Native Americans gave us tobacco. Apparently, we returned the favor with fry bread.

I wasn’t up on the whole fry bread phenomenon till I heard a story on NPR’s All Things Considered a few weeks back. Now a fixture of Native American cuisine, it turns out that the deep fried dough isn’t indigenous to Native Americans at all; it became popular only when the Federal government began to issue commodities such as white flour and lard to native tribes at the turn of the century.