Gary Paul Nabhan

Coming Home to Eat

An excerpt

Spring equinox: A day of turning over the earth-churning up dark garden soil buried beneath the winter's leaf litter-to replenish it with sunlight. A day of humus-stained hands and hopeful hearts. Laurie and I passed the daylight hours weeding, tilling, watering, and planting. We worked to make a fertile place for vegetables, herbs, and beans in all the unsown garden beds around our desert home.

I took a pick known as a Pulaski and loosened the dry, compacted alkaline soil. Laurie, a few feet away from me, wisps of blond hair streaming into her face, turned it over shovelful by shovelful. I sifted the decomposed matter rescued from our compost pit of food scraps and clippings until I had separated out the smaller grained particles, returning the larger chunks to the pit. We folded in leaf litter and organic soil gleaned from beneath mesquite trees and poured this mixture into the beds, establishing a new blend of local earth.

Down on the soiled knees of our jeans, we planted one heirloom seed stock after another, watering them, covering them with netting, and then placing larger meshed frames over them to deter the birds. I mouthed the names of the seeds as we buried them snugly in their beds: Mesilla Valley pasilla chiles, O'odham pinto tepary bean (a dry legume that has been cultivated in the desert for centuries), Mrs. Burns' lemon basil, Zuni tomatillos. It was a canticle of desert seeds, sung into darkness in hope that they would rise again into light. Once one bed was done, we moved to the next, then the next. Between beds, we would drink from our canteens, and Laurie would tuck her long blond hair back under the brim of her felt cowboy hat. She hummed to herself, nodding occasionally, while I blathered on about the history of each of the seeds.

Even when we ducked inside the house for a moment to get a drink or to bring out more seeds, we were never far from the musky fragrance of soil bathed in warm sunlight.

This day of toil marked the first phase of a fifteen-month ritual, one involving my sweetheart Laurie as well as many of my kin and old friends. The ritual extended beyond the planting of vegetables in our backyard; it included the tending of a small orchard and some terraces of agaves and prickly pears in front; the gathering of desert greens, yucca blossoms, and cactus buds and fruit in the wildlands beyond our fence; the hunting of game birds and the capture of other creatures out where the desert wilderness seems boundless. We searched for other food producers hidden in our own neighborhood, discovering those who locally grow vegetables, dress game, or can fruit that complements our own.

The ritual then moved indoors to the drying rack, chopping block, the hand-cranked grinder, the stove, and the dinner table. It had no single name. It might be termed "a communion of neighbors." It might be thought of as a "return to the old ways" of subsisting on native resources at a time when globalization is all the rage. My friend Jack Kloppenberg called it "coming into the foodshed." In some kind of shorthand to myself, I've decided to call it "coming home to eat." I've lost my interest in those "movable feasts" or "global smorgasbords" that have been the most pervasive secular rites celebrated by humankind since the Industrial Revolution began.

Let me try to be more precise about what this ritual entails, for precision is not my inclination.

I have initiated an extended communion with my plant and animal neighbors, the native flora and fauna found within 250 miles of my home.

I have chosen to eat with them, as well as eat them. I've decided to join them in what Italo Calvino calls "the ecstasy of swallowing each other in turn, as we were aware, in our turn, of being swallowed." Calvino suggests that we must swallow our pride and "erase the lines between our bodies and sopa de frijoles, huachinango a la Veracruzana, and enchiladas. . . ." For the moment I pick up a clod of clay, roll it into a marble-size ball, and tuck it into my cheek. Let me stick to this earth a while longer. . . .

As the end of this first day arrived, I was still many turns away from seeing this modest proposal bear fruit. But blisters had blossomed on my palms, and my fingernails had filled with grains of granitic grit. At last I felt that I had tangibly begun something in earnest, although Laurie kept pressing me to articulate just what this something might be.

"You know we can't begin to eat out of that garden tomorrow, don't you?"

"I know . . . but we do have all that stuff in the pantry that we stashed away last season. It'll tide us over until this grows up," I replied, trying to exude optimism while remaining humbled by what little lay before us. "I guess this is just our warm-up exercise."

I glanced at the garden. There were a few rows of multiplier onions that had resprouted earlier in the winter, a few transplanted chilies, and quite a number of recently planted but empty-looking rows in the vegetable beds. The seeds that we had buried there might not germinate for another week or two.

I had to keep telling myself that this would be an extended ritual, like some marathon run, one that lumbers slowly forward at first, replete with aches and pains and even a bit of queasiness, until it gains momentum.

