Coming Home to Eat

Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, by Gary Paul Nabhan, Ph.D. (W.W. Norton & Co., 2002)

I do the bulk of my reading on the bus. I have a half-hour commute to school, which often translates to an hour of dedicated reading time per day. Sometimes when I don’t have something to read, I get anxious.

Coming Home to Eat is a result of that anxiety. I was searching through McGrath Library’s collection at the U of M, looking for something relevant to keep me going while I waited politely for my requested library books to show up. Gary Paul Nabhan’s book describing his year-long experiment in eating locally and related events during that year was an unexpected gem.

If this sounds like a knockoff of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, be assured that Coming Home to Eat came first. Also, it is undeniably different. There’s no reason to not read them back-to-back. If you do, you are in for 600+ pages of delicious prose.

Now, Nabhan is an bone fide ecologist and ethnobotanist, to be sure, but he is also a “rural lifeways folklorist,” and his list of credits includes a book of poetry. It shows. Here’s a passage wherein he describes eating freshly foraged greens.

Quelite. Photo credit: juanvc.

Tonight I entered quelite heaven, enjoying the freshest greens I could imagine. I grilled some scallions and poblano chiles, then added a mound of hand washed greens to the saucepan. … Their flavors were so fresh, so buzzed with their recent photosynthetic surge that my meal sizzled with sunshine. (142)

Coming Home to Eat is also fascinating because of the subject. If you raised an eyebrow at Barbara Kingsolver’s quest to eat locally in Virginia, raise two at Nabhan’s quest to eat within 250 miles of his home in desert-y southern Arizona.

Many of the foods he eats are totally unfamiliar to me—thank goodness for Hannah Hinchman’s pen and ink illustrations—mesquite tortillas and roasted mescal, dried tepary beans and cholla cactus buds.

And that’s one of the two things I like about this book. Nabhan introduced me to the food resources of the southwestern deserts, something I know nothing about, and something I don't necessarily need know about. I live in Minnesota, I want to eat things grown in Midwestern soil.

I'm appropriately astonished at the variety that desert soil produces and heartened that some people still know how to find and prepare it. What I can take inspiration from is Nabhan's creation of access points to alternate food resources, his purchases of mesquite tortillas from Esperanza and duck eggs from Ms. Soto.

I was mightily refreshed by the narrative style of Coming Home to Eat. I read a lot of nonfiction nowadays and there's often a stark difference between these nonfiction texts and novels. Nabhan blurred the line between these two forms, including touches like dialogues with his sweetheart Laurie, mulling over the death of his stepfather, and describing a meeting with the EPA over Bt corn. Illustrative facts and figures, important names and dates are all there, as is a comprehensive index.

The blend of professional and personal, presented with polished prose stirs a deeper, more holistic reaction to the message I've heard so many times.

Updated April 2015.