The Land of Enchantment.

For more than 22,000 years, people have called this land of stunning landscapes deep rooted traditions, and many cultures.

Home.

The weather here changes from blistering hot in the sun's flame to biting cold at nightfall.

The landscape ranges from lush mountains to arid deserts.

Life giving Acequias.

Snake through lush farmland, while open plains give herds room to thrive.

From Pueblo farmers to Spanish conquistadors to the American cowboys, all have lended their unique flavors to this land.

From north to south, east to west.

From the Old World to the new.

The food of New Mexico is unrivaled in its cultural connections.

But what is New Mexican food?

What is New Mexican food to me?

Wow.

That is a really challenging question because it's so many different things.

New Mexican food to me is what I eat at home.

The culture, it's tradition.

It's a whole lot because everyone puts all of it, their heart and their soul in a constantly evolving banquet, not Tex-Mex.

Good steak and, blue corn enchiladas.

So the steamed corn, besides the obvious of green chili, the Mexican food to me has sort of got a bad rap, it only being spicy.

There's so many other layers chilies, chilies and more chilies.

Well, it's a kind of a blend of cultures.

It's the biggest testimony of of, faith and resilience.

Green chilies.

I thought they were horrible when I first moved here, but now I got to have them on everything.

New Mexican food is is humble and delicious.

It's contemporary, but ancestral.

It's ancient but new.

It's a good medicine, right there.

You know, it's traditional Mexican food is what I grew up eating.

Basically, it's elemental, is earthy, it's vibrant.

It's the best food on earth.

And it's also just really, really good.

New Mexican food to me is home.

It's just traditional New Mexican food.

There is, there's nothing fancy about it, but it just makes you feel good when you eat it.

My husband and I own Abuelita s New Mexican here in Bernalillo, New Mexico.

And, we're third generation owners to this, to this nice little spot.

I did not ever think I would own a restaurant, but I fell in love, and.

And here we are, 21 years later, still going strong.

We have people that come in and, oh, you know, it's just really good Mexican food.

Well, we're not Mexican food.

We're New Mexican.

Mexican food is delicious, but we have our own our own flavor.

The base of, I think any new Mexican dishes is beans and and chili and and from there, you, you know, you grow your plate to whatever you're, you're wanting to serve.

And the reason our, our flavors are so good is just because it's a blend.

You know it.

And then that's why it's so unique to I think you can't necessarily find that other places, because it took all these different cultures coming together to, to make the flavor what it is.

Every culture is is represented and honored in our flavors.

I have customers that come in today that that knew my great grandma, and they remember being at her house eating, eating the food.

You know, it just transports people back.

You could have someone come in who's who's got teeth and who doesn't get grouchy when they're hungry.

But you sit them down and you're welcoming and you feed them a good plate of food and guess what?

They leave smiling.

They are, you know, you will be like, I don't know, but I was raised on the in the boarding school, you know, it was all through church.

You hear that a lot of back in the days in the 70s, you know, and some of us were raised by non native family.

And I was like that, you know, during the boarding school era, people were ripped away from their homelands or told not to speak their language or introduce new foods.

It was very difficult native people love to sing and I we love to sing and hey y'all, we love art and we love to create.

It's not only, just food, it was stories.

There's songs that goes with it.

There's culture that goes with it.

I had to relearn.

I lost everything back.

Back in the days always to hear don't forget your language, don't forget your culture.

Don't forget your song.

I hear that a lot.

But where is our food?

The pueblo and people are the first New Mexicans.

They already had agriculture.

When the Spanish arrived in the 1500s.

They were growing maize, corn, frijoles beans and Calabasas squash.

There were eight foods that existed in the Americas, which I like to call the magic eight corn, beans, squash, chili, tomato.

Potato, vanilla, and cacao didn't exist anywhere outside the Americas.

Corn and squash and beans are kind of known around here and in a lot of indigenous cultures as the Three sisters.

Those three not only grow well together and support each other with the corn in the middle, the beans wrapping around as protection, and then the squash on the ground, providing like shade and keeping moisture in.

