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"We Meet To Eat": Native Food Truck Wants To Provide Healthy Local Options

Leslie Spoonhunter

During the last year, food trucks were a safer option for many of us wanting to eat out. One chef from the Wind River Indian Reservation is starting her own food truck featuring Native cuisine.

Goose's Kitchen is one of the eight finalists for the Wind River Startup Challenge, a competition between budding businesses to acquire funding. This business is planning to be up and running by August and showcase healthy Native cuisine.

Leslie Spoonhunter has been cooking all her life. She's Northern Arapaho and sees her food truck having a rotating menu.

"Choke cherry gravy, Indian Tacos, I want to serve buffalo, elk, and deer on the menu. Our ancestors used big game day to day. They harvested berries and whatever they could find," Spoonhunter said.

Leslie as a Guest Chef at Arapahoe School Arapaho Odyssey Cooking and Gardening After School Program.

Spoonhunter was taught how to cook by her family, and hopes to pass on what she's learned to her kids to keep the tradition alive.

Spoonhunter is also graduating with her culinary degree this month. She said she wants to continue cooking the way she was taught to prepare food and help bring people together with her cooking.

"We have a family motto. We have a huge family. Our motto is we 'meet to eat'. My aunts and mother taught me the ways of cooking through life and how it brings people together," she said.

Spoonhunter said her menu will provide a more healthy food option for the community.

Taylar Dawn Stagner is a central Wyoming rural and tribal reporter for Wyoming Public Radio. She has degrees in American Studies, a discipline that interrogates the history and culture of America. She was a Native American Journalist Association Fellow in 2019, and won an Edward R. Murrow Award for her Modern West podcast episode about drag queens in rural spaces in 2021. Stagner is Arapaho and Shoshone.
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