A Stew of Perspectives on Food Yields a Feast for the Reader

For some people, food is simply something to consume without much thought or appreciation. For others, eating is a connoisseurship, an opportunity to enjoy delectable flavors, textures and felicitous combinations. Still others see food primarily in terms of health and diet, some looking for specific nutrients, others trying to avoid calories, fats, cholesterol, salt or sugar.

Gardener, activist and ethno-botanist Gary Paul Nabhan is none of the above. He looks at food from a perspective that is at once ecological, economic, humanistic and spiritual. In his eloquent, richly evocative book “Coming Home to Eat,” he offers a fascinating, enlightening and moving account of his own experiences during a year in which he tried to eat only those plants and animals that live within a 200-mile radius of his Arizona home in the Sonoran Desert.

Nabhan begins by describing two contrasting meals he had while visiting his father’s family in Lebanon. First, he was taken to a posh restaurant, where well-heeled patrons of many nations sampled the best the world had to offer: “French champagne, caviar from failing black sturgeon populations of the Caspian Sea, jumbo Guaymas shrimp from the Gulf of California, Argentine beef ... Cuban cigars.... “ The talk was of offshore banks, tax havens and investments. “The conversation and the cuisine ... ,” Nabhan realized to his discomfort, “reflected a desire for a life unsoiled by local, regional, cultural or even nationalistic constraints, where one could pick and choose from the planetary supermarket without any contact with local fishermen or farmers, let alone any responsibility to them.”

The second meal was eaten with his family in the countryside of the Bekaa Valley: “We were conjoined in a feast a world apart from the one we had been offered in the Club Du Lubnan. It exuded the aroma of our aunts’ and cousins’ hands, the musk of goats and sheep grazed on the slopes above us, the salt and the bitter herbal bite of the alkaline earth itself.” This, Nabhan, felt was truly “coming home to eat.”

Back in Arizona, Nabhan set about turning his TV satellite dish into a seed planter, raising his own turkeys, hunting quail, foraging for wild greens, harvesting cholla cactus buds and saguaro fruit, buying other foods from local producers and (to the consternation of his family and friends) cooking up odd critters like caterpillars. He learned food preparation techniques from the local O’odham Indians, with whom he works in an ongoing effort to recover and preserve their ancient dietary traditions.

Like other tribes living within the area, the O’odham have been suffering from a high rate of diabetes, brought on by a radical change in diet from their traditional foods to the highly processed, high-sugar, high-fat, low-fiber convenience foods consumed by too many Americans of all ethnic backgrounds.

Central to Nabhan’s book is his skepticism about the claims and practices of the giant food and agribusiness companies. These companies have long contended that, thanks to their efficient methods of food production, they can easily feed the world. Nabhan and his fellow skeptics--who include scientists, farmers and ordinary citizens--perform a much-needed function in pointing out the neglected side effects of such methods, including the loss of biodiversity, the impoverishment of small farmers, the introduction of dangerous chemicals and genetic alterations.

One does wonder, however, whether a world in which people limited themselves to the foods produced in their local “food sheds” would not suffer from some of the traditional hardships: droughts, shortages, inability to sustain a growing population. Needless to say, Nabhan’s radical approach would hardly be practical for most urban Americans to duplicate. But he points us in a valuable direction if we care about preserving biological diversity, saving our natural resources, supporting family farmers and caring for the land around us.

“Coming Home to Eat” is a cornucopia of food for thought, prompting us to think twice about everything from the value of so-called “health foods” to the decline in the percentage of American families who have dinner together at home. In addition to his talents as a hunter-gatherer, forager, gardener, cook and activist, Nabhan also happens to be a very good writer, capable of transforming his adventures into a colorful and engrossing story that will appeal even to readers who might not enjoy a freshly prepared dish of locally obtained caterpillars.