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Check out this New York Times article on Sonoran hot dogs!
“THE problem with American hot dogs is that they’re American,” said Tania Murillo, standing beneath a pink and blue bunny-shaped piñata, as she rang up an order of tortillas at Alejandro’s Tortilla Factory.
“A ketchup-and-mustard hot dog is boring,” continued Ms. Murillo, a high school senior. “They’re not colorful enough. You’ve got to make them colorful, and pile on the stuff. The best hot dogs come from Sonora,” the Mexican state immediately to the south. “Everybody knows that.”
Food, Inc. is a documentary on agribusiness that got a lot of buzz after its recent release. Its narrators, Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, are high-profile proponents of local food. To learn more about it, check out the official site, reviews from Salon.com and the New York Times, and this clip:
GREENING MISSION GARDEN:
A FORUM ON OPERATION & MANAGEMENT
Sponsored by
The Drachman Institute, Friends of Tucson’s Birthplace, and the Office of Ethnohistorical Research at the Arizona State Museum
Saturday, 29 August 2009
9 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Arizona Historical Society
949 E. 2nd St.
Honorary Chair: Cele Peterson
****************
This forum will explain the cultural and historical significance of the Mission Garden site with its 4,000-year history of agriculture. In addition, it will focus on developing an efficient, practical, and sustainable plan for operations and management of the garden.
Welcome and Introductions
(9:05-9:15 a.m.)
Session I. Why Green Up the Garden? The Unique History of Agriculture in the Tucson Basin. (9:15-10:15)
Session II. Addressing Operation Needs
(10:30-11:30)
Session III. Addressing Funding and Management
(11:30-12:30)
Concluding Remarks
(12:30-12:50)
*******************************************
Free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
For more information and to RSVP contact Bill DuPont, Tel. 404-7237; cshamailbox@cox.net
Check out the NPR story by reporter Ted Robbins, “
Of course, there’s more than that if you live there. There’s the area’s tasty food — Baja California fish tacos, Tex-Mex fajitas and the newest cross-border concoction: The Sonoran Hot Dog.
Sitting in the always noisy and crowded Tucson restaurant “El Guero Canelo,” food historian Gary Nahban says the borderlands are the birthplace of many of the Mexican dishes we Americans love.
This last week, I went out into the desert to find an old friend in her trailer-turned-artisanal kitchen. My friend is a Hispanic woman who lost her job after 9/11 in a borderlands community that lost thousands of more jobs during the mortgage fiasco two years ago and the more recent economic downturn. And yet, despite all the discouraging turns that have occurred in the Tucson, Arizona economy over the last decade, I did not hear discouraging words in Esperanza Arevalo’s kitchen. I heard words like flavor, prayer and miracle; and I smelled the savory, smoky fragrance of mesquite tortillas just off the griddle. Despite warnings that these are the worst of times to be starting a small business, her homemade mesquite tortillas are selling like hotcakes. Tortilleria Arevalo is having the best of times.
Esperanza —whose name means hope—is but one of several entrepreneurs in the border states who have recently convinced me that local, place-based heritage foods are not just for the elite, but that other, less fortunate folks have chosen to purchase them during some of the toughest times that the U.S. and Mexican economies have ever faced.
Eleven years ago, Esperanza, coached by her Sonoran-born father Javier, began to offer on Tucson street corners a unique sort of tortilla whose heritage goes back centuries, if not millennia. It is made of the flour of mesquite pods, the flour of ground, popped amaranth seeds, wheat flour and olive oil. It may sound simple, but balancing the flavor and texture of these tortillas took months of experimentation by Esperanza and Javier. I know, because I was their first customer! But within a year or so, Esperanza was making twenty dozen mesquite tortillas a week in her spare time, and Javier was helping her hustle them to prospective buyers , not only on street corners, but at a couple health food stores as well. 
The 9/11 hit, and she suddenly lost her job at an emergency lighting company in Tucson. Her father encouraged her to go out on her own big time; journalist Nathan Olivarez-Giles gave her first major news story in The Arizona Daily Star; and then several farmers’ market managers invited her to set up a booth to hawk her wares. Suddenly, her demand grew to three hundred dozen a week.
“Now I have to watch how many I do, or I’ll suffer from carpel tunnel, “ she laughs. “But it’s going, it’s really going now.
Esperanza cites the health value of her tortillas—they help lower blood sugars for diabetic sufferers—as well as the heritage or historic value of mesquite—it’s perhaps the oldest staple food in the desert borderlands. But I would argue that the love she puts into her tortilla-making is expressed in the flavor and texture. Rich people, poor people, Indians, Anglos and Hispanics all flock to buy her tortillas.
