Plants of the Gods: S5E7. Part 1 — Mescal, Tequila and Magic Toads: A Conversation with ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan

Well, as a Franciscan brother, you know well the teachings of St. Francis of Assisi, who taught us to love plants and animals.

But it seems to me the problem here, one of the problems here is we're loving these things to death.

Not just tequila and mezcal and the agaves, but peyote, Sonoran desert toads, and all these other species that when you and I started out, nobody paid attention to.

And now they're paying too much attention to them in some way.

That's correct.

And I think your metaphor, loving them to death, is apt, but it's almost like strangling something you love because it went from just sheer and sometimes naive appreciation of these plants to not just over-harvesting, but taking the richest and best components of the plant, like the inulins that could help Mexicans deal with their epidemic of diabetes and turning them into high fructose syrups that are just like high fructose corn syrups.

So we've taken the very best of a plant and wrung it out.

And what we're left on the marketplace is some of the most damaging elements of that.

Well, it seems to me that, you know, the U.S. is in love with tequila and has long regarded mezcal, if they regard it all, as sort of a bastard stepbrother that really wasn't up to par.

And I think your new book makes the case that the opposite is true.

So can you clarify for all of us in listener land the difference between mezcal and tequila? Because it seems to me there's a lot of confusion.

Well, that's a great point, and that hasn't gone away 20 years after writing Tequila, Natural and Cultural History with Ana Guadalupe Valenzuela.

I think, first of all, remember that tequila was once called vino mezcal de tequila, and there were dozens, if not hundreds, of place-based distilling traditions all across Mexico that named a very distinctive terroir of mescal for a particular place.

So in Sonora, just south of where I sit right now, is Vino Mescal de Bacanora, now called Bacanora.

It's just in the zona serrana of Sonora and the Sierra Madre Occidental.

But when you begin to try to adapt the European denomination of origin system for this, The words like vino mezcal that unifies all of those distillates disappears and tequila gets reified as not only the most accessible, but the best of all agave spirits.

And I think we could argue the opposite.

Tequila is the classic example of monoculture surpassed perhaps only by sugarcane of a single clone of a single variety.

of a single species, whereas I said earlier, mezcals can be 58 different species and many varieties within that.

And whereas tequila uses one industrialized, probably genetically engineered brewer's yeast, mezcal traditionally has been made with one of the greatest batches of microbial diversity that any spirit that reaches our lips grows.

It's more like kimchi in ways than it's like European distillates because it is emerging out of that wonderful symbiosis between plants and microbes that many of the products that you and I have studied over the years are the expressions of that kind of mutualism, not just between cultures and plants, but plants and microbes.

Well, speaking of which, I want to read a favorite quote of mine from your new book, Agave Spirits, which touches on what you're saying.

Quote, as microbiologist Anne Mathis has reminded us, in ancient beer and beer yeast and common anaerobic bacteria in the fermentation vat, we find protozoans and even nematodes as well.

So we'll slowly walk you through the fascinating microbiology, invertebrate biology, biochemistry, and plant physiology of agave spirits later on.

But for the moment, trust us.