Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods [Paperback]

Gary Paul Nabhan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2002

"Amazing and eloquent....Nabhan makes us understand how finding and eating local foods connects us deeply and sensually."—Alice Waters, Chez Panisse

Issuing a "profound and engaging...passionate call to us to re-think our food industry" (Jim Harrison, author of The Raw and the Cooked), Gary Paul Nabhan reminds us that eating close to home is not just a matter of convenience—it is an act of deep cultural and environmental significance. Embodying "a perspective...at once ecological, economic, humanistic, and spiritual" (Los Angeles Times), Nabhan has dedicated his life to raising awareness about food—as an avid gardener, as an ethnobotanist preserving seed diversity, and as an activist devoted to recovering native food traditions in the Southwest. This "inspired and eloquently detailed account" (Rick Bayless, Chefs Collaborative) tells of his year-long mission to eat only foods grown, fished, or gathered within two hundred miles of his home. "A good book for gardeners to read this winter" (The New York Times), Nabhan's work "weav[es] together the traditions of Thoreau and M. F. K. Fisher [in] a soul food treatise for our time" (Peter Hoffman, Chefs Collaborative).

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Printing edition (November 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393323749
• ISBN-13: 978-0393323740
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #887,508 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Writer, professor, and conservationist Gary Paul Nabhan is the director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University. Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing, a Western States Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, Nabhan is author of Coming Home to Eat, The Forgotten Pollinators, and Why Some Like it Hot, among other books.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great topic--but why so much Spam?, August 15, 2007

By 

Melissa (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods (Paperback)

I completely honor the impulse behind this book and believe in the importance of eating local. I also applaud Nabhan for thinking and writing about these issues before so many others (yet I'm also happy for the influx of recent local eating books and articles from Pollan, Kingsolver, McKibben, Alisa Smith & JB Mackinnon, and the blog by "No Impact Man"). Some scenes are powerful: eating ripe peaches, the short Thanksgiving section, reconnecting with family. The history and science sections are good too.

What surprised me, though, is that it seemed like throughout much of the book, Nabhan was in his Blazer, on a plane, or somewhere nowhere near home. Although he carried his fried grasshoppers and tortillas with him, I was longing to read more about the actual practices of growing and preparing local food (there is, however, plenty on roadkill). What surprised me more: the continual references to Spam, especially in relation to the sunset:

"As a Spam-colored sunset blanketed the western sky, the sweat on my back chilled" (40).
"At dusk they [mechanized dairy farms] took on a sickly greenish cast, the color of modly Spam" (158).
". . . each afternoon until the sun went down, gaudy as a thin slice of Spam" (276).

Why so much Spam? He buys a can of Spam in another odd section of the book where he spends $50 on a strange combination of food for a brunch that he and his partner, Laurie, don't eat. In another section, he throws a bunch of food in the compost bin because it uses cactuses in the advertising but doesn't contain cactus juice. I was puzzled by the waste. Why not eat the food and not buy it again? (Or in the supermarket venture, why not buy foods suitable for a decent brunch?)

In terms of the time in the Blazer and the time away from home, I understand that Nabhan's work and activism demand travel--and sometimes you see "home" more clearly when you're away from it. But I can't think of any reason for all the Spam.

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sonoran Thoreau, February 20, 2003

By 

J.W.K (Nagano, Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods (Paperback)

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.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Life tastes good.", January 21, 2002

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods (Hardcover)

"Live in each season as it passes," Thoreau said, "breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each" (p. 95). This is also the simple premise of Gary Paul Nabhan's book. Nabhan is an ethnobioligist, the Director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University, and the co-founder of Native Seeds/Search in Tucson, Arizona. COMING HOME TO EAT is about a year of eating locally (p. 13) while thinking globally. In his 330-page book, Nabhan celebrates "the sensual pleasures of food without ignoring its global politics" (p. 14).

"My mouth, my tongue, and my heart remind me what my mind too often forgets," Nabhan writes. "I love the flavor of where I live, and all the plants and creatures I live with" (p. 304). In a culture where many of us obtain our food from vending machines, fast food restaurants, and "planetary" supermarkets (p. 22), it is no surprise that we have no idea where our food comes from, where it is grown, or how it is handled. On average, in fact, the food we eat today travels thirteen hundred miles from where it is produced, changing hands at least six times along the way (p. 23). In addition, nine-tenths of our food comes from non-local sources, with handlers along the food chain gaining three times more income from its consumer price than the farmers, ranchers, and fishermen who produced it (p. 34). Biting that corporate hand that feeds us every chance he gets, Nabhan's recounts his decision to purge his kitchen cabinets of all the processed foods "whose origins were distant" (p. 42), and to consume instead food that had been grown and gathered within 250 miles of his home in Tucson. Through his experiment, Nabhan is rewarded with an "oral pleasure" derived from "the minerals, the sourness or sweetness of the very ground we walk on, the very soil the seeds break through as they take in the air we ourselves have recently breathed" (p. 50). Sensual and enlightening, Nabhan's book is full of food for thought, that will leave you coming back for more.

G. Merritt