It would be easy to dismiss Esperanza’s success as a rare exception, with no relevance to the rest of us. But talk to John York and Joy Vargo, co-owners of Canela Café, a little bistro that opened in the ranch town of Sonoita, Arizona in September of 2005. Sonoita’s official population count hovers just around 846 folks, and yet they served over ninety folks for Mother’s Day brunch alone. Joy looked a bit weary when I spoke to her mid-afternoon on that day, but had served more exquisite tamales, chiles rellenos and locally-grown lamb than she ever imagining that Chef John could pump through their kitchen in one morning.
“We’ve never had a day this good,” she smiled, almost giddy. “I guess all of our work in this community over the last few years is paying off. Folks really seem to like what we’re doing.”
No wonder—they can taste the local harvests of their neighbors from both sides of the border—creatively prepared by two stellar graduates of the New England Culinary Institute.
If that were not enough, two other “local foods” restaurants opened in Arizona this spring, and both are flourishing. One of them, Diablo Burger on Flagstaff’s Heritage Square—revolves around local grass fed beef from Diablo Trust lands, one of the first rancher-environmentalist cooperatives in the Southwest. But it also features locally-produced vegetables, prickly pears pads and wines on its ever changing menu. Finally, I mused , a burger with a sense of place and a sense of taste.
From Dennis and Deb Moroney’s all-natural grassfed Sky Islands Brand beef from the 47 Ranch near Bisbee, Arizona, to Amy Schwemm’s Mano and Metate moles—gourmet sauces prepared with locally-harvested chiles and nuts from the Santa Cruz River Valley— local food producers are making it through the toughest of times. If such foods were just another fad for the elite, these businesses would be suffering. Instead, people are willing to invest a little more for flavor, health and history; they value has been more than worth the price.
Photos by Maribel Alvarez at The Desert Harvesters’ Mesquite Recipe Taster (June 2009)
With a generous seed grant from the Invoking the Pause small grants program based in Santa Rosa, California, the Flavors Without Borders Foodways Alliance has launched a documentation, education and intervention initiative focused on solar-rich, carbon-neutral tacos in our binational foodshed. We are already working with borderlands food producers who wish to see a smaller, more sustainable “foodprint” (carbon footprint of food production and delivery) for livestock, chile and wheat production in the U.S./Mexico border states, and who recognize that our foodshed is and historically has been bi-national. In partnership with the FoodPrint NM Project (formerly the Alliance for a Carbon-Neutral Foodshed in Central New Mexico), facilitated by Dr. Bruce Milne of the Sustainable Studies Program of University of New Mexico, we will be engaged this next year in implementing participatory research with farmers and ranchers in border states that will determine the current foodprint of various food production systems. In our case, we will do oral, written and photographic documentation of ranching, dryland grain farming and wild chile harvesting that have high ratios of solar to fossil fuel inputs. We will then present provocative samples of this documentation at a mobile exhibit that will function like a mobile taco stand, but will include murals, signage and video clips discussing “solar tacos” at festivals and other special events throughout the region.
Our approach is historically rooted in the sustainable food traditions that have evolved in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands since 1690, that still have a cultural and economic role in the region. Although wild chiles have been harvested in the desert borderlands from Brownsville through Big Bend, Pimeria Alta and Baja California for millennia, chiletepines took on a new role with the introduction of criollo corriente cattle and White Sonora wheat around 1690. Thereafter, wild chiltepines were essential as antioxidants reducing meat spoilage and adding flavor to carne seca, carne asada, and carne machaca deshebrada, which became the region’s major protein sources from the desert uplands. On floodplains in the lowlands, White Sonora wheat introduced by Padre Kino was rapidly adopted by indigenous and immigrant folk as the number one winter dryland grain crop in Sonora and Arizona, with wheat tortillas rapidly eclipsing corn tortillas in cultural importance. All three of these foods were historically grown with solar energy and to some extent, with draft animal assistance—but virtually no fossil fuel—up until World War II. As cheap fossil fuel, fertilizers and machinery became available after the war—and as hoof-and-mouth disease, screwworm, isolationist policies and drought impacted traditions— these time-tried traditions became abandoned and forgotten in many places.