So they kind of grow together like a family, but also nutritionally, they all sort of between the proteins and carbs and the amino acids and micronutrients.

That composition is exactly what we need to survive as humans.

You know, I grew up on the roadside hustling out my corn, at the flea markets.

And a lot of the food stands there would buy a lot of my steam corn that I would sell for my family.

A lot of the inspiration came from our son.

Yabito I myself, I'm a sixth generation farmer.

And so we wanted our child to be that seventh generation on a deeper level.

You know, there's a lot of research out there to show that even our genetics are telling our bodies how to process foods.

Right.

And so me being Hungarian and Irish and Zach being Navajo, like, we're going to digest foods differently.

We're going to prefer foods differently.

So this is kind of like already within us at birth, you know, what we wanted to happen was have that preference a preference for, you know, traditional foods, foods that are encoded for him.

And in a way, you know, those are foods when he eats it.

That's what his ancestors ate.

He's able to pull out all of the nutrition because his innate parts of himself are able to understand that food immediately.

Traditional foods here, a lot of the staples is, Navajo, Indian white corn.

Knishes those what it's called the Navajo property.

We have a pet, about 8 to 10ft deep, and we have a fire going all day.

We steam it like a ginormous pressure cooker overnight.

And there's just this very unique flavor that you would not taste anywhere else.

This is a very, you know, traditional process, something that, you know, our, our recent ancestors used.

Nixamalization is probably one of the oldest inventions that that we know of from this side of the world.

Nixamalization is the process of cooking the corn in the alkaline solution.

So in this state, traditionally it's juniper ash.

And so cooking it in there does many different things.

One of them is it dissolves the pericarp on the corn.

So normally that would just be indigestible and would pass through your body.

But that transforms the corn into what we're talking about, that nixamal to make masa, to make tortillas and tamales and all those things.

So that was probably 5000 years ago.

Nobody really knows exactly.

That invention kind of changed everything around here.

And that's why corn is so important.

And it has been for thousands of years.

We really don't have any textbooks or we don't have anything written down within our our culture.

You know, that's one of the things that everything's word of mouth being out there in the field.

That was my history lesson.

You know, it's nothing like getting your hands dirty, getting your hands in the ground, in the soil.

You know, and really feeling whatever you're feeling.

You may have a bad day by maybe an hour, maybe 15 minutes out in the field on the farm.

And hey, you know, it all goes out.

There's nothing like it.

So my original inspiration for for cooking at the level where I'm at, it was a lot to do with, self-discovery.

Part of where I'm at is, is bridging that gap where the traditions were actually lost.

The best dish to talk about the old and new is, the tamales.

It could be made with many different things.

Things like meats, chilies.

It could be made as a desert, dried fruits and, quinoa oils and, amaranth and that becomes like a energy bar that could be used.

A lot of those ingredients were used, by the Warriors specifically been a journey of of learning, who I am through food and then discovering that food is the most important thing to the Pueblo people.

As far as praying with corn, we dance for, for rain, for our crops.

And everything is based around food goes back to our history as Pueblo people.

So it starts with, the end of the basket two era, the beginning of, like the, the pottery era, and it's the introduction of beans.

So prior to beans, we didn't have a need to cook food that long.

So the, the old method was to put hot rocks into tightly woven baskets.

Clay pots were used to boil food.

Our ancestors knew what they were doing.

They knew how to prepare the food, pottery.

It gave us the ability to cook beans for a long period of time because the beans need several hours to cook.

So, changed that method, and then, pottery became utilitarian all across the board for many applications.

So when you go to our old ruins and stuff, you'll see, that storage units took up more, property than the actual living units.

And that's because there was seven years of, storing and pottery drying things and, store and sealing the buildings off so that, there was food for times of hardship.

Not far where I lived, there's a small cave, and the elders there were being about ready to publish.

Be more chaff.

See this long walk?

She had all these parties with seeds in it.

If I don't make it back.

Here are the seeds.

I want you guys, you people, to regrow this.

So this is the place to come back to.

There was a trade network between the native peoples of New Mexico with native peoples in what's now northern Mexico, southern Mexico, into Central America and South America.

