The Avra Valley in the Sonoran Desert, just southwest of Tucson, Arizona, doesn't look particularly inviting, especially if you're hungry. The rubbly soil bristles with spiny shrubs and thorny cacti, the trees have small, leathery leaves, and the animals have names like Gila monster and bark scorpion. But to Gary Paul Nabhan, that caustic exterior hides a veritable smorgasbord. Sidestepping some thorns and burrs, he walks up to a squat prickly pear cactus and whacks off a slice with his machete. After cooking, he says, it will taste a lot like green beans.
Nabhan is no Tex-Mex Martha Stewart, no hippie visionary hoping to feed the world fried grasshoppers and roasted moth larvae, although he likes to snack on them himself. He is director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University and the recipient of both a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship and a Pew Scholarship, as well as the author of acclaimed books on conservation. His most recent, to be published this fall, is titled Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods. It describes his one-year culinary quest to eat foods only from within a 250-mile radius of his desert home— not to test his survival skills, but to make a devastating point: Our eating habits are destroying the planet.
Little more than a century ago, nearly half of all Americans farmed. But by the 1997 U.S. agricultural census, only 2 percent still listed farming as an occupation. Americans now get nearly a quarter of all their fruits and vegetables and more than half of all their seafood from foreign countries. A typical morsel of food journeys 1,400 miles before it reaches a mouth— 50 times farther than it did 20 years ago— changing hands at least six times along the way.
The virtues of this global goulash are obvious: Food is relatively cheap, and almost any food can be had at any time of the year. Yet to Nabhan, the drawbacks are costly: The more global our agriculture, he says, the less varied our food; the more mechanized our farms, the poorer our farmers; the more abundant our crops, the less healthy our landscapes. Worst of all, we've grown blind to the bounty in our own backyards. To prove a point, Nabhan stoops over another cactus and says, "This little one here is the one we get the flower buds off of. They taste like asparagus tips." A few steps away, he stops in front of a withered-looking creosote bush. Its leaves make a great medicinal tea, he says. Even those mesquite trees are good for a snack or two. Their dried pods taste a little like chocolate, and they can be ground to make a flour rich in soluble fiber.
