Connecting through food, culture and memories of our mother’s kitchens: an interview with Jeffrey Lazos Ferns and Apollon Lewis by Tanja Linton

Jeffrey Lazos Ferns and Apollon “Mark” Lewis had a brief bit of downtime during their recent visit to Camp Naco to do a site visit in preparation for our gala dinner on Oct. 16. While they were here, they spoke to me about their connection to this place, their inspirations, and their insights.

Jeffrey and Mark are childhood friends, and that bond is clear in the ease with which they bookend each other’s recollections.

Although he was born in Los Angeles and raised in a military family, Mark has been an Arizona transplant for most of his life. Also born into a military family, Jeffrey grew up in Chandler, Arizona, with Pascua Yaqui and Cora tribal affiliation. I share this connection with both of them, as I grew up in an Air Force family and lived in Chandler when the military sent my dad to Arizona State University.

Mark is the third of three kids. With a large age gap between his eldest and youngest siblings, he spent a lot of time alone and had to be creative in entertaining himself. With both parents preoccupied with work, his grandmother provided stability in his life. He recalls spending time watching her cook. A culinary prodigy, he proudly shares that by age nine, he had prepared his first Thanksgiving meal, complete with all the side dishes. On visits to other people’s homes, he’d gravitate to the kitchen, pull out pans, and offer to cook. Mark baked things and delivered them to his neighbors. “Cooking is my love language,” he unhesitatingly declares.

Food has always been a part of Jeffrey’s life. Growing up in Chandler, he worked on local farms, harvesting cotton, onions, and citrus. Food usually came from harvests. A single mother raising eight kids, Jeffrey’s mom kept chickens and ducks and would butcher something for special occasions. “Food for her became a way of working through life’s challenges. I always knew something was on her mind when she was in the kitchen,” he remembers. His mom would make Sonoran-style tortillas—which were huge and paper-thin. In the wintertime, when there was less food, she would make dozens and dozens of them, and they would be sold door-to-door to the other kids and neighbors in the projects.

His mother earned the reputation of “If you’re hungry, go to Maria’s house.” “She always fed anybody. If someone came in unannounced, she’d put a little more soup in the caldo or make the tortillas a little thinner. Food to her was sacred,” Jeffrey says fondly of his mother. Born during the Great Depression, she was raised by her grandmother in Douglas, Arizona, who also raised all her own livestock, grew her own vegetables, was a midwife, and practiced plant medicine. The tradition lives on in Jeffrey, with plants, life, and medicine being critical components of his life and culture.

Food being sacred is a key belief for him. It connects us to the earth, nature, and the world around us. He feels hunger is one of the most horrific things anybody can experience. The convenience of modern life has driven us to stray from foraging, harvesting, and growing our own food. “Food has always been a central part of my being,” Jeffrey says with conviction.

During our conversation, Mark shared a work experience illustrating how some food memories—how you process, pick, or even cook something—are never lost. Having an item in your hand can connect you to this treasure trove of recollections. A connection is triggered, and the memory appears.

Mark was watching students prepare haricots verts. He observed one kid cutting off an inch on either end of the bean, resulting in his discard pile being as large as his pile of prepared beans. Unable to continue watching the waste, Mark intervened. “I told him, you’ve got to put the bean in your hand,” he says. He doesn’t know where the memory came from, but he suddenly told the student to snap off the woody end of the bean and then do the same to the other end. “Had I not stopped him, both piles would have been the same size,” Mark chuckles. His hands carried the memory of having done this before with his grandmother.

A variety of cultures and places shape Mark’s family: Cherokee; Norwegian; Black; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Texas. This blend provides a road map to why he gravitates toward certain things and flavors. “I love fermented things. Fish, pickled beets, sauerkraut . . . all that stuff,” he admits.

Jeffrey finds inspiration in a love of traditional ways of cooking. “If I’m at home scrolling on the internet, I’m probably watching a video from an Indigenous community in Mexico somewhere,” he shared with me. Keeping his cooking simple and clean allows the ingredients to be the star. He makes teas from foraged flowers. “It’s not just the process of eating or making it, it’s how it got to the table. It’s part of the story. We can’t separate ourselves as humans from our foodways,” he says.

He goes on to say that we are all connected to a foodway—geographically tied to somewhere. Opening people’s eyes back to who we are as humans through food inspires him.

Mark believes there’s an honesty in certain foods that we’re starting to lose because things are being engineered. Kids now see black seeds in watermelon and don’t want it because they’ve grown accustomed to seedless melons. His grandmother saved seeds from everything, as did Jeffrey’s mother.

Mark’s grandmother had sweet potatoes growing in the window, onions, and other things. He grew up believing they were just houseplants, but then those plants would disappear and show up in the yard somewhere. He realizes now this was food recycling.

