A perfect November Saturday morning in the Dunbar Springs neighborhood north of downtown brought an enthusiastic crowd of hungry pancake seekers and would-be supporters of native food production and promotion to the 8th Annual Desert Harvesters Mesquite Milling Fiesta & Mesquite Pancake Breakfast.
In addition to the three milling machines set up to process the buckets full of mesquite pods into flour (5 gallons of pods makes 5 lbs of flour), other offerings included live music, vendors of products from local mesquite flour; prickly pear syrup, jam, and juice; mesquite pancake mix; baked goods; chiltepines; cholla buds; olive oil; cured olives; fresh mole mixes, and more. Native herbal medicines and teas, organic Desert Harvesters T-shirts, and rainwater harvesting books were also for sale. Other local/native foods such as acorn flour titillated the taste buds and intrigued those adventurous souls who’d never tried such comestibles as atole before. Also prominently on display was the brand-new, hot-off-the-press “Eat Mesquite” cookbook self-published by Desert Harvesters (available at www.desertharvesters.org).
According to Brad Lancaster, Tucson’s water harvesting guru and a primary instigator of the event, approximately 800 people were in attendance, and all those mountains of pancakes were dished out by a large crew of volunteers flipping the delicious morsels. A variety of syrups were on hand for sweetening, including blue agave, prickly-pear, mesquite and organic back yard honey.Desert Harvesters is a non-profit grassroots group run by volunteers. It organizes and presents a number of these mesquite milling opportunities throughout southern Arizona throughout each year, ranging as far north as Phoenix and south to Bisbee and Sierra Vista. It also conducts educational workshops having to do with native horticulture, pie baking contests, planting and harvesting events. It advocates for the planting of trees such as the Velvet Mesquite in home landscapes and public rights-of-way. The organization’s dedication to the cause of community solidarity and cooperation and the promotion of native and local foods has garnered it grants, accolades, publicity, good will and the gratitude of multitudes of souls who seek a way back to traditional wisdom and knowledge of ancestral peoples.
