Subtractive Sourcing
Strip out the dominant defaults to reveal what was native to the place all along.
Subtractive Sourcing is the discipline of defining what you make by what you refuse to use. Sean Sherman built Owamni, a James Beard award-winning restaurant, by banning the colonial pantry — dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, beef, pork, chicken — and forcing every dish back onto ingredients indigenous to North America. The constraint did the creative work: once the easy defaults were gone, the team had to learn the plants, animals, and producers that were native to the land they stood on. The framework generalises beyond food. Any practice — design, writing, software, music, brand — accumulates a default pantry of borrowed ingredients that crowd out what is actually local, native, or specific to the maker. By removing those defaults on purpose, you expose a second layer of material that was always there but invisible, and you route spending and attention to the producers who hold that knowledge. The output reads as 'ironically foreign' to audiences raised on the defaults, which becomes the differentiator rather than a problem. The method is not nostalgia or purity — Sherman explicitly rejects making 'a museum piece' — it is using subtraction as a forcing function for discovery, then applying ancestral knowledge to a contemporary product.
- Name the dominant pantry of defaults that everyone in your category reaches for without thinking.
- Remove those defaults entirely rather than reducing them, because partial constraints get rationalised away.
- Replace them by studying what is native, local, or specific to where you actually stand.
- Route the spending freed up by subtraction toward producers who hold the knowledge you are recovering.
- Build forward from ancestral material rather than freezing it as heritage, so the output is contemporary not curatorial.
Developed by Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman after growing up on Pine Ridge Reservation with one grocery store serving an area the size of Connecticut. Codified at Owamni in Minneapolis (opened 2021), where banning colonial ingredients became the restaurant's defining constraint and identity.