By the time Tucson itself became the first City of Food Cultures in the U.S. to be designated by UNESCO in 2015, hadn’t the National Heritage designation for the Santa Cruz died on the vine, or become like a river suddenly drying up in the sand?
Not really. Like most desert rivers, its energy just went “underground” for a while.
Read MoreYou can sip me, you can eat me and you can moisturize with me—what am I?
The agave plant.
Today, this plant is widely known as the key ingredient in the alcoholic beverage that is taken with lime and salt or mixed in to make margaritas, but agave has a much greater importance in the Sonoran Desert than just tequila.
“We think about tequila as the major way we know the plant today, but up until a century ago more people ate it in this region than they drank it,” said Gary Nabhan, an agricultural ecologist and ethnobotanist, who has been studying agave and other Sonoran Desert plants for decades.
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