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Fruit Comes from the Archbishop

Home cooks and chefs of the Southwest have never lacked for delicious fruit, given the fact that native prickly pears, wild plums, elderberries, wolfberries, blackberries, hackberries, and persimmons grow along streams and in canyons from Texas to California.

But a turning point occurred in southwestern agricultural and culinary history roughly 400 years ago, after the first Spanish-introduced fruit took root on American soil in the watersheds of the Rio Grande and the Rio Colorado.

Cross-Border Credo

We believe that the many traditional cultures and innovative individuals of this region have developed a rich heritage of both tangible resources and intangible knowledge, practices and values that need recognition, respect and safeguarding if they are to contribute to a just, equitable, sustainable and resilient food system for our region.

We are concerned by the high rates of poverty and food insecurity on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border; which creates more disparity in economic opportunity and nutritional health than along any other border in the world.

Slow Money’s Pivotal Role in the Next Stage of the Local Food Movement

The food relocalization movement is coming of age, for it was twenty-one years ago that visionary Robyn Van En began CSA North America, the first organization to promote community-supported agriculture across the continent.

From her own collaboration with Susan Witt and others in Great Barrington, Mass., while establishing CSA Gardens in 1990, the CSA movement has grown to at least 4,570 documented American farms offering food shares to local community members…

Honoring Achievements of Hispanic Food Producers, But No Engagement With Their Struggles

Earlier this month, when Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar designated 27 new National Landmarks, five of them were meant to honor America’s historic legacy of Hispanic engagement in agriculture and natural resources.

While the César E. Chávez National Monument at Nuestra Señora Reina de la Paz in Keene, California, rightly honored one of the twentieth century’s greatest advocates for the rights of Hispanic food producers and harvesters in the United States, Hispanics may wonder about Salazar’s inclusion of the Drakes Bay Historic and Archeological District on the Point Reyes Peninsula.

Agrarian Poetry: Why We Need Its Prophesies and Imagery Now, More Than Ever

Agrarian poetry? Agrarian prophesies? Agrarian urgencies? One might wonder whether any 21st century preoccupation with agrarian values and agrarian ideals comes as too little, too late, for less than one in six of all Canadian and U.S. citizens live in rural areas outside of towns, cities and suburbs. But listen up. Look again.

Heirloom Apples, Heritage Orchards & Cideries Bring Back Food Diversity and Jobs to Our Communities

While some media reports assume that efforts to protect biodiversity in our landscapes inevitably cost jobs in our communities, heritage orchards and cideries prove otherwise.

Since the economic downturn, study after study show that new food and beverage microenterprises have become one of the most effective means of jumpstarting local economies hurt since the 2009 downturn. They not only create jobs for local residents rather that outsourcing the work to distant places, but they purchase goods and materials from other local businesses and make alliances with independent-owned restaurants and lodges which feature their beverages.

The Art of Fermentation

Join the Wizard of fermentation, Sandor Ellix Katz, for a Hands-on workshop in Patagonia, Arizona. Learn the basics of food & beverage fermentation from best-selling author, Sandor Ellix Katz.

Learn how to make the delicious & nutritious fermented corn drink of the Tarahumara, tesquino; Learn how heritage crops from the Native Seeds/SEARCH Farm & the Nabhan Orchard can be fermented in your own kitchen.

World Food Day: A Franciscan Prayer Service on Behalf of Farmers, Farmworkers & Fishers in a Year of Drought & Immigration Debate

Let us remember the words of Saint James: “The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of Our Creator, Our Lord of Hosts” (5:4).

During this season of harvest, in the year in North American history when 71 percent of our rural communities saw their crop seeds and livestock breeds damaged by drought, let us call all cultures, faiths and nations together to celebrate that which the earth did yield, and to ask for repentance for the elements of climate change, water scarcity and damage to the soil that our own actions as eaters and consumers have triggered.

Historic Food Market Gets Torched in Syria’s Civil War

Thirty thousand people have died in Syria’s civil war—and the killing is only intensifying. Obviously, human beings are any war’s most appalling casualties, but there are cultural conflagrations that matter, too—vital spaces laid waste, lost forever. Few alive today have experienced the reputed grandeur of old Warsaw, leveled by Nazi bombs in World War II. How would the celebrated Aztec city of Tenochtitlán have weathered the centuries?

We’ll never know, because the Spanish flattened it in the process of conquest, building over it what we now know as Mexico City.