When Jeffrey remembers his mother, he thinks of her hands. She always had a pile of seeds. Mark knew her and remembers her growing papaya and mangoes in Chandler, which wasn’t an easy growing environment. Jeffrey said she could eat an orange, dry the seeds, and grow an orange tree. Shrubs grew all over their yard.

When Mark prepares a meal, he doesn’t do it for glory or applause. He wants people to pay attention to what’s underneath the beauty and the flavors: that someone took time to shuck, peel, cut safely, and do something that he believes anyone would do just for sustenance or pleasure. “What makes a chef a chef? Is it going to culinary school, or is it someone who has a love for food? I just have a love for food,” he shares.

Preparing food is an act of transference for Jeffrey. His mother was an altarista. “I build an altar for Day of the Dead and all that stuff. I was taught that when you’re in the kitchen and you’re cooking, it’s just as sacred as an altar,” he tells me. Because of that sacredness, you don’t yell or shout in the kitchen. “How you move as a human through that masa, form the tortillas, and stir the pot, that energy is transferred into that thing,” he believes.

When he prepares a meal in his home or a bigger space, it truly is a transference of all he feels and what his ancestors left him. Diners may never know it, and they may never see him, but Jeffrey knows it’s there. The food is prepared in the spirit of, “It’s medicine, and may you enjoy it and have a good life.”

Mark has had a glimpse into Jeffrey’s culture and how the kitchen plays an integral part. He knows from experience that a Black kitchen is different. “There’s a matriarch in that house, and ain’t no other woman coming in and messing with her pots. Don’t come and mess with my pots!” he declares.

He will give you anything you need, but do not run through his kitchen. His experience comes through his grandma. If he violated her space, he felt like it was the equivalent of going through her intimate items. Jeffrey chimes in with, “Mexicans are like that too!” They share a laugh over their mutual experiences.

When Jeffrey’s mother passed away, the big question was who gets her comal. His family understood the significance of it. He has her cast-iron pans. Mark has his grandmother’s pot and a glass bowl. “If I were ever evicted on the spot, these are the things that would come with me. They are irreplaceable. I’m not squeamish about trying to keep the dead with me,” Mark adds.

Jeffrey would ask his mother how to make something or what was in a recipe. She didn’t talk a lot. She cooked and hummed, and the questions always annoyed her. She’d respond, “Ugh, don’t worry about it!” She was trained as a pastry chef and a cook. She could make anything using low-cost cuts of meat to feed eight kids.

Mark remembers his first Thanksgiving with Jeffrey’s family and being shocked that the potato salad wasn’t yellow or sweet and had dill pickles and olives in it. Also, it was white. “Oh my God! I never had anything like that,” he tells me.

Mark’s mom would try to make German potato salad and let the potatoes cook too long. Jeffrey and I shudder in sympathy as we relive memories of past potato salads gone wrong.

When asked what he would like others to know about his culinary culture, Mark would like people to be fearless in the kitchen. “Be adventurous. Try everything at least once. Let your mouth be the judge,” he advises. “No one should leave this earth and have flat-out said no to something they never had before. You don’t know what you might’ve been missing out on your entire life.”

Jeffrey would like people not to lose their connection to nature, plants, animals, wildlife, water, and air. “Take a look at health and wellness on a biological level and realize we’re losing clean water, clean air, clean plants, and other things.”

He also feels having a meal with someone shouldn’t be perceived as a task. It should be an experience. Part of that experience is knowing from beginning to end where that food source is. He encourages experimentation. Cultures are evolving things, moving into the contemporary. “If you stay grounded in the ancestral stories and ties to that culture, you’re just that much richer at the end,” Jeffrey shares.

Despite increasing food scarcity and rising grocery prices, Jeffrey feels he’s well-positioned to weather turmoil. “I told my partner we’re just going to eat more whole grains, and here’s what we’re going to do. It’s how my mother raised me. I make my own soups, my own broth. I have a freezer full of things I prepared in advance. I can go into the garden. I pull this and pull that.”

He cites a quote by Henry Kissinger to underscore his feelings on this topic: “Those who control the food and the energy control the world.” Although dealing with the modern economy is unavoidable, we shouldn’t let ourselves be controlled by it. There are other ways to eat healthy and clean. “Bone marrow used to be for poor people, now it’s like $45! Don’t buy into the hype,” he pleads. He encourages us to create our own stories and look toward our ancestors for inspiration.

Mark feels an important kitchen feature has been abandoned. Today’s kitchen islands have created a space where you’re facing your family while cooking. It’s an open invitation for everyone to be involved. “When you saw your mom cooking and her back was to you, she was in it too deep for you to go messing with her,” he shares.

Jeffrey prefers the coziness of a galley kitchen for the same reason. He wants to be focused on the task at hand when he is in his sacred space.