They were trading goods.

Trading food was trading human beings.

People were trading in the Americas, north and South for centuries before any Europeans ever came to New Mexico.

So a native source food might not be local, but it follows a trade route that existed for millennia.

So, for instance, wild rice from Minnesota would have been traded with tribes to the south or cow.

We found the vessels at Chaco Canyon, that contained the essence of chocolate, which was used all the way down through Mexico.

So we know that it existed here.

Oh, well, over a thousand years ago.

So with this link to, to the Mesoamerican cultures, allowed me to, stretch down south and, and really look at the ingredients that were used, like the chilies.

The Three sisters corns, beans and squash and all the different, items that were shared.

And through trade routes, along with, feathers and shells and other things that that we use daily.

For thousands of years before people farmed here, they hunted and forged to survive.

Foraging for the Pueblo people is a little different than the traditional definition of foraging.

We know that pinyon pine nuts are native to New Mexico, so picking, cultivating, saving pine nuts.

Pinion for recipes has been part of New Mexico's, foodways for centuries.

Also, berries, capelin, choke cherry.

These are the sort of things that people would add to their food.

A lot of it was us knowing where they belong and where they grow.

And just going back to these places and, asking for these things first and then, only taking what you need, leave some for the animals and leave somewhere for the plant to reproduce itself.

Pueblo food, traditionally, is very interesting.

Especially, pre-contact.

A lot of it was, was we ate a lot of rodents, like muskrats and, rabbits and things.

They were very much a part of the daily diet as well as, small game birds.

So these things were readily prepared.

It could be prepared on an open fire, and eaten pretty much at any time.

And they were hunting various animals around New Mexico, like buffalo, turkey, elk, the buffalo were here for centuries.

Native peoples of New Mexico hunted them for their food, for their skin, for their, bones, for weapons and tools.

Every part of the animal was eaten and the buffalo took on a mythical quality when the Spanish came in the 1500s.

In fact, New Mexico was originally called Cibola, from a Native American word that means buffalo or buffalo.

Plains.

In 1492, the Spanish arrived in the New World.

The conquerors extracted rich resources from the Americas, and they wanted more.

There were legends from Spain of seven bishops who left and established seven cities of gold in a faraway land somewhere, having seen Tenochtitlan, Mexico City, it did not seem far fetched that there might be other large cities of Native Americans to the north with wealth, with gold and silver.

Starting in the 1540s, they explore New Mexico.

This exploration continues into the 1590s, with both conquest and colonization under Juan De Onate there in 159 He explores north, east and west, but doesn't find any silver.

It doesn't find any gold.

He doesn't find the Seven cities of Cibola.

These legendary cities are a myth.

I like to imagine, Pueblo and warriors confronting Spanish soldiers or conquistadors and Aztec or other native Mexican warriors and colonists of all different backgrounds.

Spanish mestizo, meaning half Spanish, half Native American.

Some were Mulatos, have Spanish, half black Native American servants, colonists, and they're all bringing different kinds of foods from their diverse cultures to New Mexico.

I love our colonial period because this is where people start to come together, blending both in painful, violent ways, but also loving and beautiful ways to start creating this culture.

We have here.

New Mexican food, certainly is something that is based on the ingredients and the traditions of this area.

This this is a particularly unusual, estate in the sense that the indigenous people of this area, you know, we're agricultural people.

There was 10,000 people at San Juan Pueblo when the Spanish showed up.

So how do they feed 10,000 people?

They weren't killing buffalo every day.

They were growing food here.

And that's what brought the Spanish here to live and make this the new capital of the new world.

The Spanish conquered and colonized New Mexico in the 1600s, and that changed the local people.

But it also changed the conquers.

And you can see that in the different foods that everyone in New Mexico was eating through the centuries, the foods were mixing.

The Spanish brought chili from Mexico, chili peppers and chocolate chocolate.

These were the gifts from the Mexican Indians to New Mexico.

They're animals such as cows, pigs, goats, sheep, chickens added to the local diet and blended with local ingredients.

Diets change and everybody starts eating very differently in New Mexico, starting in the 1600s.

