Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #272670 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From 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 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

Customer Reviews

Sonoran Thoreau
Gary Paul Nabham has really put together a beautiful and inspiring apologia for the emerging local, cultural, slow food philosophy. Like a simmering stew, the book bubbles over with diveristy, as the author runs in and out of the poetic, historical, cultural and academic. Whereas others reviewers have found fault with the seemingly "unfocused" nature of the book, I was happily entertained. From cover to cover, the subject matter remains fresh and suprising. Some of the foods you can expect to encounter include boiled venison, baked rabbit, grilled corvina, tomatillo consommes, squash souffles, tepary bean burritos wrapped in mesquite tortillas, freshly picked and lightly steamed lamb quarters, purslane, tansy mustards, cress, prickly pear punch, mistletoe and Mormon tea. You will encounter organpipe cactus jam, stewed pumpkin, pinole, creosote bush salve, jojoba oil, damiana tea and pit roasted agaves - or "tatemada" - an ancient tradition the author and some local Indians revived, among others. Although the book runs thin on recipes (there are none), it liberally bastes philosophy: "If food is the sumptuous sea of energy we dive into and swim through every day, I have lived but one brief moment leaping like a flying fish and catching a glimmering glimpse of that sea roiling all around us. And then just as quickly, I splashed back beneath its surface, to be overmore immersed in what effortlessly buoys us up." When Nabham is not introducing you old, now by-and-large forgotten foods and the cultures they come from, he is reminding you of the pitfalls of the emerging global marketplace: for example, "the average American brings home nearly 3,300 pounds of foodstuffs each year for his or her consumption...much of it never eaten. It is nearly two-and-a-half time the weight of what most of our contempories in other regions of the world consume, and much of it comes from their farmlands." He also reminds us that, with each passing season, we are losing more top soil, more biodiversity, and more of the foods that help us keep us strong and healthy. A very important book that is also a pleasure to read. On a scale of deliciousness, I give it a peach cobbler.

Unfocused
This book wasn't quite what I expected. Nabhan promises a sensual tale of a year with local foods and instead wanders around from tales of anti-WTO battles in Seattle to genetically engineered crops in Illinois to monarch butterflies in Mexico. While I assume this is designed to show us the interconnectivity of man to all species, it makes for a seriously unfocused narrative. While the sections of the book are nominally divided by seasons, it's hard to find a thread that weaves it's way all the way through this crazy quilt of a book. It's also light on sensuality, although perhaps I was subconsciously envisioning tales of eating local foods off the smooth, supple thighs of young Papago women. I kept wanting him to cut loose in the narrative, break some rules, slash some tires, shotgun some processed food displays instead of meekly writing letters to Congressmen and the FDA. Have you ever seen what a 12-guage shell can do to a nice display of Hostess products?

Although a bit restrained, Nabhan and his crew fight many admirable battles and he has some insights on the raping of the seas by multi-national seafood harvesters and the danger of genetically engineered crops. He believes that we can heal ourselves and the planet by disengaging from the 99 cent value meal and reconnecting with the earth and its creatures. That's assuming the 280 million people now crowding the country are even remotely interested in such a proposition, and something tells me they are not. Nor is this book likely to ignite their hidden passions for local foods.

Important Insights
Nabham delivers important insights on the health our nation's food supply. Combining hard facts with eloquent personal narrative and sensual descriptions, he creates a captivating text that is accessible to all readers.

Nabham brings forth some very salient (and often frightening) points about the destruction of arable farm lands, the uncertainty of genetically engineered seed stocks, the loss of native biodiversity, and the damaging effects of a modern diet, among other topics.

I recommend the book highly and ask the author to follow up with a very specific series of guidelines for readers who want to take steps to eat locally and improve our nation's agricultural sustainability.