A Boston girl on a morning hike in the Tucson desert, I crane my head up at the sky, at the intense blue, at the gold and red of the Sabino Canyon Mountains. Barry Infuso is looking down, his eyes trained on the desert floor. Infuso, a chef, a nutritional anthropologist and the "Dean of Cuisine" at Pima County Community College, is hunting for mesquite pods. "They are the perfect food," he says.

It came as a jolt to me that mesquite trees have anything to do with cooking other than as fragrant wood chips for backyard barbecues and smokers. But, according to Infuso, these long, string-bean-shaped fingers, swaying from the mesquite trees are the source of an ancient, native and nutritious cuisine. Mesquites are one of the few native shade trees that dot deserts from California to Argentina. Here, in the hills outside Tucson, their whitish pods are usually regarded as irritating landscape debris. Infuso recognizes something else. He sees one of the few sustainable foods native to the scruffy landscape.

A squared-off Canadian, Infuso came to the American Southwest 20 years ago, after a long career as a chef in Silicon Valley. He loved the Southwest's landscape but couldn't get excited about the local bounty after decades spent at farmers markets in the San Francisco Bay Area. Then, Infuso went to an Oldways Conference in Hawaii. Oldways is a self-designated "think tank." It holds gatherings of chefs, research scientists, industry people and food writers who focus on preserving traditional cooking from traditional food stuffs all over the world. The gospel of the locavores, freely expressed in Hawaii, resonated with Infuso's culinary sensibilities. In Hawaii, at least. Why wouldn't you cook with mangos and coconuts, fresh fish and exotic ginger? But, back home in Tucson, keeping true to the locavore religion was more demanding.

"Local foods in the Southwest are cactus and seeds," Infuso says, brushing off the desert dust from his Ray-Bans. "Prickly pears and agave nectar seemed to sum up the options." It was a discouraging reentry from a great vacation. As we walked through the desert together, my step lively to keep up with the big man's pace, Infuso described how he wrestled with being a locavore in the Southwest desert.

Infuso decided to drill down on his local culinary anthropology and reached the wellspring of the customs of the Pascua Yaqui Indians, a tribe local to Tucson with a geographic reach that extends from California to Argentina. Infuso was already working with many tribe members from the local reservation, listening to their stories, watching the elders cook and wondering what kept the tribe alive before supermarkets and mini-marts.

In the library he found that as early as 400 years ago, a Spanish missionary, Father Kino, described the Pascua Yaquis using mesquite as a staple food, grinding the dried pods into meal with a mortar and pestle. Over the last generation, mesquite meal became uncool. White flour replaced mesquite in pancakes, cakes and breads. Doing a little more research, Infuso learned that mesquite meal is a complete protein: a low-glycemic, pod-shape protein bomb.

Mesquite meal. Top photo by Barry Infuso. Other
photos by Louisa Kasdon

Mesquite pods began to dry up in piles, refuse in the desert sun. "The shells, which mature in the summer before the monsoons arrive, became more of an annoyance," Infuso says. After a generation or so, only a fringe group still valued the mesquite pods as a dense source of nutrition. It occurred to him that there might be a link between the disappearance of mesquite meal as a staple and the epidemic of obesity he observed in the population that he served as the culinary studies dean at the local community college. He was distressed by the skyrocketing incidence of diabetes in the native and Latino families surrounding his school, who were on the average American, low-income, fast-food consuming diet, eating baked goods, snack food and sugars. Mesquite beans -- think of a pea in a pod or edamame in the shell -- are legumes and potentially a good, low-glycemic substitute for refined flours. Using the ground meal from dried mesquite pods could make a difference in the local diet.

"Here they all were, sitting on a food that was free and plentiful, that could reduce their blood sugar levels and supply a high quality protein with all the essential amino acids, at minimal cost," Infuso said. "Their grandparents had all lived to be 100, and in this community, people are dying of diabetes and heart disease at 60."

Infuso went on a culinary crusade, teaching the children in his cooking classes at the Pima County Head Start program and the seniors at the local Pima County Senior Center how to gather mesquite pods by the bushel and roast them for 20 minutes in a 200-degree oven. Once toasty, the pods can be ground into flour for cakes, tortillas and quick breads. One of his prouder accomplishments is that today, energized by his advocacy, a mobile hammer mill (the "chipper," as he calls it) makes the circuit of Tucson farmers markets. The "chipper" takes in dried mesquite by the bushel and turns it into a silky caramel-colored flour, suitable for cooking. "When the chipper shows up, people are standing in line with baskets of dried pods they've gathered from the desert floor."

"I've been working on this for the last seven or eight years. In familiar recipes, you have to sneak mesquite in to the mix to begin with. You can use it like flour, but mesquite has a different taste -- deeper, with a sweet sugary aroma. My favorite is substituting mesquite meal in a regular coffee cake recipe," Infuso says. "So sweet, you need less sugar."

Prickly pear fruit

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