After visiting the
Fertile Crescent, where he eats “local” food for the first time,
Lebanese-American writer Gary Paul Nabhan returns to the U.S.
determined to do the same at his Tucson home. To most of us, that
would have meant growing a larger garden and buying a lamb or cow
from a neighbor.
But Nabhan, a MacArthur Fellow
and famed ethnobotanist, goes all the way, throwing out most of the
food in his pantry, enlisting help from friends, members of a
nearby Indian tribe and strangers he meets during his quest. In
Coming Home to Eat, Nabhan records his travails – and successes –
while questioning his motives at every step.
The
book could easily have been a bore, but Nabhan’s ideology is
overwhelmed by his pragmatic, hands-on curiosity. He parses out
where our food comes from, he tells us how to forage for wild
plants, how to hunt and cook wild birds, and how to organize a
community around food and health. And, most welcome of all, he
doesn’t disguise the contradictions he lives with, recognizing the
near impossibility of living in the “local eatery” of his
relatives, thousands of miles away.
Coming Home
to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, by Gary Paul
Nabhan, 330 pages, $24.95. W.W. Norton, New York.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Yes, I’m gonna eat that!.
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