People would take food stuff like free haulers, local beans, local corn, local squash and add beef from Spain, pork from Spain, chicken from Spain.

And then you add in this amazing chili that was bred over a long time, for its, flavor and heat levels, too.

And this was really quite isolated for a long time.

I mean, coming to Santa Fe, like, up from Mexico City, and there was a half a year's journey.

And so the style of food that we still eat today owes quite a bit, to, you know, these ancestral roots.

The Puebloan people, fought for their cultural right to survive with the Pueblo Revolt in 1680.

And while there were attempts to remove Spanish influence, we know that, they were smart enough to still hang on to the cows.

The pigs, the goats, sheep and chickens and horses.

This is the oldest, European colonial irrigation systems in the United States were built here.

These Acequias that run through Alcalde.

They were fashioned, by the Spanish to irrigate and create food.

That was the hardest thing back in the 1500s when they were here, was, where do you get your food?

Either grow it or you steal it.

You couldn't buy it.

There's no currency.

The Acequia system was brought by the Spanish and the Acequia system was developed and evolved in Spain using, Spanish Moorish and Jewish technologies through the centuries.

They are secure system of the Spanish blends technologies with the pueblo and people to create our unique New Mexico watering systems that you can still find in northern New Mexico and at pueblos around the state.

Los Luceros is a really amazing site.

Its history dates back to about, A.D. 700, when the Tewa people first settled here and then it became a Spanish land grant in 1703.

Spanish land grants in this area were what were called long lots.

They would have, a water source, an upland area, and then fields from your agriculture and all your crops.

You would have a hacienda at the ranch house at the very center of it.

You had perhaps hundreds of people living on a land grant.

And so you had to feed all of them.

The Spanish were not working the fields, they were enslaving the native populations.

This system of enslavement was called the genezaros system.

The genezaros system existed until well after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in the United States.

Because we were still part of Mexico at that time.

The genezaros system didn't die in New Mexico until about the 1870s.

It's a different system in terms of how you look at it relative to blacks enslavement.

We know, archeologically that the people who were enslaved were actually eating a diet that was somewhat similar to the Spanish.

It was very heavy in meat.

They were still supplementing with all of the native foods as well.

The Spanish were growing a lot of different crops that they had brought with them.

In addition to the corn, the beans and the chilies, things like lentils would have been grown up here at one time.

They also brought a lot of different kinds of herbs.

Lavenders, rose Mary.

They would have had peach trees and apricot trees as well.

They also brought wheat.

The Spanish bring the horno, the mud brick oven.

It looks like a beehive.

And this was used to cook bread, tortillas, meats, stews.

So this is an innovation that the Spanish bring.

That changes how food is prepared in New Mexico, not just amongst the Spanish population, but also the pueblo and people as well.

The horno people think of it as a very native kind of oven, but an horno is actually a middle eastern origin.

It didn't take off in Mexico, but it definitely took off in New Mexico.

And so it was adopted by the Pueblo people, because it was a really great way to utilize all that wheat that was coming in, with the Spanish in terms of bread baking and making tortillas and things like that.

By the early 1600s, it's decided that New Mexico is going to be more of a religious operation than military or gold seeking.

Part of the Spanish Catholic liturgy is Holy Communion, the Holy Eucharist.

And for this ritual you need unleavened wheat bread and grape wine.

So wine was needed all the time.

In New Mexico, starting in the early 1600s.

Well, the Spanish were getting wine shipped in and it was swill.

Apparently Spain was not shipping out their best wines to the territories and the and the colonies, so the priests decided they were going to try and start their own vineyards, which really drove a lot of the the vintage culture was not the church per se.

It was this fact that most water was unsafe.

Everyone from the smallest child to the most elderly grandparents, all drank alcoholic beverages because that's what was safe.

Wine isn't the only legacy Catholicism left in New Mexico.

In 1492, the Catholic kings Fernando and Isabel decided that everyone would be Catholic.

And if you were a Jew or a muslim, you could either convert to Catholicism or leave about half left and have remained, becoming Catholics.

