• Acorns comprised the largest part of the Miwok diet.acorn scattering image by Anton Chernenko from Fotolia.com
  
  The Miwok people of northern California occupied an area from the Pacific coast to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Given their vast territory, the Miwok diet was varied and nutritious with seasonal availability of foodstuff dictating to what area the tribe would move. The Miwok perfected ingenious hunting and trapping methods to ensure a good supply of protein, and knowledge of local flora augmented their diet with nutritious plants, roots and nuts.
  
  

Cooking

• The Miwok developed a large repertoire of food preparation and cooking techniques, both to make certain foods edible that otherwise would not have been or to enhance the flavor and texture of many otherwise unpalatable ingredients. Hot-stone boiling, basket-parching, broiling in hot coals and baking in earthen ovens were some of the techniques that the Miwok developed to prepare their meals. Many foods they gathered, including acorns, had to be extensively processed before they could be eaten in order to neutralize naturally occurring chemical compounds that rendered the raw ingredients too bitter for consumption.
  
  

Plants

• Plants comprised the majority of the Miwok diet, and none was more important than the acorn. Acorns were processed and used in a variety of dishes, including biscuits, mush, soup and two types of bread. The abundance of acorns made them the main staple of the Miwok diet. In spring, buckeye nuts, young clover and oak sap were gathered and eaten, as well as kelp and seaweed for the coastal Miwok. In the fall, peppernuts and hazelnuts were gathered, eaten in the form of spicy relish and stored for the winter.
  
  

Animal

• The Miwok people frequently hunted large and small game to supplement their diet, most often killing deer, rabbits, quail and fish. Miwok hunters designed many ways of procuring their prey, such as funnel basket traps for catching quail. Animal proteins were most often roasted, used in stews or dried for storage. Eggs and seafood were also important sources of protein for the Miwok people, especially for those living in the San Francisco bay area where nesting gulls and tidal mudflats provided easy access to these resources.