2012 Puddly Awards
 
 
Follow us on TwitterFollow us on FacebookFollow us on TumblrSubscribe to RSS


Recently Viewed clear list


Interviews | January 24, 2012

Jill Owens: IMG Ben Marcus: The Powells.com Interview



Ben MarcusBen Marcus's books The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women were considered "experimental" fiction because of his unconventional use of... Continue »
  1. $18.17 Sale Hardcover add to wish list

    The Flame Alphabet

    Ben Marcus 9780307379375

spacer
Free Shipping!

Ships free on qualified orders.
$5.95
Used Trade Paper
Usually ships in 5 to 7 business days
Add to Wishlist
available for shipping or prepaid pickup only
Qty Store Section
1 Remote Warehouse Cooking and Food- General

eBook editions

Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods

by Gary Paul Nabhan

Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods Cover

ISBN13: 9780393323740
ISBN10: 0393323749
Condition: Standard
All Product Details

Only 1 left in stock at $5.95!

 

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

A celebration of food and culture with a social conscience, in the tradition of M. F. K. Fisher and Frances Moore Lappé.

In our molecules and in our dreams, we really are what we eat. Eating close to home is not just a matter of convenience — it is an act of deeply sensual, cultural, and environmental significance.

Gary Paul Nabhan's experience with food permeates his life as a first-generation Lebanese American, as an avid gardener and subsistence hunter-gatherer, as an ethnobotanist preserving seed diversity, and as an activist devoted to recovering native food traditions to restore the health of Native Americans in the Southwest. To rediscover what it might mean to "know your foodshed," he spent a year trying to eat only foods grown, fished, or gathered 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 cultural relations to the foods that truly nourish us, affirming our bonds to family, community, landscape, and season.

Review:

"Gary Nabhan is reawakening in modern America that inalienable need to delve deeply, sensually into its sustenance, the earth from which it springs, the hands that help it reach our plates and stomachs. He offers an elegant, inspired, and eloquently detailed account of becoming a 'direct participant'(to use his words) in the food that sustains him, and the lives of those around him." Rick Bayless, founding member of Chefs Collaborative and host of Public Television's "Mexico-One Plate at a Time"

Review:

"Gary Nabhan is one of the most seminal thinkers in the environmental movement and very probably in the greater arena. Coming Home to Eat is a profound and engaging book, a passionate call to us to re-think our food industry and to return when possible to our own locale for the sources of what we cook and eat." Jim Harrison, author of The Beast God Forgot to Invent

Review:

"Gary Paul Nabhan is a brilliant scientist (ethno-botany) and remarkably successful social activist. For a couple of decades he's helped people in the Southwest figure out how to eat for good health and economically. In Coming Home to Eat Nabhan weaves ideas about eating right into his interest in the pleasure of caring for ecosystems and communities. His stories are often funny and always invaluable." William Kittredge, author of The Nature of Generosity

Review:

"Gary Paul Nabhan knows the whims of nature and human nature and writes with a passion for those of us who still see and trust the wild in our land. His stories celebrate the sense of place that belongs in all our foods." David Mas Masumoto, organic farmer and author of Epitaph for a Peach and Harvest Son

Review:

"A practical primer on how to 'eat locally, think globally' (and enjoy it more) wherever you are. Nabhan explores one of the greatest sources of global despoliation and tells us exactly what we can do about it: eat consciously, and eat foods grown close at hand." Stanley Crawford, author of A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm

Review:

"Nabhan brings the rare combination of the sensual and the intellectual to his writing about food. Weaving together the traditions of Thoreau and M. F. K Fisher, Nabhan speaks to those of us concerned about the shifting value of food in our culture. With a healthy dose of self-effacing humor, Nabhan challenges the wisdom of buying into the planetary supermarket and offers his personal journey to eat locally as an alternative. It is a soul food treatise for our time." Peter Hoffman, chef owner of the Savoy Restaurant in New York City and national chair of the Chefs Collaborative

Review:

"Nabhan is a very good writer, capable of transforming his adventures into a colorful and engrossing story that will appeal even to readers who might not enjoy a freshly prepared dish of locally obtained caterpillars." Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times

