 Since Coming Home to Eat was first published in 2001, the local food movement has exploded, and more people than ever are “going green” in an effort lead healthier, more eco-friendly lives.
Gary Nabhan's year-long mission to eat only foods grown, fished, or gathered within 220 miles of his Arizona home offers striking, timely insights into our evolving relationship with food and place—and encourages us to redefine “eating close to home” as an act of deep cultural and environmental significance.
As an avid gardener, ethnobotanist preserving seed diversity, and activist devoted to recovering native food traditions in the Southwest, Nabhan writes about his long campaign to raise awareness about food with contagious passion and humor. |
Vermilionaire: An inhabitant of Southern Louisiana who benefits from the region's rich culture and environment.
  Vermilionaire is also the title of a recording by the Lost Bayou Ramblers, a Cajun band from Louisiana whose title track is a traditional song of going down to the bayou to fish, hunt, and trap, and never dying of hunger. As oil pours beneath the surface of the water in the Gulf of Mexico and makes its way to the coast, the families which have lived in close connection to the Gulf's unique habitat continue to be threatened by both man-made and natural pressures.
All along the coast, from the Florida Keys to the mouth of the Rio Grande on the Texas-Mexico border, folks like the Vermilionaires have been forced from their homelands as their jobs have been lost, their lands flooded or contaminated and their properties ruined. We find among them some of the most marginalized peoples in the United States: long-term residents such as the Houma, Cajun, Creole, Seminole, Miccosukee, African, Cuban, “Cracker,” Choctaw, and Creek, as well as hard-working immigrants from Sicilian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Central American and Mexican ethnic enclaves.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has already been called the worst man-made disaster in the history of the United States. But even that label does not capture all the dimensions of this tragedy.
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