In the middle of August, 17-year-old Lynette Alverez and her aunt Nellie Botello put on work clothes and steel-toed boots to collect the fruit of the prickly pear cactus. It's snake season in Arizona, and there are baby rattlesnakes that have yet to make that distinctive attack-warning sound.
To avoid the heat of the afternoon, they start work at four in the morning. By 9 a.m., two tons of fruit have been harvested. The juice is squeezed out and used to make a sweet similar to gumdrops, but the bright pink liquid is also used as a food colouring.
Cactus candy is not a new invention. It was once a Mexican delicacy made from the flesh of the giant schooner cactus and became so popular in the United States in the early 1900s that the now protected plant was almost driven to the brink of extinction. Today, the prickly pear, which is an excellent fit for sustainable cultivation, is used for such purposes, and its fruit is becoming increasingly popular in the southwestern US and Mexico.
On weekday mornings, cactus pickers bring buckets full of fruit to Cheri's Desert Harvest plant. Cheri Romanoski, who has three employees, first heats the harvested fruit in a huge tank, then uses a stainless steel press to extract the juice, strain it twice and cool it, before the staff thoroughly cleans the preparation room and switches on new machines to start the candy and food preparation.
A teacher turned entrepreneur, Cheri has spent many years learning that the colour, viscosity, sugar and acidity of cactus juice varies depending on the weather, and which days are best for making sweets. The company produces nearly half a tonne of sweets a day and in 2021 was awarded the „Food Artisan” title in Tucson, a city that has been selected as one of UNESCO's 36 cities of gastronomy.
(source: atlasobscura.com)