After the Inquisition was established, it became, a tradition to have a matanza, which was the butchering of a pig and roasting it, and then people eating pork publicly in public to show that they're Catholic and not Jewish or Muslim.

So these traditions are brought to Mexico and then up to New Mexico, and we sometimes forget why we do these things.

Families held on to their traditions at home, performing them in secret.

Basically, a crypto Jew is somebody who does practice in secret.

And it's been a little bit different.

But we've kept our Judaism in ways that we could so that we could survive under the Inquisition and under Catholicism.

Many people fled to the Americas to escape the Inquisition.

But then the Inquisition is established in Mexico around 1571.

So some of these folks are trying to get away to outlying areas like New Mexico.

500 years we have been here in New Mexico.

We came, and landed in Mexico.

And we run basically because of pressure from the Inquisition.

We pretended to be Catholic, very Catholic as much as we could.

Did this because we were protecting our family and we were protecting our interests.

We're protecting ourselves.

Families outwardly presented themselves as good Catholics while practicing their customs privately at home, incorporating local foods into their traditions.

Hanukkah comes from the Book of Maccabees.

There was a battle going on and a miracle happened in the temple that for eight days the oil did not run out.

So that's why we have empanadas fried in olive oil and we have donuts fried.

And all the empanadas are the same thing as what the Ashkenazi do with the frying of the donuts and Hanukkah empanadas.

Well, that's our donut.

My grandfather was in the ship business once upon a time.

My mom and dad, we didn't even have any any sheep.

Molly and I started this whole deal all over again.

I wasn't supposed to be in the ranch business.

I was supposed to be a dentist.

So I sort of fell into the job of being a rancher.

A farmer, I guess you say.

So I'm a sheep rancher out the last of the sheep ranchers in northern New Mexico.

I say that we've done the work of four people for our whole lives.

People have been raising sheep in Tierra Amarilla for hundreds of years.

What happened?

Yeah.

This is it involves a lot of a lot of history.

This.

We are filming the Tierra Amarilla Land grant.

This was a land grant.

There were lots of sheep in this area at one time.

Probably too many.

Well, the churro sheep was the first sheep that came to the New World.

Of course, some of them dispersed among the Indian tribes too, you know, in relation to the churro sheep and it's stewards of the Navajo peop its shepherds.

The longer wool allows us to create our textiles, what that allows us to create our clothes and such.

The meat, the fat, you know, they're able to retain a lot of that, and they're a little bit smaller than the conventional blackface sheep.

And so the reason for that is because that means they're less likely to eat that much more and hydrate that much more.

So you're actually having an efficient, you know, livestock rather than ones that will just continuously extract the resources around them.

And, you know, people say that sheep are dumb and this and that, but they're not.

They have their own intelligence.

They're brilliant at taking care of themselves.

In the 1860s, when the U.S. government was working to control all of the western tribes, they were moving the Dena on the long walk, and they wanted to destroy their livelihood.

So they slaughtered tens of thousands of the true sheep out on Denita.

A lot of the people who resisted the long walk hid in the canyons, eastern Arizona, western New Mexico, and hid the sheep along with them.

Then in 1934, the Bureau of Indian Affairs agent for New Mexico, helped to get passed the Livestock Reduction Act.

And this was to raise the price of beef during the depression, which meant that goats and sheep across the United States were slaughtered in mass.

And once again, the true sheep was really hit hard by it.

We almost lost the entire breed at that point.

Wow.

New Mexico's cowboy tradition has a broad history that goes back to Spanish ranchers who brought cows, sheep, goats, and that extends into the Mexican period where you had vaqueros.

Vaqueros were cowboys.

The Americans are also bringing their ranching traditions that blend with the Spanish and Mexican vaquero tradition to create the iconic cowboy that we see later in movies and comic books and stories.

Those legends and myths are based in historical realities.

I was born and raised down south in Artesia, New Mexico.

My family is very deep, rooted in the heritage of New Mexico agriculture.

It was just a lifestyle for us.

It's what you did, right?

So it was like, you know, my I watched my granddad, you know, break horses and and brand cattle.

It's just it's special.