Review:

"Nabhan makes us understand how finding and eating local foods connects us deeply and sensually with where we are." Alice Waters

Review:

"[E]loquent, richly evocative... fascinating, enlightening and moving." Los Angeles Times

Review:

"I opened the book warily, ever on guard against the moralism and class privilege that so often taint the 'natural foods' movement. Nabhan disarmed me quickly with his political take on eating and his command of statistical data on land ownership, water and energy consumption, and corporate profits.... Coming Home to Eat is an exposé with an honorable sense, companion reading to Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation." Cheri Register, Ruminator Review

Synopsis:

"Amazing and eloquent....Nabhan makes us understand how finding and eating local foods connects us deeply and sensually."--Alice Waters, Chez Panisse

Synopsis:

Issuing a "profound and engaging...passionate call to us to re-think our food industry" (Jim Harrison, author of The Raw and the Cooked), Gary Paul Nabhan reminds us that eating close to home is not just a matter of convenience--it is an act of deep cultural and environmental significance. Embodying "a perspective...at once ecological, economic, humanistic, and spiritual" (Los Angeles Times), Nabhan has dedicated his life to raising awareness about food--as an avid gardener, as an ethnobotanist preserving seed diversity, and as an activist devoted to recovering native food traditions in the Southwest. This "inspired and eloquently detailed account" (Rick Bayless, Chefs Collaborative) tells of his year-long mission to eat only foods grown, fished, or gathered within two hundred miles of his home. "A good book for gardeners to read this winter" (The New York Times), Nabhan's work "weav[es] together the traditions of Thoreau and M. F. K. Fisher [in] a soul food treatise for our time" (Peter Hoffman, Chefs Collaborative).

About the Author

Gary Paul Nabhan, a prize-winning essayist and agricultural ecologist, serves as a Distinguished Research Scientist with the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona. He lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

What Our Readers Are Saying

Add a comment for a chance to win!
Average customer rating based on 2 comments:

knik, January 1, 2012 (view all comments by knik)
Nabhan is a solid story teller who can bring something like food and nature together to make it compelling for the reader. While this may sound a cliche; ignore learning about these matters at your peril. After reading Grace Young and Eileen Yin-Fei Lo's writing on Chinese food preparation, where freshness is one of the key drivers, how can we not want to learn more and understand how broken our food sourcing system is and what we should be thinking about to address these shortcomings. So I strongly recommend this as a starting point in developing ideas around this dilemma.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
innersmile, June 26, 2011 (view all comments by innersmile)
I like this title - a double entendre. "Coming home to eat" in a literal sense: Coming home and eating in our own kitchens. We have been a nation that eats out or exists on fast food and we need to stay home and spend time cooking and having family life center around getting together to share meals. Then there's the larger meaning of "coming home to eat": Eating locally, seasonally, buying from small organic sustainable farms, making sure our land is taken care of so that it can take care of us. I haven't rated this book because I haven't yet read it, but I will - it's subject is important. What and how we eat may not be the source of all our societal ills, but it's making us too sick to do anything about them. We have no guts, literally.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
View all 2 comments

Product Details

ISBN:
9780393323740
Author:
Nabhan, Gary Paul
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Author:
Nabhan, Gary
Author:
Nabhan, Gary P.
Subject:
General
Subject:
Essays
Subject:
Cooking and Food-General
Copyright:
Publication Date:
November 2002
Binding:
TRADE PAPER
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Illustrations:
12 drawings
Pages:
336
Dimensions:
8.23x5.47x.84 in. .83 lbs.

