There is a Western European environmental imaginary that assumes arid environments are incapable of supporting human life, or that the quality of that life, if it exists, is hardly worth living. From this perspective, it is easy to see agriculture and arid environments as antithetical. Irrigation becomes necessary in arid environments like the Mezquital Valley when the plants you want to eat did not evolve to survive aridity, but there are plants that have evolved in this way, and many of them form the basis of rich culinary traditions in central Mexico.

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