This week on Arizona Illustrated Baker Don Guerra started in his garage and now he's a James Beard Award winner.

Bakers, they all share a certain spirit.

They're very nurturing people.

They're a patient people because they know the bread is not always so predictable.

The monsoon rains mean mushrooms in the mountains.

It's something really amazing.

And the fact that it only pops up in a short time of the year and disappears again it's just a really magical thing to be the person that captured it in that small time that it was.

And how wastewater testing became a global public health tool.

Science is very seductive.

Once you start getting data and applying it to solving a problem, it's very, very exciting.

Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrator.

And I'm Tom MacNamara, and thanks for joining us from here at the Broadway Village.

This plaza designed by the Swiss born architect Jose Reyes Joslah in the Spanish Mission Revival style and finished back in 1939, making this the first suburban shopping center in the state of Arizona Tucson.

And it could come here for groceries, gas, clothes and more.

Now over 80 years later it still serves pretty much the same function.

One of the current tenants is Barrio Bread and you can usually find a line outside before 9 a.m. but it isn't just Tucson that's taken notice of the baker Don Guerra's Bread.

This year he won the prestigious James Beard Award for outstanding Dean Baker Arizona illustrated profile Don back in 2015 when he was still waking up before sunrise and making bread in his garage long before the sun rises.

This garage comes to life the oven clicks on flour flies and one baker gets to work bakers.

They all share a certain spirit.

They're very nurturing people.

They're a patient people because they know bread is not always so predictable.

Really baking is a kind of a mystery.

I mean, you can be really good at what you do, but I don't think anyone says that they're fully in control of their process.

You know, we want to just nurture the bread along and hopefully we get to where we want to be in the end.

But the whole thing is, we're just hoping it works out.

It's just a science, a daily science experiment.

As the baker behind Tucson's Barrio Bread, Don Guerra, does a lot of experimenting It's 4 a.m. and he'll make almost 200 loaves of bread by midday.

As he bakes the bread.

Sea shaped the night before.

He's also mixing new dough measuring and shaping the next batch and putting his mark on every last piece that's the Baker signature on the bread and scoring it properly with a razor.

And then that function is to get the bread to expand it you kind of know ahead of time the loaf I want to produce.

So just like an artist will gather paints and blend them, I do this same thing with my flowers.

The minute I mix the leaves, a nerdy ingredients flour, water, salt with a form of lemon, in this case to live.

And then while these it becomes a live.

So I get these ingredients to dance Guerra mixes art and science and his approach to making bread.

He starts by building a habitat for yeast and bacteria.

Called a starter.

Basically, it's just a flour water mixture, just taking flour and water, mixing it together.

And within 48 hours you can see life while decent bacteria jump in that flour water mixture, take up residence, and then they start a fermentation cycle through fermentation, through the Wild East, consuming the starches.

They're in the flour, they have byproducts, and those are carbon dioxide and alcohol.

The carbon dioxide helps the bread rise and the yeast and bacteria give it flavor.

It's a process Gaara has been studying for 25 years.

Well, started when I moved to Flagstaff, I was 20 years old.

I moved up there after leaving Tucson and just to try something new for I think it was my second day, second day in Flagstaff, I met someone and they asked me if I needed a job and I said, absolutely, I just got in town.

I would love that.

And he was a baker in a bakery, a small little bread bakery, and he asked me if I want to work the night crew.

I went in, I volunteered one night and just fell in love with it.

Jarrah quickly worked his way up to running his own bakeries, but quit when his workload began to take a toll on him and his family.

He reinvented himself as a teacher and taught physical education in the Tucson Unified School District for almost a decade before the bread pulled him back.

I just knew I needed to get back to it, and once I did, it just felt like home.

I always feel that if there's that passion, if there's that drive, there is excitement, enthusiasm, and you make a leap of faith and you take a calculated risk that things will work out.

That leap of faith turned Guerra into what he calls a community support and Baker.

He doesn't sell through restaurants or stores.

People order his bread online and pick it up in person or they simply walk off and say, Hello, I got it.

I want to have that personal touch with my business.

I want to know them.

