Tag Archives: gary nabhan

Place-based foods of the borderlands weather the economic downturn; not just for the elite – By Gary Nabhan

31 Jul

pictures march 09 176

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.

pictures march 09 178Eleven 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. pictures march 09 179

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.

pictures march 09 180“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)

Santa Cruz Valley’s Wild, Cultivated and Prepared Foods, by Gary Paul Nabhan

28 Jul

Welcome to the borderlands, the crossroads of the Santa Cruz River Valley in Southern Arizona and Northern Sonora. For millenia, the Santa Cruz River Valley has been a natural corridor for the seasonal migration of birds as well as other wildlife, and for the cultural diffusion and exchange of foodstuffs. It harbors the northernmost populations of wild peppers known as chiltepines, but the first culinary use of chiles north of the present-day U.S./Mexico border was also recorded in one of its prehistoric villages. Other wild plants that have been prepared as food or drink in the Desert Southwest for upwards of eight thousand years —from century plants to velvet mesquite—remain in use here today. Thus the Santa Cruz River Valley can rightly be called one of the ancient hearths of Southwestern cuisines.

CornpickinglightsharpSo what is this area’s most enduring contributions to Southwestern cuisine? When we try to recall what foods have been grown, harvested, prepared and served here for many centuries, at least a dozen immediately come to mind: green corn tamales; big, wheat-flour tortillas for chimichangas; carne machaca con verduras; flat enchiladas made with “gordita” corn cakes; tepary bean casuelas; prickly pear and saguaro cactus syrups; atole del mesquite; calabacitas; chiltepin salsas; sweet compotes made from quinces, figs, agave hearts or barrel cactus; capirotada bread puddings; and a kind of chile relleno stuffed with picadillo and garnished with pomegranate seeds.

Perhaps these are what we might call the signature dishes of the ranchero culture which developed from Native American, Hispanic and Moorish roots over the last three hundred years. Many, many other cultures have since contributed their influences and innovations, so let’s not limit our tasting to the legacies of just a few cultural communities. Some of these historic dishes occasionally resurface in the cantinas, cafes, festivals and restaurants of the Santa Cruz Valley, but to most contemporary residents, they are at least seasonally if not permanently out of sight and out of view at the drive-in window or sit-down restaurant menu. Many, in fact, are not commodified at all. And yet, when they do reappear during a quinceañera or cuaresma celebration, they are just as cherished as they were decades ago.  While historically rooted in ranchero culture, these traditional dishes never remain the same for very long, for they are not fossils but living, changing foods. Their recipes shift as new influences and ingredients become available, and their presentation on the table has also varied through time.

Change is also the norm—not the exception—in farming and ranching traditions, although there are strands of continuity.  Although the criollo corriente cattle were among the first livestock introduced to the region, other breeds have usurped them in importance. Ranchers religiously assess the status of native grasses and browse on the range, and alter their livestock management practices accordingly. Likewise, farmers are always finding new ways of directing water to the roots of their crops, so that currently-touted drip irrigation and water harvesting techniques are but a few links in a long chain of innovation and adaptation. Some methods work, others fail as the times pose new challenges, so more innovation uis always needed.

My point may already be obvious to you: the heritage foodways, farming and ranching practices of the Santa Cruz Valley are eclectic and dynamic, building on many cultural influences and many improvisations pioneered by innovators here in our midst. The goal of Sabores Sin Fronters/Flavors Without Borders is not to freeze them in time, label and license them, but to let them live, breathe and mutate through time in response to human needs and ecological necessities.support local ag

Years ago, I made a pilgrimage on foot— up the Santa Cruz River from near its confluence with the Gila, all the way to Nogales, and beyond, to Magdalena, Sonora. When I arrived in the Upper Santa Cruz Valley near Continental, I came upon a small residence that had a simple hand-written sign declaring “green corn tamales” on its lawn. After I had put down my rucksack and knocked on a screen door, I was greeted by a woman in an apron who had been making green corn tamales all morning from a newly-harvested batch of Mexican June corn. Those tamales were so full of sun and soil that when I closed my eyes to eat them, they even tasted green. But they were not the only exquisite tamales being made that day; all the way down the road that I trod, I spotted other hand-written signs proclaiming “Get Your Fresh Tamales Now,” or, “Best Tamales on Earth.”

In the Santa Cruz Valley, it seems that every tamale is the best on the planet, and every salsa is better than average. Whether you find them for sale, or shared for free only at family feasts, remember that such foods bring us the distinctive tastes of very unique place. Seek them out, and savor them; they are our manna, the ephemeral nourishment of a dry land like no other.

Photos by Josh Schacter

Tracking the Foods that Cross the Border (ones that did so before there was a Border!)

27 Mar

One of the first field projects of the Sabores collaborative has been a collaboration among the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona, the Kino Fruit Tree Project of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, and the REDISOS network of the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California Sur. We are specifically investigating the fate of the heirloom fruit tree varieties introduced by Jesuit missionaries to the borderlands between 1713 and 1767, and the status of these trees in desert oases on both sides of the border.

Background

When Jesuits such as Kino, Salvatierra, Ugarte and del Barco arrived in Sonora and Baja California, they brought with them seeds and cuttings from the Old World, filtered through the Canary Islands “nurseries.”  There are many ethnohistoric documents in Spanish that give the precise times, places and conditions under which fruit and nut trees were introduced to the Sonoran Desert. Some of these—such as Mission olives, Mission figs, Mission grapes and Sonoran pomegranates—became mainstays in Mission era cuisine on both sides of the border. Along with dates and citrus, they have played important roles in the food economy of the borderlands for three centuries. But what has happened top these original introductions and the agricultural oases which harbored them?

olive tree JESUS

Into the Field: January 2009

Just after New Year, seven of us visited a total of a dozen of these Mission era oases on the Baja California peninsula, from San Borja in the north to Todos Santos in the south, recording the extant agro-biodiversity, recipes and food lore at each site. What we discovered is that nearly two dozen heirloom varieties of fruit crops introduced by the Jesuits persist in these agricultural oases of Baja California’s Ranchero culture. In a few locations, the very same trees first planted by the Jesuits remain in place-gigantic living remnants of the Mission era. Many of these same varieties once occurred north of the border, but have been subsequently lost. Over thirty other perennial crops have been introduced to these oases over the centuries as well. We are now working with environmental historian Micheline Cariño-Olvera of UABS to determine the factors favoring their persistence or precipitating their loss at particular oases, during particular eras. We hope to present this work at the international Cultura del Oasis congress on gastronomy and agriculture in October, 2009.

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