So should it be any surprise that when we break bread and eat together with people from backgrounds different than our own, fear falls away and we find previously unanticipated common ground?
If there is a corollary to that principle, it is that when we get outside to work side by side together to restore food-producing landscapes and to recover historically declining food species or varieties, we harvest an even more delicious capacity to respect one another and move toward long-term collaboration instead of conflict. That’s the very premise of my forthcoming book from Island Press, Food from the Radical Center, due out by late September.
Now just imagine if we could actually get some politicians down off their soap boxes, in their jeans and boats, planting trees together or releasing fish back into streams…. I don’t doubt that the prospects for collaborative actions in other spheres would not measurably improve.
–Gary Paul Nabhan
