Author’s Talk featuring Carolyn Niethammer
February 14, 2026 @ 10:00 am – 11:00 am
Free with Admissions
Capacity 60
Cactus, Corn, and Cattle: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary Heritage
An early farmer tends his irrigation ditch in the re-creation of a scene from a farm at the base of Sentinel Peak where Mission Garden is located today. Archaeologists have found evidence of habitation in this area from 800 BC to AD 1300. (Robert B Ciaccio, lcoutesy Desert Archaeology, Inc.)
Join us as we trace the big changes in diet in the Santa Cruz River Valley over the last 4,000 years. Niethammer’s book, “Desert Feast,” will be available for purchase and autographing.
Author
Carolyn Niethammer
Carolyn Niethammer has been writing about the food and people of the Southwest for six decades in books and newspaper and magazine articles. Four of her eleven books are cookbooks, three are books about Native American women, one is a travel book, and one of her two novels features a famous cook from Arizona history. Her work has been translated into German, French, and Korean. Her latest nonfiction “A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary History,” is a look at Southern Arizona’s food history over the last 8,000 years, including the arrival and development of agriculture, and is an answer to why Tucson was named the country’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy. She recently received the 2025 Jim Griffith Foodways Keeper Award.
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