The deep rooted heritage of it is is so cool.

Our family's been here since, I think, 1885, in the valley.

I have three children.

They're the sixth generation here in our area.

For me, wanting something to do with my family, this has always been a, a goal of mine to be able to take my kids to work with me.

When we were working in the oil field to to support our cow habit, the kids couldn't go.

But as long as we were at the house farm and bailing hay, moving cows, the kids could always be in the pickup with me.

Probably the biggest part of what we do is the family aspect of it.

The Americans are driven.

They are a progressive people, not unlike the Spanish in the 1500s, only now it's the 1800s.

And they also come with an attitude that maybe their culture and foods are better than the local Mexican foods or Native American foods.

But again, the conquered or changed by the conquerors.

But the conquerors also are changed by the people they conquered.

It's one of our staples that we serve here at the restaurant, I think was a huge influence of the Native American culture.

Is our subject is only they call them Frybread might be a little crispier.

I mean, there's going to be some little changes, but our soap operas are definitely one of our dishes that we're grateful that we learn from the Native American culture.

What's their frybread?

They might do, Indian taco or something like that.

New Mexican cuisine.

We've, we've adopted it.

We're like, please share it with us.

We.

It's so delicious.

When I speak about Frybread, I try to leave the traditional part out, but it is a modern survival food.

It was created at a time when people were starving and a lot of the rations were actually spoiled.

Government issue were foods that were issued by the U.S government during relocation.

During the trail of Tears.

But here in New Mexico, the long walk for the dinner or for the Navajo flour, when we're introduced to as white flour.

So when you're starving.

Yeah, you you eat just to survive.

And when they were imprisoned in an internment camp in the southern part of the state, they were issued these rations.

And from these rations Frybread was born.

So this is credited to the Navajo Nation, where they, started creating the fry bread and, the fry bread, went pretty much, wild, on off the reservation.

So people started doing their own variations.

So now we all have our own variations of that.

Fast forward through a couple of campaigns, conflicts and then the Navajo Long Walk, all of that came to to be because of how resilient and how hard we were to kill, how hard we were to annihilate war in a sense, you know, really pushes history and advances it.

Capitalism is brought to New Mexico.

Before that, you had people who bartered or traded.

They just they grew what they needed.

The idea of cash crops was brand new.

The idea of having excess supplies and selling for a profit was new.

The railroad is a revolution in New Mexico that is very significant, much like agriculture amongst the pueblos or the a secure system brought by the Spanish.

The railroad connects New Mexico with a much faster technology to places east like Saint Louis or Chicago.

Fred Harvey, we should make mention of, with the Harvey Houses and the Santa Fe Railroad.

Fred Harvey, who is a national treasure, if you will, really coordinated all the restaurants across the country on the railroad stations and actually on the railroad cars.

There were a number of Harvey Houses throughout, New Mexico where the Santa Fe Railroad made its stops.

Fred Harvey also was one of the early sort of farm to table restaurant tours, if you will, because he would buy local produce all across the country to use in these restaurants.

It's amazing that 100 years ago, someone was concerned about that.

Trails helped shape history.

The native peoples of New Mexico have been trading along trails with native peoples in Mexico for thousands of years.

The Camino Real connected New Mexico to Mexico City and, of course, the Santa Fe Trail connected Santa Fe to Missouri in the 20th century.

You have route 66, a road connecting Chicago to Los Angeles and cutting right through Albuquerque.

That also helped shape our culture and our food ways.

Diners, hotels, serving, bacon and eggs, flapjacks.

Whoever's rancheros that blending of foods eggs, bacon with tortillas, and red and green chili.

Never mind the green chili cheeseburger.

Where would we be without that?

There's a lot more pressures today than there was.

You know, most mostly from from the economic standpoint.

The life as a rancher back then was a lot different than than it is today.

It was less based on, economy was best based on capitalism, was more based on sustaining their families and based on sustaining the community.

You know, the the whole capitalistic aspect of it, the whole money part came later.

I make a great living off my acreage here without the farmers market had to be really challenging.

It's like getting Whole Foods prices and you put that money in your pocket.