Nevertheless, there remain enough strands of these traditions left to re-weave them into a “solar” taco de carne asada, which we will promote through what we call “taco diplomacy” on both sides of the border. Folklorist Maribel Alvarez has begun a Fulbright Fellowship to document extant traditions of wheat in Sonora, and Native Seeds/SEARCH has agreed to offer heirloom White Sonora wheat to artisanal bakers and tortilla-makers in the coming year. Local foods activists Gary Nabhan and DejaWalker have interviewed borderlands cattle buyer and novelist J.P. S. Brown on corriente cattle traditions in the borderlands, and ranchers Dennis and Deb Moroney, Mac Donaldson and Duncan Blair will be documenting their solar versus fossil fuel inputs in raising other adapted breeds for local markets. Kimberlee Chambers, Kraig Kraft and Gary Nabhan will “daylight” the food value chain that brings chiltepines across the border.
Kimi Eisele and Josh Schacter are working on the design of a bio-deisel run taco truck to be equipped both as a mobile kitchen and exhibit kiosk at regional food festivals and special events. Gary Nabhan, Maribel Alvarez and DeJa Walker are bringing together a board and staff that will run a new Edible Tucson magazine that celebrates the richness of foods in the Sonoran Desert borderlands and Sky Islands. Stay tuned for more information soon.
Photo by Josh Schacter
Check out this delightful blog post from Sabores associate Kraig Kraft, which provides a recipe for a chiltepin martini!
One summer in the late 1990s, while earning a Master’s degree in geography at the University of Arizona, I drove a friend’s truck across the border to Nogales, Sonora every week to research on children’s perceptions of globalization in one very poor colonia called “Solidarity.” I arranged to spend nights in one of the family’s homes—a concrete house on a double lot with an extra sofa in the living room.
On the afternoon of my first night there, a heavy rainstorm swept across town. The rain came down hard for over an hour spurting through the glass-less windows and rapping on the half-finished aluminum roof. The children and I and I took turns holding cups out from under the roof of the porch and pouring the collected water on the potted plants. Eventually rain turned to hail and bounced off the porch in tiny pellets. Then rivers flowed down the street. I prayed the truck wouldn’t float away.
To the west, the sun lowered and filled up half the sky with light. Within moments a full rainbow stretched over the hills. Seven-year-old Judith, the oldest daughter, flashed a toothless smile at the sky. “I want to go over there,” she said, pointing to the rainbow, “to touch it and see if it’s hard. And if it is, I can climb up it.”
Judith didn’t know any tales about pots of gold at the end of a rainbow’s arc. When I told her, she leapt around the house for the rest of the afternoon, plotting her journey to the treasure. “And when I get it,” she said. “I’ll bring it back for my dad.”
I scribbled her words in my notebook—this was just the kind of conversational gem I wanted: childhood hope and dreaming.
At night, I slept on a lopsided couch in the living room. A breeze blew through the window, but still, I sweated inside my sleeping bag. Tinny music came from the house next door. Mosquitoes buzzed in my ear all night. I woke up every hour to make sure the truck hadn’t rolled down the hill. When the roosters crowed at dawn, I was grateful the night was over.
The next day, I crossed back into Arizona for a few hours. The excuse I created for myself was to make a phone call. But I was hot and cranky. I flopped down on a fluffy couch in the empty lobby of the Americana Motel. The cold air inside dried my skin. I pressed my bare feet into the marble floor, then called home and listened to my boyfriend’s voice, which sounded hollow and far away inside the new house we had just rented–the house with its thick white walls, evaporative cooling, wood floors, high ceilings. It was an easy one-hour drive north from where I stood. I told him I’d be home in three days. I hung up and went to the bathroom and washed my hands with hot water soap because I could. This privilege wasn’t lost on me.
That evening, after my work at the school was done, I sat in the kitchen with Rosario.
She told me how grateful she was to have this home, a far cry from the one she grew up in, in Sinaloa. “It wasn’t very sturdy. Once, a cyclone came and carried it away. We all ran outside and the whole family squeezed into the truck.”
As we talked together, she set a bowl of flour and a tub of lard on to the counter. She added lard to the flour, and mixed it with her hands, asking me to pour in a little water from time to time, along with pinches of salt.
“Flour tortillas?” I asked. She nodded.
She showed me how to take a small amount of masa and form it into a small ball. When we had a dozen or more of them, she took one between her hands and flattened it, passing it back and forth in a graceful clapping dance. I followed her moves.
Hers came out round and perfect. Mine were misshaped, crooked, uneven. She smiled and put them in the cast iron skillet anyway.
Later, her husband Ricardo laughed when I carried the tortillas to the table. “Huaraches,” he said, a reference to the durable leather sandals with soles made from recycled tires. I laughed.
“They always look like huaraches at first,” he said. He ate happily, as did I.
That night, Rosario insisted that I sleep in the bedroom with everyone else. I could have the top bunk to myself, she said, and the screen door would keep the mosquitoes away.
So I did.
