http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/24/dining/tucson-food-unesco.html 2016-09-05 10:01:18 Tucson Becomes an Unlikely Food Star Named a culinary capital by Unesco, the city has a long history of wringing plenty from a desert. === 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 cactuses 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 A half-dozen years ago, the international agency In 2004 the group began a “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 Still, Tucson has never been high on any list of great food cities. Even Santa Fe, its Southwestern-food sister, gets 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 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 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 “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, 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 the Not far from downtown, a nonprofit group is recreating a Spanish colonial walled garden like the ones Father Kino built. The 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 Mr. Nabhan, an ecumenical Franciscan brother who helped start One of them is white Sonora 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, “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.”