I want to know who's eating my bread.

And I want them to see me as more than just someone in the bakery making a product.

Guerra also wants to connect people from the local farmers who supply him with wheat to bread bakers and enthusiasts all over the world.

With social media nowadays, I can connect with so many people around the world.

There's other people out there as crazy as I am, doing their thing, baking their bread.

All right, Jack, which kind of bread would you like today?

This one right in front run.

Do it.

All right.

OK, I want everyone to enjoy good bread.

I want everyone to participate in the whole process and to come together to celebrate.

It's very rewarding for me.

When I can create community through bread.

It's taken people from fragmented communities to really wanting to become part of a tribe and to belong and support something that's bigger than just one person.

You have a great day, a good week to my sunset on.

Most days, every loaf is gone.

And Guerra begins his cycle anew.

I do love to try to get better and better and better with these little increments.

Every single day.

And that's a challenge for me.

And that's where that's where the beauty lies, though, is just having these successes, little successes, too, every day.

And trying to get it improve your process.

I want to look at it and see that all of the work I've invested from 24 hours previous has paid off in that final loaf.

So it's really that dot, dot, dot moment where I get a foot in the oven and it comes out some baguettes here and you get to see your work, you get to see what you what you put into it.

And hopefully that's a lot of love, a lot of care and a lot of skill.

When you look back, what are your thoughts about those days?

Those are very formative days.

I mean, I could not have had a success, have had without those seven difficult years in my garage, working alone and making bread and really thinking about my future and where I wanted to go.

How has life been different since that terrific James Beard Award?

What's been exciting times for me?

The community, everyone rallying behind the James Beard Award here in Tucson.

I'm just really invigorated motivated.

And I just have a lot of courage right now because I do have a support from community.

Southern Arizona is one of the only places in the world with a monsoonal weather pattern that brings much needed rain to desert plants, animals and people during the hot summer months.

But our cooler sky islands also benefit from the rain this time of year.

The added moisture spawns diverse and prolific fungi population.

This is monsoon mushrooms here we are on top of Mount Lemmon, and any day that even if we weren't to find one single mushroom, any time you spent a day in the woods, you've already won My name is Julia Bishop Beauty and I was a reporter for 25 years down here at the border and now my major passion is mushrooming.

I've joined a group and we hold mushroom growing classes and we have mushroom hunts.

We look for mushroom treasure, right?

Which is what we're doing here today.

What if I open it?

It's still brown all the way through.

Exactly.

It's just incredible.

You're out here in the forest and you suddenly seeing bright orange is bright reds, blues, whites, purples, any color?

Bright yellow.

So it's something really amazing.

And the fact that it only pops up in a short time of the year, and disappears again, it's just a really magical thing to be the person that captured it in that small time that it was there.

My name is Niles Bauer, and I run the Mushroom Club here in Tucson.

We're in Mount Lemmon in Tucson, Arizona, because this is probably the densest mushroom population after the monsoons of any place in the world or of any known place in the world, because we have the monsoons and because the monsoons are finite and fairly short, the mushrooms have to emerge during the monsoon or soon afterwards Hi, my name is Denver, and I'm a mushroom hunter.

I just really have a hobby and enjoyment to come out here to the mountains during the rainy season and find all the delicious medicinal, edible mushrooms that I can.

I would say solidly, I've been doing it for about four to five years, and it started as Chances.

I got a book for Christmas that was a mushroom ID guide, so it kind of started there.

But it really the passion was ignited when I came up here to Mt.

Lemon and found garden under macaques, big, beautiful red mushrooms growing on the trees.

And that just really started a passion for me to come up here and see what else I can find year after year.

Any time you say the word mushroom all you hear people talk, oh, trippy mushrooms, this and that.

But it's really a sad state of affairs because most Americans most Westerners don't have a relationship with mushrooms.

And whereas most other countries do, most any other countries, you know, they really love mushroom hunting.

They love gourmet mushrooms.

And in America, unfortunately, we only know of two or three varieties, really, when there's thousands and thousands of varieties that could be being enjoyed.

You just got to get out there and find them, start cultivating them.