Other books you might like

  1. $6.50 Used Trade Paper add to wish list
  2. $15.93 Google eBooks add to wish list
  3. $11.95 Used Hardcover add to wish list
  4. $3.50 Used Trade Paper add to wish list
  5. $6.50 Used Trade Paper add to wish list
  6. $17.95 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

Related Aisles

Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods Used Trade Paper
0 stars - 0 reviews
$5.95 In Stock
Product details 336 pages W. W. Norton & Company - English 9780393323740 Reviews:
"Review" by , "Gary Nabhan is reawakening in modern America that inalienable need to delve deeply, sensually into its sustenance, the earth from which it springs, the hands that help it reach our plates and stomachs. He offers an elegant, inspired, and eloquently detailed account of becoming a 'direct participant'(to use his words) in the food that sustains him, and the lives of those around him." Rick Bayless, founding member of Chefs Collaborative and host of Public Television's "Mexico-One Plate at a Time"
"Review" by , "Gary Nabhan is one of the most seminal thinkers in the environmental movement and very probably in the greater arena. Coming Home to Eat is a profound and engaging book, a passionate call to us to re-think our food industry and to return when possible to our own locale for the sources of what we cook and eat."
"Review" by , "Gary Paul Nabhan is a brilliant scientist (ethno-botany) and remarkably successful social activist. For a couple of decades he's helped people in the Southwest figure out how to eat for good health and economically. In Coming Home to Eat Nabhan weaves ideas about eating right into his interest in the pleasure of caring for ecosystems and communities. His stories are often funny and always invaluable."
"Review" by , "Gary Paul Nabhan knows the whims of nature and human nature and writes with a passion for those of us who still see and trust the wild in our land. His stories celebrate the sense of place that belongs in all our foods."
"Review" by , "A practical primer on how to 'eat locally, think globally' (and enjoy it more) wherever you are. Nabhan explores one of the greatest sources of global despoliation and tells us exactly what we can do about it: eat consciously, and eat foods grown close at hand."
"Review" by , "Nabhan brings the rare combination of the sensual and the intellectual to his writing about food. Weaving together the traditions of Thoreau and M. F. K Fisher, Nabhan speaks to those of us concerned about the shifting value of food in our culture. With a healthy dose of self-effacing humor, Nabhan challenges the wisdom of buying into the planetary supermarket and offers his personal journey to eat locally as an alternative. It is a soul food treatise for our time." Peter Hoffman, chef owner of the Savoy Restaurant in New York City and national chair of the Chefs Collaborative
"Review" by , "Nabhan is a very good writer, capable of transforming his adventures into a colorful and engrossing story that will appeal even to readers who might not enjoy a freshly prepared dish of locally obtained caterpillars."
"Review" by , "Nabhan makes us understand how finding and eating local foods connects us deeply and sensually with where we are."
"Review" by , "[E]loquent, richly evocative... fascinating, enlightening and moving."
"Review" by , "I opened the book warily, ever on guard against the moralism and class privilege that so often taint the 'natural foods' movement. Nabhan disarmed me quickly with his political take on eating and his command of statistical data on land ownership, water and energy consumption, and corporate profits.... Coming Home to Eat is an exposé with an honorable sense, companion reading to Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation."
"Synopsis" by , "Amazing and eloquent....Nabhan makes us understand how finding and eating local foods connects us deeply and sensually."--Alice Waters, Chez Panisse
"Synopsis" by , Issuing a "profound and engaging...passionate call to us to re-think our food industry" (Jim Harrison, author of The Raw and the Cooked), Gary Paul Nabhan reminds us that eating close to home is not just a matter of convenience--it is an act of deep cultural and environmental significance. Embodying "a perspective...at once ecological, economic, humanistic, and spiritual" (Los Angeles Times), Nabhan has dedicated his life to raising awareness about food--as an avid gardener, as an ethnobotanist preserving seed diversity, and as an activist devoted to recovering native food traditions in the Southwest. This "inspired and eloquently detailed account" (Rick Bayless, Chefs Collaborative) tells of his year-long mission to eat only foods grown, fished, or gathered within two hundred miles of his home. "A good book for gardeners to read this winter" (The New York Times), Nabhan's work "weav[es] together the traditions of Thoreau and M. F. K. Fisher [in] a soul food treatise for our time" (Peter Hoffman, Chefs Collaborative).
spacer
spacer
  • back to top
Follow us on...


Powell's City of Books is an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, that fills a whole city block with more than a million new, used, and out of print books. Shop those shelves — plus literally millions more books, DVDs, and eBooks — here at Powells.com.