Signal 010 — Sixty-Four Seasons
Chopped has been on the air since 2009. Sixty-four seasons. Seventeen years of mystery baskets and frantic plating and celebrity judges and dramatic lid-lifts.
It took all sixty-four of those seasons to produce a single episode where every chef was Indigenous.
On April 21, Diné chef Justin Pioche won the “Indigenous Inspirations” episode — the first all-Indigenous competition in the show’s history. He beat out Mariah Gladstone (Blackfeet and Cherokee), Ray Naranjo (Santa Clara Pueblo), and Jessica Walks First (Menominee). The judges included Pyet DeSpain (Prairie Band Potawatomi) and Sean Sherman (Oglala Lakota Sioux). He took home ten thousand dollars.
Here is what he cooked: sautéed whitefish with pawpaw salsa and sumac tea. Anaheim chile-rubbed bison with sweet corn grits and charred lima beans. Pemmican bread pudding with candied sweet potatoes.
Read that menu again. Whitefish. Sumac. Bison. Pemmican. These are not “inspired by” ingredients. These are not a non-Native chef’s idea of what Indigenous food might taste like if you ran it through a French technique blender. These are ingredients that have been feeding people on this continent for thousands of years, cooked by hands that know what they mean.
Pioche is a 2023 James Beard finalist for Best Chef in the Southwest. He runs Pioche Food Group — a high-end catering company and food truck — with his sister Tia and his mother Janice. He lives in Fruitland, New Mexico, near the Navajo Nation. He does not yet have a brick-and-mortar restaurant. The ten thousand dollars from winning a national television competition is going toward trying to open one.
Sit with that for a second. A James Beard finalist. Running a food truck. Hoping a game show prize will help him afford walls.
But the part of this story that actually matters isn’t the win. It’s what happened before the cameras rolled. Ray Naranjo organized a conversation among all four chefs before the competition started. They agreed: no matter who wins or loses, use your voice for your communities. Then they hugged each other.
“We all agreed and hugged each other,” Pioche told The Journal, “and that was really, really powerful.”
Four people walked into a competition designed to eliminate three of them, and their first act was to decide together that the competition was not the point.
That is not how reality television is supposed to work. Reality television runs on conflict. On sabotage and side-eye and confessional booth trash talk. Four Indigenous chefs looked at that machine and quietly refused to feed it. They competed hard — Pioche’s final round against Gladstone was genuinely close — but they competed as relatives, not rivals.
Pioche said it plainly: “Food has always been medicine, and we need to keep it that way because medicine can be more than just nourishment — it can be a way to heal yourself.”
Sixty-four seasons. One episode. And in that one episode, the contestants modeled something the show has never shown in seventeen years: that you can compete without destroying each other. That winning doesn’t require someone else’s humiliation. That the point of being on the platform is not the platform itself — it’s what you carry onto it and what you send back home.
Pioche hosted a watch party in Farmington. His family was there. His community showed up. He plans to share the prize money with the family members who built the business with him.
I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying Food Network is suddenly a champion of Indigenous representation because they aired one episode after sixty-four seasons. One episode is not a movement. It’s a gesture. Whether it becomes something more depends on what comes next — whether Indigenous chefs become regulars or remain a special event, trotted out once for the optics and then filed away.
But I am saying this: when Justin Pioche plated pemmican bread pudding on national television, he was doing something that no amount of corporate diversity programming can manufacture. He was cooking his people’s food, on his people’s land’s ingredients, with skills sharpened in his people’s communities, and he was doing it better than everyone else in the room. That wasn’t representation. That was sovereignty on a plate.
Sixty-four seasons is a long time to wait for a seat at someone else’s table. But Pioche isn’t waiting for a seat. He’s building his own table. He just needs the walls to put it in.
// NEON BLOOD
Sources: ICT News, KJZZ, Native News Online, The Journal
