Tucson is one of America’s best kept secrets.
But we fear “not for long” with an article like this. The Times is spot
on. Its one of the most exotic cities in the country, a combination of
urban and wilderness that few can match and just gets in your
bloodstream. The smell, the air, the sun, the monsoons, the mountains,
the flatness, the cactus, its endless. Tucson.
Tucson Becomes an Unlikely Food Star
TUCSON
— There are food deserts, those urban neighborhoods where finding
healthful food is nearly impossible, and then there is Tucson.
When
the rain comes down hard on a hot summer afternoon here, locals start
acting like Cindy Lou Who on Christmas morning. They turn their faces to
the sky and celebrate with prickly pear margaritas. When you get only
12 inches of rain a year, every drop matters.
Coaxing
a vibrant food culture from this land of heat and cactus an hour’s
drive north of the Mexican border seems an exhausting and impossible
quest. But it’s never a good idea to underestimate a desert rat. Tucson,
it turns out, is a muscular food town.
Eight months ago it became the only place in the United States designated a City of Gastronomy by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, known by its acronym, UNESCO.
A half-dozen years ago, the international agency began including food as a part of cultural heritage worth protecting, recognizing the
importance of things like Armenian lavash, the Mediterranean diet and
the gastronomic meals of the French.
In 2004 the group began a Creative Cities Network
to link places where folk art, literature, music and other creative
pursuits are being put to use to guide sustainable urban development. In
the gastronomy category, Tucson joined 17 other cities, among them
Parma, Italy; Bergen, Norway; and Ensenada, Mexico. “They
want towns where the designation will make a difference,” said Jonathan
Mabry, Tucson’s officer for historic preservation and an author of the
application.
To
an outsider, Tucson’s star turn may be a bit of a head scratcher.
Certainly, the city has plenty of reliably delicious tamales, brilliant
renditions of huevos rancheros and devoted eaters who will spend the day
debating the best place to get a good raspado.
There’s even an outpost of Pizzeria Bianco, Chris Bianco’s Phoenix restaurant, which serves what several critics have called the best pizza in the United States. Still, Tucson has never been high on any list of great food cities. Even Santa Fe, its Southwestern-food sister, gets more love.
But as people here will tell you, being a great food city is not always about the restaurants.
“Tucson has really figured out the connection game,” said Megan Kimble, the editor of the Tucson magazine Edible Baja Arizona and the author of the 2015 book “Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food.” She
pointed to strong advertiser and reader support for the magazine as
just one example of the love people have for local food in this city of
about 500,000. The magazine consistently has more advertising pages than
any of the other 90 published under the Edible Communities umbrella in
the United States and Canada, said Nancy Brannigan Painter, the
executive director of Edible Communities.
The
Unesco designation has been a rallying point for a city that has to
balance an annual influx of snowbirds and University of Arizona students
with a substantial Native American community, recent immigrants and
deep pockets of poverty. “It gives us a reason to have deeper discussions about food and what it means to everyone who lives here,” Ms. Kimble said.
Of the many facets of Tucson food culture included in its 16-page application, one has risen above the rest: the claim that the city has the longest history of agricultural cultivation in North America.
Dr.
Mabry was part of a team hired by the city that made the discovery in
2000. He was working as an archaeologist, digging not far from downtown
Tucson, when they discovered layer after layer of irrigation trenches,
then found some charred corn. They sent it to be carbon dated. It was
proof, he said, that modern-day Tucson had been built on top of a
4,000-year-old farming village. The
fact is now dropped into even the most casual discussions about
Tucson’s culinary assets. “It’s like part of the brand now,” Dr. Mabry
said.
Cooks
here make great use of the food that comes from the desert, finding
ways to incorporate agave, cactus pads, amaranth and the tiny wild
pepper called chiltepin. Mesquite pods are pounded into sweet flour that
is baked into cookies. Descendants
of fruit trees introduced in the 1600s by the Rev. Eusebio Francisco
Kino, an Italian who explored the Southwestern deserts, offer quince,
figs and white pomegranates with soft seeds that taste of apple and
grapefruit. Cholla
buds, the slippery flowers of a cactus that taste vaguely of asparagus,
are chopped into salads and salsas. Members of the Tohono O’odham Nation
sometimes gather them on the San Xavier Indian Reservation near Tucson
and dry them, selling the buds in jars and soup mixes at the San Xavier Co-op Farm.
“They’re
O.K., but it’s not like cholla buds are going to take the country by
storm,” said Janos Wilder, a French-trained chef who opened his first
Tucson restaurant in 1983. “But they’re neat because it’s an absolutely
unique and important story. It takes its place in a larger context.”
A
lot of the food from the Sonoran Desert is like that. “I thought it was
a wasteland when I first came here, but slowly my eyes opened up,” he
said. To celebrate the new designation, Mr. Wilder has spent the better part of the summer at his latest restaurant, Downtown Kitchen and Cocktails,
cooking a different menu based on each of the new cities of gastronomy.
This week, he’s preparing the food from Phuket, Thailand.
Tucson’s
passion for its food culture goes well beyond the kitchen. People
embrace new ventures and cheer creative solutions to help people eat
better. When the lines at theCommunity Food Bank of Southern Arizona nearly doubled during the economic crash in 2008, the people who run it
helped clients build gardens in their backyards and sell extra produce
on consignment at the bank’s farmers’ markets.
Not far from downtown, a nonprofit group is recreating a Spanish colonial walled garden like the ones Father Kino built. The Mission Garden Project
is a history lesson on four acres, tracing agricultural practices that
began on the site with the Hohokam and Tohono O’odham tribes.
The
county’s libraries tuck seed banks into old card catalogs. If you want
to plant tomatoes, or the little brown tepary beans that were long a
staple of the Southwestern Native American diet (and don’t require much
water to grow), simply check them out with a library card. If you save
some seeds from your crop and bring them back, all the better.
The city’s devotion to creating livelihoods from its heritage foods is part of what appealed to UNESCO, said Gary Paul Nabhan, a seed-saving expert who advised the city on its application. Mr. Nabhan, a MacArthur Fellow and director of the Center for Regional Food Studies at the University of Arizona, has written more than 30 books, most of them about the plants and cultures of the Sonoran Desert.
Mr. Nabhan, an ecumenical Franciscan brother who helped start Native Seeds/SEARCH,
a nonprofit organization that saves and distributes Southwestern
heirloom seeds, is a proponent of what he calls desert terroir, and the
ingredients that make up what he calls borderland cuisine. One of them is white Sonora wheat,
one of the oldest varieties grown in North America. Father Kino
introduced it to the Tohono O’odham farmers, who welcomed it as a winter
crop and used it to make the precursor to the thin, stretchy wheat
tortilla that is the foundation of Mexican border cooking.
Don
Guerra, a cult star among the nation’s slow-fermentation bread bakers,
uses it in the loaves he bakes in an Italian deck oven he installed in
his Tucson garage. His community-supported bakery, Barrio Bread, produces 900 loaves a week for people who order it online. “Tucson
has a kind of open-software approach to food,” he said. “People want
others to succeed, especially if you can make food from this region.”
The
UNESCO honor has lifted a town that sometimes doubts its place in the
cultural hierarchy. “It’s like a new point of pride,” he said. “For so
long we’ve been this poor cousin of Phoenix.”
But Tucson will always be Tucson, a place people either love or hate. “There’s
no one who’s ambivalent about it,” said Ms. Kimble, a Los Angeles
transplant. “But once it gets in your soul, it’s in there.”
