When one of our second grade teachers at Harvey Milk contacted me to ask if I could use a LOT of prickly pears for a lesson, I was thrilled that there was such a strong connection with our fourth and fifth grade unit on Indigenous food cultures and the native edible plants of California.
I was able to harvest nearly a hundred prickly pears off of the giant cactus pictured below, and there were easily hundreds of fruits left after I had filled my bags. After burning off the spines over an open flame, the pears were gently washed and placed into students’ home kits with a small jar of prickly pear nectar and a can of club soda.
In class this week, students watched a short film called Birdsong Guides a Tribe Home about the Cahuilla people (who live in and around what is now called Palm Springs in Southern California). We cut our prickly pears in half and tasted the fruit fresh. Some noticed its vibrant color, some commented on the fruit’s many seeds, and some made comparisons to strawberry, banana, watermelon, and flowers. Some students who don’t like mushy textures disliked the soft, watery quality of the prickly pear - an idea that aided our conversation about how for desert people, water is life.
We learned that prickly pears were eaten fresh, but also dried for storage to be eaten in the winter. Indigenous peoples made chewing gum from prickly pear. The seeds were dried and ground into flour. The spines were used for tattooing, and anthropologists have discovered tattoo instruments made from prickly pear spines that are 2,000 years old!
We then made our own prickly pear sodas. As I was planning for the lesson, I thought it would be better for students to be able to eat the prickly pears fresh and then also have some prickly pear nectar to mix with the club soda. I’m not equipped to juice enough prickly pears for 78 participants, so I purchased prickly pear nectar from a cactus farm in Arizona. The color of the nectar is certainly very dramatic and enticing, but I was dismayed to find that due to the addition of malic acid as a preservative, the resulting product smelled and tasted nothing like the bright, fruity flavor prickly pears are known for. The nectar tasted almost like tomato juice and many students said it smelled like pickles. There’s nothing wrong with pickles, of course, but it certainly was not what we were going for with our homemade sodas.
Ah well, I hope we were able to model for everyone how things don’t always turn out the way you plan, and we used the snafu as an opportunity to discuss the difference between a whole food like the fresh prickly pear grown in a backyard near our school and an industrialized version like the farmed and mass-produced nectar from out of state. Most students chose to make their soda using the fresh scooped-out fruit mixed with the club soda, which made for a very refreshing drink. If we teach this lesson again, I will have students add agave syrup to taste. It’s made from the agave plant, another staple of the Cahuilla diet.