Still, this ritual is simple in its intent: to make me a direct participant, as fully and as frequently as possible, in the making of the bread and wine that sustain not only my life but the lives surrounding me as well. At last I want fully to bear the brunt of what my own eating of the living world entails. I want to escape the trap that I, like most Americans, have fallen into the last four decades: obtaining nine-tenths of our food from nonlocal sources, with shippers, processors, packagers, retailers, and advertisers gaining three times more income from each dollar of food purchased than do farmers, fishermen, and ranchers. I want to reduce the distance that my food travels before it reaches my mouth and my mind, so that I can reduce the ignorance my friend Jim Harrison describes with such devastating simplicity: "The majority of our population that eats beef, pork, and chicken has never known an actual cow, pig, or hen."

However straightforward my intentions have been, the road back home has been chock-full of holes, and marred by curves, bumps, and sudden diversions. It has taken me more than a year to get to this point of beginning in earnest. What I had hoped this ritual might do, as most rituals eventually do, was move me beyond abstract intention into the unanticipated peculiarities of practice. Each day's bread, each season's batch of wine, might rise and take shape in its own weird way. The folks that I make and break bread with are surely part of the communion as well; every mouthful I take will be flavored by their presence.

Bread and wine. Whenever I have extended the offerings beyond bread and wine, to include the other forms of nourishment found in the larder, Laurie reminds me that killing fish and quail is much more gruesome than reaping grains and harvesting grapes. However local my endeavor has become, Laurie remains unconvinced that all my food getting will necessarily be noble. Laurie has found herself among my family members, friends, and neighbors who have been maintaining a healthy skepticism about my current project. They ask me over and over again to explain "the rules."

The rules. Although they never come out and say it, my friends have been convinced that I will force them to join me in suffering through some horrendously restrictive diet. Each of us, they have hinted, will surely lose dozens of pounds if only because the desert offers so few foods each season. Alternatively they have worried that I am about to make them "human subjects," testing some new harebrained theory of nutritional ecology I have conjured up.

Worse yet, they have all heard about the time I offered aflatoxin-laced mesquite pods in pudding form to my children at Thanksgiving. Fortunately Laura and Dusty declined to sample the pudding, leaving me the only victim. My digestive tract did not recover for another couple of weeks; meanwhile my near-fatal pudding recipe was sent off to be published in Organic Gardening. (Once it was in print, I regretted that I had not reminded others to avoid moldy mesquite.) My daughter, Laura, recently admitted to me that even when she was a little girl, she was already suspicious of my cooking, aware that whenever she sat down at the table, she was literally being asked to be party to a half-baked experiment.

Rules? I clear my throat and try to state my position. "I have no rules," I assert, "other than Thoreau's advice to 'live each season as it passes, breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.'" Unfortunately all my listeners hear is "resign yourself." This comment immediately brings out all their worst fears: I will be asking them to join me in eating any plant or animal, living or dead, that comes within my grasp.

"Will we have to eat turkey vulture if you find one rotting on the roadside? Will you remove all the cactus spines from the prickly pear fruit before you put it into the salad? Do we have to eat that wild chili pepper ice cream you invented?"

I try to say something reassuring, but it all sounds so defensive. The trouble is, I don't have any hard-and-fast rules, only a few tentative hypotheses about what "eating locally" and "coming into the food shed" might ultimately mean. I may change my mind about some of the provisional guidelines over the coming year, or change them several times. This is no diet, and it has no defined zones, other than a 250-mile loop around my home that I drew this morning on an old Arizona Highways map.

I must also explain that I am not "doing food therapy," as if I have joined a support group where we gather weekly to admit how long we have been addicted to buying junk foods from the global marketplace. That addiction is real, even though the psychosis of believing that hauled-in surrogates can fill in for what is homegrown has not attracted the attention of many therapists. But I don't need their outside help; I must simply try to stumble homeward, setting my hunger on what has nurtured me longest.

At first I was inclined to give most of my culinary attention to native vegetables and heirloom turkeys—that is, seeds and breeds that had adapted to the blistering heat, the pathetic-looking, alkaline earth, and the scant, brackish waters of our desert homeland. But the decision I made was not without its detractors, most of whom were my freeze-dried-Stroganoff-eating, instant-cappuccino-drinking, wilderness-backpacking buddies. They questioned me relentlessly, wondering how any home garden in the desert could ever be economical and ecologically benign, given that water was so scarce and costly here.

