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