So over here you see some nice poly pores.

Not positive on the idea of them.

Probably not hard to figure out what they are, but these are very common up here on Mount Lemmon.

You'll find them all over the place from probably 6500 feet on up This is the shaggy mane mushroom.

It's a choice.

Edible Mushroom.

And one of the nice things about it is it doesn't have a lot of lookalikes so when you're going along you can find it, you can identify it.

And you know, you found mushroom treasure because it's delicious.

Your day has just paid off one of the best known and safest of all wild mushrooms.

The flavor is very delicate, but the texture is marvelous.

Not slimy as in okra, but succulent as an octopus.

I actually don't like eating mushrooms, but I'm just fascinated by the legitimate science behind them.

My background is in engineering, but I've never pursued that.

I always went for my passion.

I guess mushrooms are essential to a forest.

There essential to any store system itself.

And if you look over there, you can see mushrooms growing on this side of this dead log.

What they're doing is recycling the nutrients from the tree itself back into the system so you can get uptake into living organisms, plants, animals, that fungi itself gets gets reused and recycled by fungi.

Without that, this whole system would just break down.

Everything would just fall apart.

I don't think we choose who we fall in love with.

Right.

And I didn't really choose to fall in love with mushrooms.

And today they appeared.

It happened, I fell in love.

And then after that, I can identify logical reasons.

What like such as?

You know, they have incredibly huge medicinal properties or they have chemical warfare between each other and make little chemicals or they support all life on the planet.

Right?

So I can use all these logical reasons, but basically I just fell in love.

It just really depends what mushrooms you're looking for.

Some mushrooms are going to be looking up in the trees.

Some mushrooms are going to be looking on the ground.

Some going to be looking on stumps.

So if you know what you're looking for, you know, specific areas to check, I personally am looking for anything and everything.

So I'm looking at everywhere.

There's something about being outside and being engaged in nature.

And this is allows you to do it without any effort.

If you've got a passion for plants and you go out into nature to identify plants or to look for plants or go birding or you're engaged and there's no effort and the same goes for mushroom collecting and mushroom.

I d I could study them for the rest of my life and not learn everything there is to know about mushrooms.

They continually surprise and delight when COVID19 began to appear in North America.

Ian Pepper, an environmental microbiologist with the University of Arizona, had a big idea.

What if he could use wastewater to track the spread of the virus in communities around the country?

Now, Pepper had experience tracking viruses this way.

And as COVID19 spread in more and more communities around the United States, he realized that his work could help to fill an important gap in public health officials data.

This is Poop Doesn't Lie.

Produced by landmark stories my first living memory is crawling in between vegetable rows of my father's garden I've always kind of played in the dirt.

My theory is that's why I think I have good immunity because soil will give you that rather than sterilizing everything around you.

Doing any spiked samples today.

The day after the fall semester started, we got our first positive we knew we'd get a positive at some point, but once we got a positive, it was like Whoa, no.

What do we do?

Science is very seductive.

Once you start getting data and applying it to solving a problem, it's very, very exciting.

Good science, as often happens from good scientists, but with a stroke of luck.

And that has happened throughout my career.

If you would ask me in January of 20, 20 what I was going to do that year, how could I possibly have predicted what I was going to end up doing?

Some colleges struggled to contain the spread of corona virus.

Others say they have stopped outbreaks before they started.

Ian Pepper and his team started researching the presence of Corona virus in wastewater and how it can show community spread.

It can be used to determine if COVID19 is present in a community.

Even if people are asymptomatic, viruses can survive up to three days in wastewater and we will be attempting to isolate light virus.

But no one knows the answer to that question at this point in time.

What we're out here doing today is collecting sewage samples to get a general idea of how much COVID is out there in the community right now.

Everybody sheds waste, everybody goes number two, everybody secrete it as they are infected when it's still in their flow.

And turn it all the way around the opposite way.

It's a way for us to test without having them take a test.

Essentially, we can do that in the lab without the individuals there that gives us and the community a rough idea of how many individuals out there or in that dorm have COVID when it first started, none of us really knew a lot.