I think we have the most amazing farmer's market here.

Just spectacular.

So when you go there and see chilies being roasted and all the varieties, tomatoes and all the other wonderful produce, then I think it drives the point home that we do live in a a cornucopia of amazing ingredients, even though we live in the desert.

If you look at the just who we are as the Santa Fe Farmers Market, you know, you see, you see just the true diversity of, farming and ranching in northern New Mexico.

I think what we have we're trying to do here at the Santa Fe Farmers Market is to, is to help build up, the economy of northern New Mexico and mostly focusing on small scale farms and ranches.

And.

Over the lifetime of New Mexico, the indigenous communities of northwestern New Mexico, I figured out ways to to harvest rainwater, and the growing methods to to be able to sustain communities for, for centuries.

And I think that's a lot of what we're doing now is, is reverting back to old ways, the old ways of reclaiming a lot of of of soil, you know, conventional agriculture, so sad to say, has has been very extractive.

To really understand your soil, you know, there's a saying that says like, you know, there's there's a grandpa, the son, and then the grandson.

The grandpa says, you know, I'm a I'm a I'm the best farmer.

The son says, I'm a, I'm a good farmer.

And then the grandson says, I'm a poor farmer.

And the reason for that is because the soil tells on you.

You know, grandpa, when he first started farming the soil, the nutrients were rich.

And then when the dad started, his son started farming and doing the same practices.

Then the soil quality went down and down and down.

So when the grandson finally inherited that farm, just within three generations, they have poor soil, they have poor quality of crops.

Everybody is starting to jump on the bandwagon.

Regenerative agriculture.

Where did that start?

Why didn't that start?

Who started it?

Well, who created it?

We did.

As indigenous folks, you know, due to our farming practices of, you know, crop rotation, reading your soil, understanding that and the nutrients and but just most importantly, again, what you extract, you put back in, you know, we as human beings, we've become really ignorant to nature and I'd really in a way think that we're superior, but we're not.

We're just a speck and a speck in a speck in the universe.

Which is a scary thought, but not scary when you have that purpose, when you a part of that universe, then you, you know, have nothing to fear.

The more you know about the food of a place that you live, the more connected you are to it.

You have such a rich agricultural tradition here, and it's important for kids from New Mexico to know about that.

It's a it should be a source of pride for all New Mexicans.

We've done several projects where we focus on New Mexico grown.

What does that mean?

New Mexico grown food, New Mexico grown kids, New Mexico grown recipes.

One of the things that's really unique and rare about New Mexico is what's happening in school food.

There are so many efforts statewide to help bring more local food into school cafeterias.

What kids eat at home needs to be reflected in a way, in what is served in the cafeterias.

But also super important is carry on those traditions around food that have been in New Mexico for centuries, and pass that on to the next generation.

We have this sort of dichotomy in the state where we were known for food, and we have these fantastic restaurants, and yet there are people who are going hungry.

New Mexico leads the country in food insecurity and in particular for children.

Nationally, 1 in 5 kids suffer are experiencing food insecurity.

Here in the Four Corners area, it's 1 in 4.

Those underlying issues that we're trying to address are can be kind of dire.

The nutritional health of children being as poor as it has been, kids not getting enough food, all of those sorts of things.

Those are hard, tough issues to grapple with.

I'm very proud to say that our state has an initiative called New Mexico Grown that incentivizes school districts to use and procure, locally grown, vegetables and fruits.

We can get minimally processed foods that are culturally relevant.

I have a student who just graduated this year.

His name is Carson Stark.

He actually started growing food and made it available for us to purchase and serve at his own high school.

I like to watch something grow from a little speck of a seed, and that's always kind of been a little passion of mine.

Is watching something start from nothing and turn into something.

We served over the course of the year to our 11,000 plus students, close to 500,000 breakfast meals, 1.5 million lunch meals, snacks and suppers around half a million.

We purchase close to 250,000 pounds of locally grown produce.

I like selling to schools.

It's kind of a full circle event, selling back to the school that I grew up in.

It just makes sense.

Number one, the quality is so much better for our kiddos.

