Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
W. W. Norton & Company (2009), Edition: Reissue, Paperback, 336 pages
Description
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.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member destabee
I read this book while riding Amtrak from North Carolina to Philadelphia during the month of August. Outside the window of the train I could spot a number of wild foods.
As I read, I was reminded how much local food was once a part of my life in Oklahoma and even Louisiana. Sadly as I read this
I remembered the painful scratches from picking blackberries. I also remembered how the cobbler made from those berries on a cold winter day was sweeter for the effort and pain of picking them.
I remembered the chilly autumn air as I gathered pecans. I remembered the ecstasy of standing beneath a peach tree and eating a perfectly ripe peach warmed by a summer day while watching the sun that had warmed that peach slowing sink below the horizon.
While I don't live in a climate any thing like that described by Mr. Nabhan (nor do I expect I ever will), I was reminded to celebrate the bounty that surrounds me.
This book may have some slow passages but it reminded me that food is for the soul as well as the body. The book may have had limited direct application because of differences in geography. However, this book was like opening the windows to a house on the first warm day of spring. Suddenly I was reminded of the promise and possibility of the natural world around me. It reestablished a connection in my life that was severed and I wasn't even aware of the break.
It really did create a sense of coming home for me.
As I read, I was reminded how much local food was once a part of my life in Oklahoma and even Louisiana. Sadly as I read this
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book that was no longer the case. I remembered the painful scratches from picking blackberries. I also remembered how the cobbler made from those berries on a cold winter day was sweeter for the effort and pain of picking them.
I remembered the chilly autumn air as I gathered pecans. I remembered the ecstasy of standing beneath a peach tree and eating a perfectly ripe peach warmed by a summer day while watching the sun that had warmed that peach slowing sink below the horizon.
While I don't live in a climate any thing like that described by Mr. Nabhan (nor do I expect I ever will), I was reminded to celebrate the bounty that surrounds me.
This book may have some slow passages but it reminded me that food is for the soul as well as the body. The book may have had limited direct application because of differences in geography. However, this book was like opening the windows to a house on the first warm day of spring. Suddenly I was reminded of the promise and possibility of the natural world around me. It reestablished a connection in my life that was severed and I wasn't even aware of the break.
It really did create a sense of coming home for me.
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LibraryThing member foxglove
The writing is sometimes slow, and sometimes stiff, but sometimes beautiful or surprising. The real treasure is the content, where Nabhan describes the pleasures of eating locally, why it is important, and how that way of life is endangered. The book also contains excellent descriptions of ways to
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prepare traditional desert foods. Show Less
LibraryThing member the_hag
This book was, simply put, a joy to read, a veritable cauldron of ideas explored and fleshed out for the reader. It may be because I lived for 8+ years in the same general areas as Nabhan that I can get a feel for what he is talking about more easily, but more likely than not, it is not that which
This book is really an intimate look at one man's passion for eating as locally as possible, a goal I have long thought of as a grand ideal but more and more, it is something I would very much like to do and while I don't have a great deal of knowledge about where exactly to start...reading Coming Home has really given my ideas wings. Nabhan certainly brings to the fore wide ranging topics, touching on the "health" of our food supply, genetically altered seeds, ect...and really brings home the interconnectivity of the local, regional, national and global food chains. What this book doesn't cover in depth, one can certainly get by reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Pollan and I can honestly say, having read both, I am a better person for it.
I plan to buy a copy of this for my permanent library and would heartily recommend it to anyone! It's well written and while one gets the sense that Nabhan is on a personal crusade, it's not preachy or elitist in any way. It almost reads like a novel and I would caution that Coming Home to Eat does NOT provide any type of resource for eating locally (as in a formula for doing so), but it DOES provide inspiration and some very cool laugh out loud moments. A+!!
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endears Coming Home to Eat is that Coming Home is more of a philosophy than anything else and Nabhan's enthusiasm is certainly catching, though some of his methods and ways are not for everyone (eating road-kill for instance). This book is really an intimate look at one man's passion for eating as locally as possible, a goal I have long thought of as a grand ideal but more and more, it is something I would very much like to do and while I don't have a great deal of knowledge about where exactly to start...reading Coming Home has really given my ideas wings. Nabhan certainly brings to the fore wide ranging topics, touching on the "health" of our food supply, genetically altered seeds, ect...and really brings home the interconnectivity of the local, regional, national and global food chains. What this book doesn't cover in depth, one can certainly get by reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Pollan and I can honestly say, having read both, I am a better person for it.
I plan to buy a copy of this for my permanent library and would heartily recommend it to anyone! It's well written and while one gets the sense that Nabhan is on a personal crusade, it's not preachy or elitist in any way. It almost reads like a novel and I would caution that Coming Home to Eat does NOT provide any type of resource for eating locally (as in a formula for doing so), but it DOES provide inspiration and some very cool laugh out loud moments. A+!!
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LibraryThing member Devil_llama
The author tells a good story, bringing the characters to life, as he describes his year of eating locally. He would eat nothing for a year but that which was grown in his own locality - a difficult task, since he lives in the American southwest. His descriptions of growing, harvesting, and
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preparing food made me wince, even as I enjoyed the story. It brought home to me very starkly how much time our ancestors had to devote just to feeing themselves, leaving much less time for other things that might be considered equally important to some of us. A good entry in the slow food genre. Show Less
LibraryThing member jarvenpa
A thought provoking book indeed. Disclaimer, I'm a vegetarian, so the sequences about slaughter of nicely raised critters just provoked in my mind "really, you don't need to do that!". But fascinating details about the food plants of the Sonora desert region with passionate meanderings about the
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WTO, GMO, and so on. The author comes across as something of a fanatic prig, and I imagine I would not care to spend much time in his presence, but the book is worth reading and thinking about. It's 10 years old, but the debates are still quite current. Show Less
LibraryThing member bookqueenshelby
I usually love these types books but this one just bit the dust..I couldn't even finish it
Subjects
Language
Physical description
336 p.; 8.1 inches
ISBN
0393335054 / 9780393335057