It is perfectly possible these days to buy strawberries in the middle of winter, imported from halfway around the globe. And ecologist Gary Paul Nabhan finds that appalling. Inspired by a trip to his parent's homeland of Lebanon, where his relatives ate only local foods (and many of those produced on their own land), he decided to do the same where he lives, in the southwestern desert of Arizona. His motto is Thoreau's: "...live each season as it passes, breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each."
Understandably, his long-time (and, one gathers from this account, long-suffering) girlfriend and various other friends and relatives take a skeptical view of this enterprise. After all, it is a desert. And the author has a tendency to be extremely experimental in his cooking, whether pollen or grubs. But he persevere on, learning how to roast mescal lechuguilla from local Native Americans, as learning how they ate years ago, before the proliferation of processed foods took over the continent. Older family members, when pressed for the 'old' ways of food preparation, express disapproval for his romantic (and, as they see, impractical) desire to return to the labor of preparing everything by hand, sacrificing hours a day to the task of getting dinner to the table.
Much of the book deals with the politics of food growing--the high dollar you pay to get strawberries in December mostly goes to transportation costs and the farmer gets very little, even though it is his (or her) labor and soil that produces the product. Growing your own food is undoubtedly best, and Nabhan strongly encourages this, citing a study that shows that the return in product is three times greater than the expense, even with the high cost of water. Unfortunately, those that live in apartments and condos are rather ignored. Careful shopping, I suppose is the remedy in that case, supporting local growers and eating only food in season. He points out that this is true even of organic foods--if they have been shipped around the globe, how good are they for the environment?
Genetically engineered foods also get a thumbs-down, and from an interesting viewpoint. Rabbi Yossi Serebryanski, one of the coplaintiffs in the case against the FDA, argues that genetically engineered foods are no longer kosher, as they often include genes from viruses, insects, and hogs--correct labeling, at the very least, is necessary for those that need to keep kosher for religious reasons.
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