That point was true: Most of the vegetable crops I was sowing required irrigation with two to three times the amount of water that naturally fell here as rain, which was a meager twelve inches a year. The water that flowed out of my backyard hose into my beds was fossil groundwater pumped to my house with fossil fuel, so that even my most locally grown food drew on water and energy supplies from a distant place—the Pleistocene. In other words they were lain down in the earth tens of thousands of years ago when mammoths and mastodons still romped around these parts. Still, I asked these skeptics, what was the lesser evil: growing my own or having Cargill, ConAgra, and SYSCO bring me foods from thousands of miles away, grown and transported in ways that require even more energy and water than what I could locally squander?

Fortunately for me and other Arizonans, three of our neighbors in Tucson painstakingly answered that question more than fifteen years ago, when they measured all costs and returns from their two home gardens for three years running. While doing so, Tom Orum, David Cleveland, and Nancy Ferguson undoubtedly spent more time weighing and counting vegetables than most of us will do in our entire lifetimes.

Although Tom, Dave, and Nancy liberally irrigated their desert gardens, the market value of the vegetables they produced was more than ten times what they paid for tap water, and three times their total costs for water, manure, tools, and seeds. Even though water was their largest single gardening expense, they reaped between $7 and $9 worth of vegetables for every dollar they spent on water. Devoting just two to three hours a week to sowing, manuring, watering, weeding, and harvesting, they produced $150 to $180 worth of vegetables each year, harvesting a broad mix of greens, beans, beets, fruits, or shoots no matter what the season.

I had shared some community garden plots with Tom, Nancy, and other friends a few years before, so I knew that they were religious gardeners, devoted to their daily practice of getting dirt under their fingernails and fresh greens in their mouths. However, their diligence in keeping up garden accounting day after day for a full three years was altogether flabbergasting. To my relief, in the final year, as Tom placed some newly harvested squashes on the scale, I finally heard Nancy admit just how strenuous the whole ordeal had become. Not gardening itself, mind you, but the accounting that went along with it: the weighing of all the produce, the measuring of manure piles and water use, the jotting down of seasonal market prices for vegetables.

In the end my friends had proved that even in the desert, where water was ecologically and energetically costly, home gardening consumed far fewer resources than did the production of trucked-in food. Large-scale production is typically far more wasteful of water and energy in the field, in the warehouse, in transport, and in the supermarket. Somehow the return on the water, time, and energy invested in gardening is always recouped. The toil involved in tilling the soil and handpicking the harvest is infinitely more satisfying than fighting the mobs in the grocery store for periodically misted, ethylene-gassed fruits and vegetables transported from fields and orchards a thousand miles away from our dinner tables. Nancy and Tom have retired from weighing all their veggies every day, but they have not grown tired of gardening.

A little less ambitious than my buddies Tom and Nancy, I currently hoped to wrest four out of every five of my meals from locally grown foodstuffs. Unlike them, I refused to count calories, kilowatts, or acre-feet. Instead, I decided to count species. I hoped that nine out of every ten kinds of plants and animals I would eat over the coming months would be from species that were native to this region when the first desert cultures settled in to farm here several thousand years ago.

Mind you, that was a hope, not a rule. I would prefer to feel the tension between lofty goals and realistic choices than to never hope at all, even if I risk being called a hypocrite for failing to accomplish those goals.

It was at this point in my elaboration that most of my friends sensed that there still might be some rough edges to my modest proposal.

"What kinds of crops are you willing to eat?" they asked.

"Oh, you know: chilies, squashes, tomatillos, beans, prickly pears, century plants, and amaranths, ones that have close relatives growing wild around here."

"You didn't mention corn."

"Well, it's just a seminative. I mean, the closest patch of its wild ancestor, teosinte, is more than five hundred miles south of here. Besides, I think I can do without Frito-Lay's chips made from genetically modified corn for a while."

"And how about animals? Which are kosher for you?"

The term kosher had currency for me even though I have Arabic rather than Jewish roots; I had recently been reading the Old Testament to try to understand the logic of its food taboos.

"Well," I mused, "no factory chickens, no pond-grown trout or salmon, no feedlot anything. But I'm all for free-range turkeys, and quail and doves. Fish and shellfish from the Gulf of California, wild 'pork' from jabalina, maybe a few caterpillars and grasshoppers . . ." I tried to recall the ancient list of clean and unclean beasts writ in Leviticus, and realized that it sounded as though I had gotten the two mixed up. I began to falter: "Maybe some fat lizards, and a snake or two . . ."

Copyright © 2001 by Gary Paul Nabhan. All rights reserved.