Gary Paul Nabhan

This book has been on my shelves for a VERY long time, since we lived in Arizona (at least fourteen years?). I finally only got around to reading it because of a prompt for a reading challenge.

This book made me wildly nostalgic for Tucson and made me wish I'd spent more time hiking/in the mountains when I'd been there. It was also a nice addition to having recently read Death Comes for the Archbishop and thinking about how cultures/agriculture/religion changed among indigenous peoples as show more Europeans and later white Americans pushed West.

Despite having friends in Tucson who spent a lot of time with the O'Odham, I knew very little about them as a people prior to this book. I especially enjoyed the chapter on cactus wine, because, as Nabhan points out -- an outsider's understanding of the annual saguaro fruit harvesting is highly romanticized. Nabhan's representation is both grittier and more beautiful.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. show less

A collection of essays by desert ecologists, poets, scholars, artists, and more with both indigenous and desert-transplant points of view.The book is broken up unto sections including Native Ways of Envisioning Deserts, Growing Up Deserted, Desert Contemplatives, Desert as Atzlan and Divided Turf, Deserts Seen from Other Places, and Desert as Art/Ecology Nexus.

The opening essay by Gary Nabhan explores the history of arid landscapes discussing everything from birds, plants, and people of show more these purportedly "uninhabitable" spaces, including symbiotic relationships between senita cactus and a moth, and competition between nurse plant and nursed plant, all with Nabhan's unique humor throughout. There's an essay featuring "Desert Fathers" -- monks who escaped to the Egyptian desert -- and one highlighting desert-themed murals in Tucson and Ajo in the Sonoran Desert. There's essays by folks who spent their childhood exploring the Sonoran Desert and essays by those who have chosen the Sonoran Desert as their home base as adults. The desert is explored in countless ways and by a diversity of voices to explore the nature of desert nature.

Try this collection if you enjoyed The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide show less

A fascinating tale of the relationship between the spice trade and culinary imperialism. The author's family lineage dates back to the time they were spice traders in the Arabian peninsula. Frankincense was discussed very knowledgeably and was a fascinating story in itself.

Nabhan writes of how trading in spice and precious plant products predates the Christian era (CE) of records. His work and those of his colleagues, Gene Anderson, Paul Buell (an ethnobotanist and a food historian, show more respectively) have credibly demonstrated that the uncanny similarities between recipes in disparate parts of the world point to a cuisine-based dissemination of knowledge.

Nabhan's book often wanders from point to point and back again, occasionally devolving into arcane aspects of history that may not interest the casual reader. However, there was much to gain from reading the book and certainly new insights about how Asian and North American centres of origin for specific crops came to be so widely dispersed. show less

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 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 show more (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+!! show less