Amazon.com
Does it matter where our food comes from? Do we, our communities, and the planet do better if we choose food grown by local sources we trust? Exploring these and other questions of dietary and spiritual subsistence, Gary Paul Nabhan's Coming Home to Eat presents a compelling case for eating from our "foodshed."
Nabhan, a subsistence hunter, ethnobiologist, and activist devoted to recovering lost food traditions, gave himself a task: to spend a year trying to eat foods grown, fished, or gathered within 250 miles of his Arizona home. His book, both personal document and political screed, details this experiment from the moment Nabhan purges his kitchen of canned and other processed foods ("If this year could resolve anything for me, perhaps it would rid me of the desire to ever again buy any packaged food that boasted of its homemade flavor....") to a final food-gathering pilgrimage. That journey underscores Nabhan's conviction that we have too easily believed "the vacuous nutritional promises of the industrialized food that has sold our health down the river." In fact, the book encompasses an ongoing pilgrimage, during which Nabhan explores, for example, the near loss of saguaro cactus fruit as a dietary staple due to saguaro's use for "local color" in shopping malls, golf courses, and retirement centers. Readers, converted, skeptical, or just curious, will find Nabhan's book a source of many simple and stirring truths. "Until we stop craving to be somewhere else and someone else other than the animals whose very cells are constituted from the place on earth we love the most," he writes, "then there is little reason to care about the fate of native foods, family farms, or healthy landscapes and communities." But care we must, as the book shows so enlighteningly. --Arthur Boehm
From Publishers Weekly
In this intriguing yet unsatisfying volume, the author chronicles a year of striving for a diet consisting of 90% native flora and fauna, found within 250 miles of his Arizona home. Nabhan (Cultures of Habitat) packs the book with telling local detail; the saguaro cactus, for example, is being cleared from the Sonoran Desert at a rate of 40 acres per day. An ethnobotanist with an interest in seed preservation and director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University, Nabhan is remarkably knowledgeable about plant species and the traditions of local tribes; indeed, his nature writings and conservation activism have won him a MacArthur award. But Nabhan's tone is so phlegmatic that his accounts have little emotional impact. (After an unsettling attempt to slaughter some turkeys he had raised, an effort that left him splattered with blood, he describes himself as "a little shook up.") His reactions become predictable (and preachy): he tastes a native food, recounts its history and waxes na‹ve about how wonderful it is ("If a native food tasted this good, why did it ever fall out of favor?"). His project sometimes seems doctrinaire; he doesn't admit to ever craving an Oreo or tasting a local food that's not to his liking. Nabhan's book is informative, but doesn't leave a distinct flavor in the reader's mouth. 15 illus. and one map not seen by PW. (Nov.)Forecast: As an upbeat counterpart to Eric Schlosser's recent Fast Food Nation, this book may attract some attention. An author tour in areas where devotion to "local foods" is prevalent (Tucson, Phoenix, Portland, Bay Area) should also help.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
One of the great Russian writers of the 20th century, Babel (1894-1941) was arrested in 1939 and later executed by Stalin's regime. In 1954, his work was largely republished, but much of his correspondence, drafts, and manuscripts was confiscated when he was arrested and has never resurfaced. Now, for the first time, all of Babel's surviving work has been assembled into one volume. Readers new to Babel will discover his "Red Cavalry" stories, plays, diaries, screenplays, and short stories. In addition to an introduction by Cynthia Ozick, the book is graced with an excellent preface and afterword by Babel's daughter, who also edited the volume. She provides recently uncovered information about her father's arrest and execution as well as personal remembrances. With the publication of this volume of Babel's work, it is hoped that a full-scale biography will follow. Essential for literature collections.- Ron Ratliff, Kansas State Univ., Manhattan Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Nabhan explores how food, place, and culture are connected to ecological, physical, and spiritual well-being. An eloquent and trailblazing writer and the recipient of a MacArthur genius award, he sought to deepen his knowledge of native plants and traditional Native American cuisine by trying to eat strictly within the "foodshed" surrounding his southern Arizona home. A foodshed, Nabhan explains, is an area that can provide people with all the fresh wild and cultivated plants and animals they need for a healthy and delicious diet. Nabhan relates his often hilarious, always fascinating attempts at growing his own food, raising turkeys, foraging in the desert, and sharing the fruits of his labors, while simultaneously presenting a harrowing history of the rise of corporate high-tech agriculture and its genetically engineered crops, seed monopoly, and global distribution of processed and fast food. Most Americans have no idea where their food comes from, how it's grown, handled, or shipped, but many are starting to wonder, as Nabhan does, what our society has sacrificed for the sake of convenience. Warmhearted, innovative, and respectful of life, Nabhan inspires readers to think twice about corporate domination of the food supply and the old adage You Are What You Eat. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Stanley Crawford, author of A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm
A practical primer on how to 'eat locally, think globally'—and enjoy it more—wherever you are.
William Kittredge, author of The Nature of Generosity
Nabhan is a brilliant scientist and remarkably successful social activist....His stories are often funny and always invaluable.
David Mas Masumoto, author of Epitaph for a Peach
[Nabhan] writes with a passion for those of us who still see and trust the wild in our land.
Alice Waters, chef/owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California
Nabhan makes us understand how finding and eating local foods connects us deeply and sensually with where we are.
Rick Bayless, author of Mexico: One Plate at a Time
He offers an elegant, inspired and eloquently detailed account of becoming a 'direct participant' in the food that sustains him.
Jim Harrison, author of The Beast God Forgot to Invent
[A] profound and engaging book, a passionate call to us to re-think our food industry.
Peter Hoffman, chef/owner of Savoy Restaurant in New York City
Nabhan brings the rare combination of the sensual and the intellectual to his writing about food....a soul food treatise for our time.
Los Angeles Times, Merle Rubin, 19 November 2001
[E]loquent, richly evocative... fascinating, enlightening and moving.
Book Description
A celebration of food and culture with a social conscience, in the tradition of M. F. K. Fischer and Frances Moore Lappé. We really are what we eat. Eating close to home is not just a matter of convenience—it is an act of deep cultural, emotional, and environmental significance. Gary Nabhan's experience with food permeates his life as a third-generation Lebanese American (with Irish and Lithuanian mixed in), as an avid gardener and subsistence hunter, as an ethnobotanist preserving seed diversity, and as an activist devoted to recovering native food traditions to promote the health of Native Americans in the Southwest. To rediscover what it might mean to "think globally, eat locally," he spent a year trying to eat only foods grown, fished, or caught within two hundred miles of his home—with surprising results. In Coming Home to Eat, Nabhan draws these experiences together in a book that is a culmination of his life's work—and a vibrant portrait of the essential human relation to the foods that truly nourish us, affirming our bonds to family, community, landscape, and season. 15 n/w illustrations, 1 map.
About the Author
Gary Paul Nabhan, prize-winning author and naturalist, lives in Flagstaff. He is the director of conservation biology at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and cofounder of Native Seeds/SEARCH.
Home
