Coming Home to Eat by Gary Paul Nabhan

The sub-title for Coming Home to Eat, “The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods,” more or less sums up the ideas behind this short book. Nabhan, a writer and ecologist based in Arizona, is passionate about his subject and cause. He’s very involved in Native Seeds/SEARCH, an organization dedicated to conserving and promoting heirloom and wild agricultural seeds and the cultures in which they traditionally form a part.

The conceit of Coming Home is for the writer to consume only foods from a 250 hundred mile radius from his home in Arizona for one year. Unlike the book, Julie and Julia, this is not a compulsive race against time. And in fact, as Nabhan travels for his work, he does consume foods from other regions of the country, even eating fast food occasionally. Nevertheless, the idea of eating locally frames the structure of Coming Home, which is roughly divided into seasons and then sub-divided by chapter on topics related to specific foods or personal experiences involving their acquisition, preparation and/or consumption.

coming home to Hegui's birth city: Olegário Maciel, MG, Brazil

At its best, this book reads like a tightly written novel or even poetry. I’ll quote just one of numerous examples that really struck me with its romantic imagery:

Enchanted with the ripening peaches on his trees at home, Nabhan surprises his wife (or perhaps fiancée. I’m not sure.) with a sensuous treat. First he blindfolds her, and leads her by the hand through their house into the backyard.

“Here’s where you have to trust me. I’m going to place something to your lips that I’d like you to taste. If you don’t want to, just say so, but I just tasted it myself a little while ago, and it was delicious.”

“Ohhh, this better be good. Okay, I trust you.”

I picked one of the peaches, dipped it in a bowl of water, and cut it in half, plucking out the pit. Then I placed the fleshy side of the peach up against her lips and gave it a little squeeze.

“Juices!” she squealed.

It turns out that she loves them. They feed one another peaches and drink white wine that evening and end up sleeping under the stars.

It’s at times like this that the book excels. Though I sort of wonder about people content to dine on peaches and chardonnay alone. Is that the meal of someone who really likes food? I’m not sure. I’d want something a bit more substantial myself, though the event does sound full of pleasure.

He makes a lot of interesting points about the economic plight of small farmers, geneticly modified crops, problems with monoculture and the reduction of genetic variation in staple foods. That kind of chatter is everywhere these days. Look at Organic, Inc. or Slow Food Nation. Somehow, though, Nabhan’s Southwest perspective seems unique and makes this familiar territory fresh. I found the sections of the book where he describes his attempts to work with the federal government to put in protections for the monarch butterfly especially enlightening. I didn’t know that genetically engineered corn actually killed the beautiful insects.

About the relationship between big business and government, I was baffled by his apparent naïveté when he writes “Is it routine for industry to run its own studies, which EPA then passively accepts as the only information available?” Of course, the answer from the EPA staffers is “Well, yes.” Isn’t this widely known?!? Certainly the FDA works the same way when launching new medications for the U. S. market. Why would EPA be different? But unlike the case of drugs for humans, where later studies and additional information comes out after marketing, it seems that post-release studies rarely come up for genetically engineered crops. Perhaps there’s no money, or worse, interest, in it? That is a real shame! I’m glad that you were there to complain to the Feds about the monarch butterfly problem, Gary!

It’s when Nabhan lets his poetic imagination get too unrestrained that I get annoyed. Clearly he champions the small local farmer over agro business and he has a strong sentimental connection with the past. That’s cool. The problem lies with the writer’s oversimplification of complex food issues and his tendency to characterize things in biased and rather severe terms that rubs me raw. A few examples should give you an idea.

While on a visit to Chicago to attend a wedding, Nabhan takes his wife, Laurie, to the Museum of Science and Industry where he’s disappointed to see that the food exhibit “continued to reek with the toxic perfumes of industrial agriculture, as it had when I was a kid.” Really! Is all so-called industrial agriculture bad?

Describing the historical trend from small farms with numerous small farmers to larger, industrialized forms of agriculture, he poetically characterizes these “unpeopled farms stretch[ing] westward as far as our eyes could see. At dusk they took on a sickly greenish cast, the color of moldy Spam.” He alludes to Spam again later in the book and even lists as a suggestion for further reading “The Spam Cookbook” edited by Linda Eggers. Why’s he so interested, particularly in a ruined, strangely colored example of the infamous canned meat product?

Color and food have meanings for Nabhan beyond their theatrical potential. In an early chapter describing “sand food,” a desert food eaten mainly in times past by natives to the region, he strikes up a conversation with a traditional herbalist. He’s especially curious about one plant in particular. “I was told about this plant by an old Papago lady, who ate it when she was a little girl, but now that she eats the white man’s food, she’s sick with diabetes.” Wow! “white man’s food!” That’s disturbing. Plus, I thought that McDonald’s was popular everywhere in the World. That’s international and color blind, if you ask me.

Even when talking in a more balanced way about various food choices that people make, it tends to go to extremes. Comparing the nutritional value of sphinx moth larvae, a type of caterpillar traditionally consumed by the native O’odham, to shrimp, mussels and snails, he suggests that if our tastes could change, larvae would be featured on “the menus of many regional restaurants. Today, however, they are being hit and killed as they cross the pavement of desert highways.”

Road kill versus quality food: does eating well, preserving local traditions and the environment, and staying healthy always have to take on such black-and-white, literally my-way-or-the-highway dimensions? Why not some sort of compromise?

And more importantly, even if you believe everything he writes, most folks these days aren’t able to so completely embrace the live-locally, grow-your-own-food, avoid-all-things-processed lifestyle; even if they wanted to. Nabhan is a dreamer, not a realist. He says himself that this is not a roadmap to a new food lifestyle. “I did not want to change the world…”

Coming Home to Eat succeeds in its focus on cultural and food history, particularly in the Southwest, and as a personal memoir. Its grander pretensions as an argument against processed food, fast food, GMO crops etc. is well meaning but fails to convince due to the topic’s vagueness and his indirect method of addressing these questions. Is he saying that Native Americans develop diabetes and die younger because of fast food, because of the loss of their reliance on traditional local foods, from the increase in caloric intake and reduction in exercise that “development” has brought, or merely from lack of choices due to poverty and isolation? I really don’t know after reading this book.

Nabhan made up his mind long ago and is preaching to the already converted. He points to agro business, fast food, processed food and politics as the culprits here. I wonder about the role of the individual eater in all of this. Poor or not; white or not; native or not: don’t we all ultimately decide what and how much we consume each day? Obesity is a national health crisis in America. But it’s one thing that we can actively change, regardless of our age, health status, ethnic or national origin, or whatever. I didn’t see much about that here.

A lot of his concern over monoculture and ocean harvesting seems valid. But what are the causes for this? It just doesn’t make sense to say that there are international markets that buy these products to create foods from “Nowhere, U. S. A.” as he does. Who make up these international markets? Where are they? And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, why are there so many of them? What’s the practical limit of the human population on the Globe? How does this impact local farming communities and the economics of food? I’m terribly curious about this topic, but alas, haven’t found much about it in this book.

Beyond the romance, the skeptical or indifferent reader simply attracted to the writing style of Coming Home to Eat, or casually interested in food will likely come away puzzled, or, like me, irritated with this biased and dogmatic treatment of a real and pervasive socioeconomic problem.