Coming Home to Eat: the Politics and Pleasures of Local Foods. . - Changing Diets and Remarking Food Systems - book review

Whole Earth,  Spring, 2002  

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Gary Paul Nabhan 2002; 330 pp. $24.95 Norton

In the face of a globalized food economy, neutraceuticals, transgenic foods, and the disconnect between our meals and their sources, says the author, "we have become a nation of food worriers more than food savorers." Rather than write a jeremiad bewailing this condition, he sets out on a "modest experiment": to live for a year mostly on native flora and fauna he can raise or gather within 250 miles of his Arizona home.

His experiment is more an extended sacrament than a test to be passed. Some of his efforts succeed beyond expectations; some fail in hilarious fiascoes. Along the way, he connects with native people who carry on traditions around desert foods to be found in no supermarkets--and reintroduces some other native people to their own ancestors' foodstuffs. He's attentive to the connection between food choices, global food issues, and threats to cultural and biological diversity, but his final word is both more simple and more profound: "I love the flavor of where I live, and all the plants and creatures I live with." --MKS

""Close your eyes," I told the uninitiated who came out to join us. "Imagine that someone put a delicate vegetable the size of a marble into your mouth. You could not put your finger on it exactly, but its taste reminded you of asparagus tips, artichoke hearts, and capers. You tasted an initial lemony burst as your teeth and tongue crushed its tenderness, followed by a lingering smokiness of mesquite, perhaps because the vegetable had been steamed over mesquite coals in a horno, or a roasting pit. You open your eyes and see a bowlful of the vegetable you had savored, spines and all, sitting menacingly on the table before you."

I was describing cholla cactus flower buds--a little-known delicacy of my Tohono O'odham neighbors and their Akimel O'odham kin in the Phoenix area.

"The real bottleneck to the revival of native, locally grown food is a cultural--or more precisely, a spiritual--dilemma. If we no longer believe that the earth is sacred, or that we are blessed by the bounty around us, or that we have a caretaking responsibility given to us by the Creator--Yahweh, Earth Maker, Gaia, Tata Dios, Cave Bear, Raven, or whatever you care to call him or her--then it does not really matter to most folks how much ecological and cultural damage is done by the way we eat.... Until we stop craving to be somewhere else and someone else other than animals whose very cells are constituted from the place on earth we love most, then there is little reason to care about the fate of native foods, family farms, or healthy landscapes and communities.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group