The Seri Traditional Food System: Cultural Heritage, Dietary Change, and the (Re) Awakening of Dietary Resilience Among Coastal Hunter-Gatherers in the Mexican Northwest

Abstract

The Mexican northwest has experienced a tremendous change since European contact. Until the middle of the twentieth century, the Seri diet was based on seasonal consumption of wild edibles. The collection and consumption of such food products were culturally mediated by a lunation system that combined lunar phases and resource seasonality through a lexical-semantic construction that enabled people to use a series of complex environmental observations, such as the arrival of turtles or the presence and absence of certain stars. Modern Seris, descendants of hunter-gatherers and fishers, can still recall the annual food routes followed by their ancestors and the type of food consumption carried out throughout the year. In this article, we make use of participant observation, oral histories, casual conversations, and ethnographic data to explain the evolution of the Seri diet from European contact to present-day market-mediated consumption. We offer a discussion on the meager amount and shallow content of Seri food and diet along with a more important description of current food products—both native and introduced. We conclude the high plausibility of reviving the food practices by reappropriating the annual migration Seri’s routes embedded in ecological knowledge and oral tradition.