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.

...more about coming home to eat

Santa Cruz Valley Heritage Foods
By Gary Paul Nabhan
April 13, 2009

For millennia, the Santa Cruz River Valley has been a natural corridor for the seasonal migration of birds as well as other wildlife, and for the cultural diffusion and exchange of foodstuffs. It harbors the northernmost populations of wild peppers known as chiltepines, but the first culinary use of chilies north of the present-day U.S./Mexico border was also recorded in one of its prehistoric villages.

Other wild plants that have been prepared as food or drink in the Desert Southwest for upwards of eight thousand years —from century plants to velvet mesquite—remain in use here today. Thus the Santa Cruz River Valley can rightly be called one of the ancient hearths of Southwestern cuisines.

When we try to recall what foods have been grown, harvested, prepared and served here for many centuries, at least a dozen immediately come to mind: green corn tamales; carne machaca con verduras; flat enchiladas made with “gordita” corn cakes; tepary bean casuelas; prickly pear...

...finish reading