 |
Renewing America's Food Traditions: A search for forgotten delicacies
By Gary Paul Nabhan
Published: EatingWell July/August 2008
I was once asked what I would do if I had to choose to eat just one of America's distinct heritage cuisines exclusively. Would I head to the Mississippi Delta to try the crayfish, rockfish and gumbo of Creole and Cajun dishes, or to a New England Yankee farmstead to savor one of the region's many heirloom cider apples, roasted root vegetables, mutton or cheeses? Would I travel instead to Puget Sound for Chinook salmon cooked over a smoky fire on alder sticks and topped with a huckleberry sauce? Or hunker down in a canyon in the Southwest for grilled, range-fed goat, Hatch chiles and tomatillos?
As my imagination raced around the continent, my mouth watered. I thought about the question during a long, long pause, then replied, “I think I'd cry…” I would cry with joy at the astounding diversity of native foods we still have. And I would cry with sorrow at what we have lost and may still lose.
|
 |
An Unlikely Way to Save a Species: Serve It for Dinner
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: April 30, 2008
Some people would just as soon ignore the culinary potential of the Carolina flying squirrel or the Waldoboro green neck rutabaga. To them, the creamy Hutterite soup bean is too obscure and the Tennessee fainting goat, which keels over when startled, sounds more like a sideshow act than the centerpiece of a barbecue.
But not Gary Paul Nabhan. He has spent most of the past four years compiling a list of endangered plants and animals that were once fairly commonplace in American kitchens but are now threatened, endangered or essentially extinct in the marketplace. He has set out to save them, which often involves urging people to eat them.
Mr. Nabhan's list, 1,080 items and growing, forms the basis of his new book, an engaging journey through the nooks and crannies of American culinary history titled “Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods” (Chelsea Green Publishing, $35).
|
|
Renewing America's Food Traditions in your neighborhood this May!
Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods
Renewing America's Food Traditions is a beautifully illustrated dramatic call to recognize, celebrate, and conserve the great diversity of foods that gives North America its distinctive culinary identity that reflects our multicultural heritage. It offers us rich natural and cultural histories as well as recipes and folk traditions associated with the rarest food plants and animals in North America. In doing so, it reminds us that what we choose to eat can either conserve or deplete the cornucopia of our continent.
While offering a eulogy to a once-common game food that has gone extinct—the passenger pigeon—the book doesn't dwell on tragic losses. Instead, it highlights the success stories of food recovery, habitat restoration, and market revitalization that chefs, farmers, ranchers, fishermen, and foresters have recently achieved.
|
|
New Book to Hit The Shelves on March 27, 2008!
Arab/American: Landscape, Culture, and Cuisine in Two Great Deserts
The landscapes, cultures, and cuisines of deserts in the Middle East and North America have commonalities that have seldom been explored by scientists—and have hardly been celebrated by society at large. Sonoran Desert ecologist Gary Nabhan grew up around Arab grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who have been emigrating to the United States and Mexico from Lebanon for more than a century, and he himself frequently travels to the deserts of the Middle East. In an era when some Arabs and Americans have markedly distanced themselves from one another, Nabhan has been prompted to explore their common ground, historically, ecologically, linguistically, and gastronomically.
Arab/American is not merely an exploration of his own multicultural roots but also a revelation of the deep cultural linkages between the inhabitants of two of the world's great desert regions. Here, in beautifully crafted essays, Nabhan explores how these seemingly disparate cultures are bound to each other in ways we would never imagine.
|
|
Forget Organic. Eat Local.
The best food you can eat may be in your own backyard. Here is one man's quest for the perfect apple.
By: John Cloud
Not long ago I had an apple problem. Wavering in the produce section of a Manhattan grocery store, I was unable to decide between an organic apple and a nonorganic apple (which was labeled conventional, since that sounds better than "sprayed with pesticides that might kill you"). It shouldn't have been a tough choice--who wants to eat pesticide residue?--but the organic apples had been grown in California. The conventional ones were from right here in New York State. I know I've been listening to too much npr because I started wondering: How much Middle Eastern oil did it take to get that California apple to me? Which farmer should I support--the one who rejected pesticides in California or the one who was, in some romantic sense, a neighbor? Most important, didn't the apple's taste suffer after the fruit was crated and refrigerated and jostled for thousands of miles?
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
