Media

t’s been two years since Tucson was designated a UNESCO City of Gastronomy, a title reflective of Tucson’s rich food history and culture. In November, the Tucson City of Gastronomy board hired Erik Stanford, who worked as a chef at the Cup Café, The Carriage House, Exo Roast Co., and 5 Points Market and Restaurant before launching his own food hub, Pivot Produce.

Imagine walking into a market with shelves stocked full of food products labeled as made in Baja Arizona. There’d be packages of velvet mesquite pod flour, beer made with White Sonora wheat, whiskey made with barley malted over mesquite wood smoke, sourdough bread made with heritage grains, olive oil smoked with pecan wood, and soup mixes with dried cholla cactus flower buds and tepary beans.

When Tucson became the first city in the United States to be designated as a City of Gastronomy last December, one of the few obligations it consented to was to participate in international exchanges through the UNESCO Creative Cities Network.

But just what would we find of tangible use to our community from the different food systems, educational strategies, and native cuisines of cities in Iran, South Korea, Brazil, Norway, Turkey, Spain, Japan, Sweden, Thailand, and Italy?

You probably heard the news. After a two-year application process, on Dec. 11, 2015, Tucson joined the international Creative Cities Network of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a World City of Gastronomy, the first such designation in the United States.

We’ve known it—those of us who eat here have tasted it. We’ve felt it in the soil under our fingernails. We’ve seen it in the magenta stain of prickly pear. We’ve heard it in the hammer mill grinding sweet speckled mesquite; smelled it in the exhale of steam from a crowded pot of tamales.

Tucson has always been a city of gastronomy. Today, it was designated a World City of Gastronomy by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), becoming the first city in the United States to receive such a designation.