Coming home to eat : the pleasures and politics of local foods / Gary Paul Nabhan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nabhan, Gary Paul.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Gastronomy.

Physical Description:

330 pages : illustrations, map ; 22 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : W.W. Norton, [2002]

Summary:

In our molecules and in our dreams, we really are what we eat. Eating close to home is not just a matter of convenience -- it is an act of deeply sensual, cultural, and environmental significance. Gary Paul Nabhan's experience with food permeates his life as a first-generation Lebanese American, as an avid gardener and subsistence hunter-gatherer, as an ethnobotanist preserving seed diversity, and as an activist devoted to recovering native food traditions to restore the health of Native Americans in the Southwest. To rediscover what it might mean to "know your foodshed," he spent a year trying to eat only foods grown, fished, or gathered within two hundred miles of his home -- with surprising results. In Coming Home to Eat, Nabhan draws these experiences together in a book that is a culmination of his life's work -- and a vibrant portrait of our essential human relation to the foods that truly nourish us, affirming our bonds to family, community, landscape, and season.

Contents:

I Spring: The Cruelest Months

1. Eating My Way through House and Homeland 31

2. Purging the Canned, Making Room for the Fresh 42

3. Coping with Death, and the Life Thereafter 55

4. Riding the Dunes and Finding the Ghosts 67

5. Dead Chemicals or Peaches Eaten Alive 84

II Summer: The Fertile Months

6. Saguaro Fruit and Cactus Icons 103

7. Mesquite Tortillas and Duck Eggs 118

8. Tomato Hornworms and Summer Storms 133

9. Scouting for Wild Greens and Chiles 139

10. Seed Saving and Foraging in the Heartland 151

11. The Frontera Grill and the Frontiers of Technology 165

12. From Toxic Cornfields to Rattlesnake Roadkills 172

III Autumn: The Feasting Months

13. The Headwaters and the Foodshed 191

14. The Fertile Valleys and Their Wild Varmints 208

15. Sea Turtle Soup and By-Catch Stew 216

16. The Nomad's Movable Feast and the Taste of Island Chicken 224

17. Hunting Mushrooms and Grilling Salmon 238

18. Feasting with the Dead 244

IV Winter: The Reflective Months

19. Of Vinegars Fermented and Memories Curdled 255

20. The WTO in Seattle, and the Spirit of St. Louis 262

21. Hunting Quail and Stalking Scavengers 275

22. Mexico's Breadbasket of Toxins and Migrants 281

23. The Desert Walk for Heritage and Health 289

Cornucopia of Native Foods Eaten within the Sonoran Desert/Gulf of California Foodshed 305.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [307]-309) and index.

ISBN:

0393020177

OCLC:

46991192