Updated October 04, 2024 at 08:35 AM ET
In the courtyard of the historic Gutiérrez Hubbell House in Albuquerque's verdant South Valley, the afternoon sun is beginning to soften. A band plays under a spreading cottonwood, and in the audience is Chrissy Byerlein, with a vivid purple drink.
"Bright and fresh and not too sweet, but not too sour," she says. "It's delicious"
We are at the annual New Mexico Prickly Pear Festival with vendors selling mocktails, syrups, jams and more, all made from the ruby fruit clustered on cactus across the Southwest this time of year.
Paula Padilla has a cooler of purple popsicles.
"We try to source local ingredients that are in season, and it was obvious everywhere we drive around in the city, there's prickly pear," she says.
Festival founder Will Thomson started thinking differently about crops after he had a farm in Albuquerque's North Valley growing things like eggplants and tomatoes.
"I saw that lots of the things we grow use a lot of water, and we're in a desert, and we're in a desert that's going to get hotter and drier," he says.
Dry goods
There are many edible plants adapted to arid climates. Among them are prickly pears, or opuntia, of which there are hundreds of varieties, about 100 growing in New Mexico. As well as the familiar deep red or purple fruit, there are varieties with different colored fruits, spines and flowers.
The fruits have long been eaten by Native people, and along with the cactus pads or nopales, they're a big part of Mexican cuisine.
"But we don't eat them much here," says Thomson. To try to change that, he started this festival in 2019.
"I really wanted to have a place to have discovery and joy around eating this fruit that lots of people are familiar with but they may not have tried," he says.
There are workshops teaching how to cultivate and prepare prickly pears. Lilia Avila from local nonprofit Three Sister Kitchen is showing people how to make agua fresca, adding lime and mint to the blended cactus fruit.
She just helps herself to plants all over the city.
"Right there, every corner, we have some," she says, laughing. "Even my neighbor's, and she knows that I just go and steal it from her."
Desert menu
Across the way, Karen Bedell of Sonoran Scavengers is selling not just prickly pear products but mesquite flour, wolfberry jam and candied barrel cactus. Most of it is gathered from wild plants.
"There is more food in a desert than there is in a forest," she says. "We've just forgotten what's there."
And presiding over the Prickly Foods lemonade stand is Liz Mackenzie, who's Navajo, or Diné, and is in business with festival founder Will Thomson. She says a big part of her business and this festival is encouraging reconnection with native plants.
"I'm Indigenous," she says. "It's kind of just part of my culture in general to be really reading into the land and living off the land and learning about the land and appreciating what it can give to you as long as you take care of it."
Food of the past, and future
The vendors and speakers here today are part of a cohort of advocates for a return to traditional ways of eating. Tanisha Tucker is from the Tohono O'odham Nation, she lives in Arizona and learned from her elders to gather prickly pears at this time of year, taking only what she needs and leaving some for the animals.
"I think it's really important for people to understand that, because we are in a desert climate, we are just going to get drier and drier," she says. "We don't want to use up all of our water to plant these plants that aren't native, and they require a lot of water."
Elsewhere, at the University of Nevada, scientists are studying the potential of opuntia as a climate-resilient crop that could be used for biofuels and livestock feed as well as human food.
"We found that cactus pear only requires about 400 millimeters of precipitation a year, and that is only about 20% of what is required for other crops," says John Cushman, a professor at the university's department of biochemistry and molecular biology.
He says up to 40% of a cow's diet and all of a sheep or goat's diet can be prickly pear, and the natural moisture in the plant can keep the animals hydrated in dry climates.
Staying hydrated
Several people at the festival are trying prickly pear for the first time, among them Kylie Tierney who has not one but two drinks on the go.
"You have to," she says. "It's the prickly pear festival!"
She recently moved to the area.
"I actually do have some prickly pear in my yard, which I don't know what to do with," she says. "Hopefully today I can learn some insight as to how I can harvest it and what it can be used for."
She may face challenges. Anecdotes abound of first experiments with home preparation of prickly pears leading to spines in fingers, stained countertops and jam full of gravelly little seeds. To coax out that purple sweetness, most people need tongs, gloves and strainers.
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