Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local FoodNabhan, 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. |
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments | 13 |
The Cruelest Months | 31 |
Saguaro Fruit and Cactus Icons | 103 |
Mesquite Tortillas and Duck Eggs | 118 |
Tomato Hornworms and Summer Storms | 133 |
Scouting for Wild Greens and Chiles | 139 |
Seed Saving and Foraging in the Heartland | 151 |
The Frontera Grill and the Frontiers of Technology | 165 |
Sea Turtle Soup and ByCatch Stew | 216 |
The Nomads Movable Feast and the Taste | 224 |
Hunting Mushrooms and Grilling Salmon | 238 |
Feasting with the Dead | 244 |
The Reflective Months | 255 |
The WTO in Seattle and the Spirit of St Louis | 262 |
Hunting Quail and Stalking Scavengers | 275 |
Mexicos Breadbasket of Toxins and Migrants | 281 |
From Toxic Cornfields to Rattlesnake Roadkills | 172 |
The Headwaters and the Foodshed | 191 |
The Fertile Valleys and Their Wild Varmints | 208 |
The Desert Walk for Heritage and Health | 289 |
Other editions - View all
Coming Home To Eat: The Pleasures And Politics Of Local Foods Gary Paul Nabhan No preview available - 2009 |
Common terms and phrases
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