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

By Gary Paul Nabhan

Book Overview

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).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393323749
• ISBN13: 9780393323740
• Release Date: November 2002
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.9" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

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.

Food for Thought

In today's society we are more distant from our food and how it is produced than ever before. Gary forces us to take a look at how the agricultural systems work - or don't work- and how our food choices affect the farmers, ranchers and fisherman who struggle to make a living off the land, as well as the world around us. Very thought provoking read.

"Life tastes good."

"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