Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods
by By Nabhan, Gary Paul
Category: Cooking , Essays & Narratives

We really are what we eat. Eating close to home is not just a matter of convenience it is an act of deep cultural, emotional, and environmental significance. Gary Nabhan's experience with food permeates his life as a third-generation Lebanese American (with Irish and Lithuanian mixed in), as an avid gardener and subsistence hunter, as an ethnobotanist preserving seed diversity, and as an activist devoted to recovering native food traditions to promote the health of Native Americans in the Southwest. To rediscover what it might mean to "think globally, eat locally," he spent a year trying to eat only foods grown, fished, or caught 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 the essential human relation to the foods that truly nourish us, affirming our bonds to family, community, landscape, and season.