Page 11 - the NOISE June 2013

though not technically a native food, has been grown in the region for over 300 years. This grant has brought together a diversity of related people, including farmers, bakers, millers, and brewers, in order to get these grains from the seed bank, to the farm, to the table.
Corn is the cornerstone of the American Southwest. It has been a subsistence food for generations, and ancient strains of corn were protein-rich and hearty, a far cry from the hybridized sweet varieties we are most familiar with today. Ancient corn came in a rainbow of colors, sizes, shapes, and flavors. Now, modern corn is overly sweet, devoid of nutrition, grown with an arsenal of pesti- cides and chemical fertilizers, and, most in- sulting of all, genetically modified. Because corn is wind-pollinated, fields of GM corn pose a threat to all corn farmers in an area. Organic fields can easily be tainted, and for this reason, it’s especially important to resist the onslaught of GM farms.
And that’s just for starters. There’s also
the spiritual aspect of eating foods that are appropriate to the land, and the fla- vors that come with enjoying native foods. Some local favorites are the high-protein, low-starch tepary beans, and ancient strains of red and blue corn, used for making high- protein cornmeal. Corn as we know it today is not anything like the ancient native corn varieties.
John Bianchini, of Yum Yum Produce (Yu- mYumProduce.com), gives his comments: “When most people think of corn, they think of sweet corn: Kandy Korn, Sweetie 82, and ExtraTender 277A. Nearly all corn for fresh
consumption in America is hybrid sweet – even the organics. Indian corn is almost like a ghost, but it’s my pick for the future. It is hearty, easy to store, and a survival carb that regenerates the soul.” Mr. Bianchini, along with his wife Natasha Shealy-Bianchini, run the Verde Valley’s foremost CSA program through Yum Yum Produce.
CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and programs like theirs are vital for small farmers, especially those grow- ing “specialty” crops, such as native tepary or native corn. Yum Yum collects money from subscribers and distributes it to local farmers in order to help them fund their crops. They then take that locally grown produce and deliver weekly boxes to subscribers, as well as sell at local farmers’ markets. It is a work of passion for Mr. and Mrs. Bianchini, who have devoted their lives to both keeping it local, and keeping it native. For them, food is more than just what we eat: it is our culture and our soul.
Ayurvedic chef Mira Murphy of Sedona, has both grown native foods and taught workshops on native food preparation. For her, the most exciting native food is Hopi corn. “Because of all the GM corn,” she elabo- rates, “and the extinction of many variet- ies of corn, when I grow this ancient strain that has been adapted to this region of the world, I feel connected to this Earth and I feel the corn is thankful to me for keeping its genetics alive. It is not an empty edible substance to be processed into food addi- tives; it is real food.”
Ms. Cruz, of NS/S, elaborates on that: “When you think about agriculture, ‘culture’
is central to that concept. It’s part of how people grow things, what they’re eating, how they’re cooking, and the stories behind foods. Modern society is slowly coming back to that, since our food is part of our culture.”
There are plenty of challenges to moving
back to an agriculture of native foods. For one thing, many places suffer a lack of native seeds; no one has been collecting or preserv- ing them. Another challenge is that many farmers want to grow what they know will sell, which means, foods that are already well known and popular.
Mr. Schmidt of NS/S expounds on other challenges: “What we grow in the collection tends to be farmer-selected varieties to be very diverse, very heterogenous, and that makes them difficult to market.” Most mar- ket growers want everything to be the same size and same color, for ease of sale; but na- ture doesn’t work that way! Also, in native crops, time to maturity can differ, which is good for the plant, and good for subsistence eating, but creates more work for the farmer at harvest time. These crops are great for CSA farms and market farmers, but large scale farmers may struggle with these issues.
“Some pretty basic breeding work could ad- dress those issues,” Mr. Schmidt continues, “if our goal was to get them out to the large
scale farmers.”
Over 4000 years of agricultural history in the Southwest may be the key to future food security. For the most part, native foods are still a specialty grown by smaller scale farmers. Hopi farmers, for example, do not commercially market their foods. “In order to achieve consistent production,” ex- plains Mr. Bianchini, “they would need to irri- gate from a source other than the monsoons. To do so, they believe, would be a gross viola- tion of their cultural and spiritual connection to nature.” Not all native peoples, however, farm in this way. A few Tohono O’odham farmers in Maricopa County have been com- mercially growing tepary beans with the support of that county’s Cooperative Exten- sion. Currently, however, supply still does not meet demand.
Another challenge with specialized foods is the price. Mr. Bianchini chimes in: “De- mand could be much higher if the crop cost went down, but that is not fair to the small farmers who will always have to compete with the corporate farms.” What it comes down to is this: if you’re a supporter of na- tive foods, the best thing you can do is buy them and eat them. But then there’s another question: how do you eat them? Some of these foods are so unusual to our typical grocery-store palate, we’re not even quite sure how to prepare them!
Mr. Bianchini worries that “the public is far too used to decadent and strong flavors to appreciate the subtle complexity of wild or native foods.” But Ms. Murphy has hope:
“I have found that people get excited about eating native foods when they learn the sig- nificance of being more connected to the land where they are living.” She shares a story about a woman who approached her at the end of one of her native foods cooking classes, after showing everyone ears of Hopi corn grown the previous year. “We were able to see the genetic miracle and hold this pow- erful energy in our hands. This woman ap- proached me with tears in her eyes and said:
‘I never understood why corn was considered sacred and used in sacred ceremony, but now I get it.”
| Sarah Irani is a mesquite- lovin mama who also seams a line of designer clothes. sarahsupernova@hotmail.com
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