And Dr. Pepper came forward and gave me the opportunity, and it's worked out wonderfully Point three, point two, we take a sample of sewage.

We take it on ice back to the lab there at the lab.

We will process the sample and identify the strain uncovered in the samples.

And from there we know the concentration and they can use that data to determine essentially how much COVID is in those areas.

And severe point zero.

Point four.

Yes, that'll work.

Did you Wastewater based epidemiology is a very young discipline so we've learned tremendous amounts during this first year.

In a nutshell, poop doesn't lie poop can be your friend and poop can tell you a lot about yourself and about your community.

I know why you got interested in wastewater based epidemiology.

Why?

Because they have the migrant farm workers.

They have elderly people and a military base there, which brings in people from all over the world.

And we ended up for at least a couple of the surge as being really the hot spot in the nation, if not the world.

We have so much cross-border traffic, so different variants come in health wise.

We were impacted you missed a pretty unique town.

We're on the border of both of Mexico and California, and we're on the Colorado River.

So we're a heavily agricultural community a lot of the ag industry is about two thirds of the economy.

Just to give some perspective, there's about 1500 refrigerated semi trucks a day that roll out of here with fresh produce.

So it's a major, major industry if you're eating a salad that has led to spinach, kale, broccoli, celery, any of that kind of stuff, it most likely came from Yuma.

It has been nearly six weeks since production resumed in most meatpacking plants.

The agriculture industry in part but we really didn't want to have happen as the season started up again was to have what happened in the meatpacking industry.

More than 27,000 workers have become infected and 99 have died we knew about the work that Dr. Pepper was doing in Tucson with the wastewater based epidemiology.

We worked closely with him to set that kind of system up here in Yuma.

What we're currently doing in Yuma is what we call hot zone monitoring we divide Yuma up into regions and within each region we identify buildings of high risk schools retirement homes, nursing homes.

So then if you get a positive hit in a given region, then you would go and sample the buildings of high risk the back is a date packing facility that manages our workforce based on the seasonality of the fruit.

Our year round crew is about 250 people.

But at the height of our season, which is right after harvest, we've hired as much as 600 people to help us during that period of time.

COVID was a challenge and it took everyone by surprise.

We have some people that have been part of the industry for over 20 years and they've been part of the industry for so long that we kind of all know each other you know, methods of communication keep me up on my face.

But the reality is that we spend more time with each other than with our family.

So how do we help each other and keep each other safe?

How do we know if people are getting sick as an answer?

Can you?

Paul Brayley and his team were thinking about bringing this project to town and they reached out to the community and ask for volunteers so we decided that it was worth being able to have that piece of information, which is if somebody's sick here or not, and am I putting others at risk?

So we jumped on it right away.

We test and we test and we test and sure enough, we find four people that tested positive for COVID.

All four of them were asymptomatic, the workforce was scared and we are trying to work through all of this knowing the impact that that could have had in the production would have been massive.

That was a scary time, but we were able to react quickly and by keeping track of everyone's symptoms after that, I think we created something that could have been really bad we're in this together, and the last year with the pandemic certainly proved that, that we are a family and that we care for each other nobody had heard of wastewater based epidemiology and then this pandemic hit.

Ian Pepper is the director and Ian was drawn into the national and international limelight and he stepped up to the task of testing the voice.

In my mind, he was an obscure scientist doing his thing and also and this became a great tool.

Erika, how's it going?

He was the right person at the right time.

How many samples he got today?

Yeah, we could have never done this without you.

You can expand the principles of testing for Corona virus to any other infectious agent L.A. Sky's the limit.

Wastewater monitoring is here to stay the legacy for the students.

That's your legacy.

So about to be processed right now, but it's all about the students.

So what is your control?

Unfortunately, this experiment isn't testing the same thing.

We were trying a different variables time, so to see the actual watching them mature, watching them grow as the greatest satisfaction I've ever had.

Or possibly an adverse effect, i'm pretty sure a few years from now, you're going to have students graduating in wastewater based epidemiology so interestingly of the 44 years at the university of arizona perhaps made busiest and at the same time most successful year because we merely saved some lives.

Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you next week.