Giving Compass' Take:
- Chris Malloy highlights the potential of mesquite, once a staple of indigenous diets and now neglected, to provide food even as climate change makes growing most crops in the American Southwest difficult or impossible.
- What other crops are already climate-change ready? How can funders help to identify these crops and work to put them in the agricultural mainstream?
- Read more about learning about food from indigenous peoples.
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In a Southwest that’s getting hotter and drier while its population steadily grows, ecologists and Indigenous food activists are increasingly touting mesquite’s potential as a widespread, sustainable drylands crop and food source.
Many people who live on the millions of American acres where mesquite grows—from Southern California to western Kansas—see it as just another tree. Residents of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert in particular may not realize that mesquite was once their region’s most important food. Its seeds are about 35 percent protein. Its roots can tunnel 160 feet, deeper than any other tree, making for copious yields despite minimal water.
This is the apex desert food that today’s suburbanites sweep from yards into trash bags, that pops unnoticed under car tires and browns like rock, while millions of people instead buy wheat flour trucked in from the Midwest, and sugar from distant beet, corn, and sugarcane fields.
Over the course of history, mesquite pods have been used to make flour, no-bake bread, the thick Mexican beverage atole, candy, syrup, even beer. Yet despite its versatility, nutritional potential, and adaptation to harsh desert conditions, mesquite hasn’t been as widely seen as a potential food source in recent centuries. Early ranchers in the West even tried to eradicate mesquite trees by fire, chemical, and clearing.
But in recent decades, Southwestern ecologists have become increasingly fascinated by mesquite’s potential as a widespread, sustainable drylands crop and food source. Some of them have released ambitious, forward-looking plans to make mesquite an ecologically sound pillar of regional food systems. Though conundrums loom—creating supply chains, changing consumer habits, and re-imagining farms—they believe mesquite has the potential to be a crop of the future.
In a Southwest that is getting hotter and drier while its population steadily grows, one of the keys to smarter food systems may have been hiding in open-desert sight from the beginning.
Read the full article about mesquite by Chris Malloy at The Counter.