Number two, we are helping to sustain our local food system, keeping money within our community.

And that's important.

And as part of that full circle, conquering and defeating food insecurity.

We have a saying green chili is why you move here, but red chili is why you stay here.

Because you can eat.

You can use it year round and you don't need refrigeration.

You know those decorative restaurants that you see hanging on the Viegas?

That's actually how they were dried 100 years ago.

And then when they dried, they just brought him inside.

Is hunger from the inside biggest.

And that was the red chili for the whole year.

You can cook with the restaurants, but I always remind people, make sure they're not bug spreaders, shellacked unless you want to kill somebody.

Chilies are loaded with all sorts of nutritional things, too.

One green chili has six times the amount of vitamin C of an orange, and we're pretty greedy with our chilies.

I think I learned that we keep 80% of our chili crop here, and only export 20%, which is amazing, and I think we consume it all.

You know, in the mid 1900s, everybody grew very chili.

Everybody had a garden because they were very poor and they had lots of land.

Back then, green chili wasn't a big deal because they didn't have refrigeration, they didn't have freezers.

So red chili was really more desirable.

I remember growing up eating mostly red chili and only eating green chili in the fall.

My dad would roasted it on a barbecue grill and they'd peel it, and my mom would make a fresh batch of tortillas, and he put that tortilla right on there, warm with that fresh green chili, a little bit of salt, and you were in heaven.

Nowadays, green chili is a big deal because now it can be roasted, peeled, put in containers, frozen, and you can have it year round.

So it's kind of evolved is becoming more of a mainstream thing, when in the past it was really a special occasion.

It's not until the 20th century that a Mexican, botanist and a Japanese American botanist, they re-engineer our our chilies to create the nice big fat peppers that we love and enjoy today in New Mexico.

New Mexico invented the chili pepper that we are famous for here, that we cultivated and grow.

The reason why I got into chili manufacturing is the the traditional and cultural aspects of it, like growing up in New Mexico.

It's a seasonal tradition to go to your favorite roaster, smell the smells CM roast and get a big sack.

That's more than just a flavor.

It's more than just the spice.

It has cultural significance.

And it's a it is like the essence of New Mexico.

There's just a lot of really dedicated New Mexico farmers who have been obsessed with the craft for a really long time.

We grow different varieties of the same pepper for different heat levels.

A lot of the chili that we grow in the state is flavor over heat.

The hottest chili that we grow is the Lume Bray variety.

And you can see the capsicum grow along the veins of the chilies as, a yellow to orange oil.

The deeper the color and the more you see that the, the hotter the pepper is going to be.

There's no other state that uses or embraces the chili pepper the way New Mexico does.

It's an important part of our diet.

It's an important part of our identity.

I think New Mexico is the only state that can be identified with red and green chili, and that's how it should be.

The story of New Mexican food is as unique as the people who live in this land.

From farmers to shepherds to chefs, countless people come together to create new Mexican food.

A food that is truly unmatched.

Red or green?

Oh my gosh, it's whatever was in front of me at that moment.

I love about oh, I'm totally Team Green.

Oh, I'm green all the way.

I'm a green girl.

But I do love red.

I am a Christmas guy.

I gotta say, both as a chef, I appreciate red more.

I think there's more going on in a red sauce.

The red chili is kind of like a holy grail.

I'm more of a green gal.

I like red, green and to quit it's unreliable.

Molly cooked the best red chili you ever did eat So red Christmas.

Yeah.

Of course.

Absolutely.

Christmas.

Great.

I like mine on the side because it's too hot.

I like it spicy.

You know, I'm Christmas.

Very much so.

I, I like both chilies, but I think I prefer Christmas, I do Christmas, Christmas, Christmas.

I love both of them.

If I had to pick one over the other, I'd probably say Green Christmas.

Yes, I am red and green.

I love Christmas, Christmas, Christmas.

You know, when it comes to to chili, you know, I'm very seasonal.

You know, I'll go on green for most months out of the year.

But there comes a time when I shift my body just needs more red chili.

So it's like asking my favorite Beatles song.

And I don't know, I love it all.