Coming Home to Eat, by Gary Paul Nabhan

I just finished Gary Paul Nabhan's deliciously languorous book, Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food. My copy of the book is well-worn and dog-eared because I read it slowly, all summer, at the pool on Sundays, and here, in the hammock, where I finally finished it yesterday.

Nabhan, the director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University, lives in Flagstaff. The thing that struck me most about the book was how incredibly different his local food is from mine. Prickly pear cactus fruit and nopalitos. Saiya roots, whatever they are. Wolfberry fruit, huh? Tiger rattlesnake. Ironwood seeds. Soapwood yucca blossoms. Sonoran panic grass.

This got me thinking. A new restaurant called Seasons 52, part of a chain, just opened near me. According to its website (www.seasons52.com):

Rediscover the authentic tastes of freshly harvested food. Every week of the year as different foods reach their seasonal peak of taste, we seek out the best market-fresh products, such as vine-ripened heirloom tomatoes in summer, crisp apples in autumn, hearty root vegetables in winter and tender green asparagus in spring.

This begged an obvious question, since after reading Nabhan's book I realize that seasonal eating is truly regional at the least and local at best. If this restaurant is basing its entire concept on seasonal eating, I asked Seasons 52 via email:

From what regional or local farms do you get your produce?

It has been almost a week since I wrote. I have not heard back.

But back to Nabhan's book, because I want share with you a beautiful, thought-provoking passage from the final page that hit close to home for me as Atlanta's light starts shifting, casting longer, lower shadows, and the oppressive summer heat finally starts to recede, and I work the dirt, once more, for a new season of crops:

The real bottleneck to the revival of native, locally grown foods is a cultural--or more precisely, a spiritual--dilemma. If we no longer believe that the earth is sacred, or that we are blessed by the bounty around us, or that we have a caretaking responsibility given to us by the Creator--Yahweh, Earth Maker, Gaia, Tata Dios, Cave Bear, Raven, or whatever you care to call him or her--then it does not really matter to most folks how much ecological and cultural damage is done by the way we eat.

Food for thought. I'll ponder this today. In the hammock.

Coming Home to Eat, by Gary Paul Nabhan