"Food is culture," proclaim the posters promoting the Santa Fe Farmers Market. "Experience Northern New Mexico."

Since all vendors at the Santa Fe Farmers Market must come from the 15 Northern New Mexico counties, the food sold there couldn't be any more local unless it grew in your own backyard. But some of the most popular and exotic peppers and squashes sold in Santa Fe are sourced from seeds that traveled thousands of miles from their European homes to start a new life in our high desert clime.

This exchange of seeds, people and food from one part of the world to another — and how that movement has affected and does affect the culture of both the immigrant and the host country — is what award-winning local food writer and cookbook author Deborah Madison will address Monday evening when she speaks about food culture and globalization as part of the Santa Fe Art Institute's "Outsider: Tourism, Migration and Exile" lecture series.

Madison, a longtime supporter of farmers markets around the country, acknowledges that she, too, brings home seeds whenever she travels.

In 1979, when she was preparing to open Greens, the famed San Francisco restaurant that kick-started Americans' interest in vegetarian food and formed the cornerstone of her career, she went to Paris and bought seeds at Vilmorin, a seed producer and distributor. She planted them at Green Gulch Farm in Sausalito, Calif., which provided much of the produce for the restaurant.

"The restaurant opened with us serving all kinds of things that were new at that time," Madison says, "such as arugula, borage blossoms, Marvel of the Four Seasons and tons of other lettuces ... foods that we now take for granted, that are part of our menu, but at the time were quite (unusual and) exciting."

Opening the restaurant, it was important for her to have access to a wide range of ethnic foods and recipes, Madison says, because it was other cultures — French, Italian, Greek, Irish, Asian, Middle Eastern — that best knew how to prepare vegetables.

Today, she says, "we are pretty facile with ethnic foods." Whether it's an authentic Greek dish in a restaurant in New York City or a fast food version of it that can be found anywhere in the United States, "we can cook them, we can eat them, we can pronounce them. They are part of our daily menu."

But that wasn't always so.

It took World War I, the Great Depression and World War II, Madison says, for the larger American culture — "those who had been here longer" — to accept newer immigrants' food ways. But even then, the vegetables, beans and grains that made up the bulk of the newcomers' diets weren't embraced because they were healthy or tasted good, but because they were thrifty — a way to stretch food supplies and dollars in hard times.

"Before WWI," Madison says, "there was criticism leveled at Italians because they ate too many vegetables. ... In fact, spaghetti and meatballs is an invented dish because social workers at that time wanted Italians to eat more meat instead of all those vegetables."

The integration of foods from the Hispanic world into the North American diet has gone more smoothly, Madison notes, partially because "we are a different culture now, and we like those flavors."

But, she cautions, the influence of culture on food preferences cuts both ways, affecting the immigrant as much as the host.

About six or seven years ago, she says, a crew of brothers newly arrived from Mexico with their families helped renovate her home in Galisteo. Every day, she says, they would plug in the microwave at lunchtime and heat up a meal of tamales, enchiladas, beans and other things their wives had made for them.

"On Fridays," she says, "they would take the scrap wood, build a little fire, put a harrowing disc on top and make a delicious lunch of chiles and chicken and onions and so forth and throw the tortillas on the coals."

Recently, some members of the crew returned to do additional work on her home. This time, Madison says, "their lunches were a Coke, a sandwich, a candy bar ... a piece of fruit, maybe. It was very different."

People who work in the health field, Madison notes, "say that Mexicans arrive basically fit and lean and, within a year, begin to show the signs of dietary ravages."

This "collision of cultures" is "the kind of dynamic that fascinates us," says Diane Karp, executive director of the Santa Fe Art Institute. The goal of SFAI's lecture series — which is bringing in speakers as diverse as a musicologist, a Supreme Court justice and a paper maker — is to explore "how the movement of human beings enriches and transforms culture," she says. Madison's contribution will address "how culinary culture moves with these groups."

What Madison says she found most interesting as she was doing the research for her talk is how recent our open-mindedness about the foods of others actually is. We may not think twice about cooking Italian or going out for Mexican or Thai food — but that wasn't always so. "It was a very hard-won battle in a way," she says, "one that came hand-in-hand with our maturing as a people and as a nation."

That's something to think about the next time you reach for a bag of fresh shisito or padrón peppers at the Santa Fe Farmers Market.

THE SKINNY ON FOOD

What: Deborah Madison talks about food, culture and migration as part of the Santa Fe Art Institute's 2008 curated lecture series

When: 6 p.m. Monday

Where: Tipton Hall at the College of Santa Fe, 1600 St. Michael's Drive

Price: $5 for the general public; $2.50 for students, seniors and SFAI members

For more information: Call 424-5050 or log onto www.sfai.org