For Camp Naco’s gala dinner, Mark is excited to showcase Black food culture. He knows Buffalo Soldiers mostly came from the East, specifically the Southeast. He wonders what they brought with them. Did they find ways to grow collard greens? Did they dry meat to make pork rinds? “You just don’t abandon your diet when you move,” he says.

He contemplates the bounty of all the regions the Soldiers passed through. “After the job, what still gave you pleasure? What was the joy that touched your lips and went down to your tummy?”

He describes his thought process in approaching the challenge of developing a menu that honors Buffalo Soldiers. He won’t reveal the secrets of what’s on the menu, but his Cheshire Cat grin promises pleasant surprises.

The land inspires Jeffrey. When he visited Camp Naco earlier this year and saw how close it was to Douglas, he felt the connection to where and how he grew up. It’s fundamental to his migration and Borderlands story.

During his visit, he met Camp Naco board member David Lloyd and, through him, learned more about the Opata, the Sonoran Indigenous people of the area. Jeffrey appreciates how bountiful this place is, how rich it is culturally, and how it has been the intersection of these things over periods of time. “What a magnificent place to live in,” he shares. “I want folks to leave excited about what is in their front and backyard.”

The actions of enslaved people forced to leave their homes also inspire Mark. He knows okra is a fast-growing plant with lots of seeds. People braided seeds into their hair. “They didn’t know where they were going, but they knew they weren’t going to be hungry when they got there,” he says.

Jeffrey researched archives at the Smithsonian Institution about the diet of Buffalo Soldiers but didn’t find much. Both through imagination and references from people and families, along with influences from the Opata, Mexicans, and the cavalry, he feels one can start to piece together what life would have been like. They all had their own cornucopia from which to contribute something to the mix.

Depending on where he’s living, Mark’s favorite local ingredient changes. When he was in California, it was Gilroy garlic. Here in Arizona, it’s chile, which can be converted to hot sauce. He has a sauce for everything.

Jeffrey’s favorite ingredient is prickly pear. He uses it as both a botanical and a food item. For our gala dinner, Jeffrey revealed Mark is creating a special hot sauce for the tacos. He promises it will be beautiful. Jeffrey admits he himself probably has 12 different salsas at home.

A must-have kitchen tool for Mark is a cleaver-type knife. More importantly, he can’t imagine a kitchen without salt. “Like the old Black people used to say, ‘What you mean you don’t got no salt in this house?!’ We would buy salt every time we went to the store. It was bad luck not to have salt in your house,” he shares.

Jeffrey also has a favorite knife, which Mark borrowed for a while and eventually returned. His mother’s cast-iron skillet is also important to him. He uses it for everything. He could go camping with just those two things.

Responding to what people should know about Borderlands cuisine, Mark says the Borderlands isn’t really a line. To him, it’s a change in elevation, climate, and what grows here. He encourages those who see a geographic transition to stop, forage, or go somewhere to eat nearby—especially if it’s farm-to-table. It is also a place of family connection. Mark’s nephew lives in Naco, Sonora.

He observed a variety of transitions on his drive from Phoenix to Naco: the transitions, the topography, and the biodiversity changes. “Jeffrey has taught me there’s a lot out there to eat. It’s a salad bowl. You just gotta keep walking,” he states.

“Eat at as many mom-and-pop places and as local as you can get,” is Jeffrey’s recommendation for learning about Borderlands cuisine. Go to as many small festivals as possible to get local flavor. Spending time with the elders of a community can really help you understand the history of a culture. His experience is that they will give you stories about foodways that are being erased.

“Go to arboretums and preserves, jump into other cultures, don’t be afraid to act and ask questions. Show a willingness to learn,” he encourages.

He also recommends crossing the border. Jeffrey hasn’t been to Naco, Sonora, yet but admits he is very curious about it. He firmly believes that travel makes a difference. Each region, each neighborhood has its specialties.

Nearing the end of our interview, I asked both chefs to name four historic people they would prepare a meal for and what that meal would be.

Mark took my formulaic question and made it his own. His twist is that he would like to show someone how he can cook today. His grandfather loved biscuits baked very dark because he liked that burnt taste. Mark has learned how to perfectly get biscuits to that point.

His other great-grandfather turned Mark on to black-eyed peas. Mark would like to show him he can make them better than him. He would also love to cook for a food celebrity and strip away the pretentiousness.

Pati Jinich, because they would never stop talking about the Borderlands, food, immigration, culture, and Mexico; Dolly Parton, because she’s one of the kindest people he’s ever encountered; activist Dolores Huerta; and writer James Baldwin would be seated at Jeffrey’s table. He wouldn’t want to impress them with the food but would look forward to the conversation.

Mark, Jeffrey, and the entire Naco Heritage Alliance team look forward to gathering with our guests around the table, under the stars at historic Camp Naco, for what promises to be a truly memorable evening.