Hey Mother Nature

By Gary Paul Nabhan
for Slow Food Nation

The Earth has grown tired of making fossilized food
Tired of having to pump fossil fuel as well as
Ancient groundwater up from her very innards
To let them spill onto our fields & orchards
Where frantic crops are forced to suck it all up.
What oozed out of the aquifer and oil well
Now bleeds with additives, fertilizers & pesticides
So that we might eat.

We too have grown tired
Tired of all those so-called “fast” foodstuffs
That are all actually frozen in time
While being freed from their attachments to place
So that they might be flung
Half way across the hemisphere
To fly into our mouths
Like so many stones shot from a catapult.

Our bodies are tired of taking in
Anything in need of thawing out, that is,
Anything micro-waved in a frigid plastic sack
Anything cloistered in a rigid sealed box
Anything taken off the range & locked in a feedlot
Anything with a patented genetic modification
Anything once wild that has been captured & broken.

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Recently appeared in Resurgence Magazine, by: Gary Paul Nabhan

Biodiversity is not just “out there” - in the rainforests, oceans and wetlands - it is here, on our plates.

I DID NOT know it by such lofty terms as food biodiversity back them, but as a child in a household of Lebanese immigrants to America, I viscerally knew that we had items in our backyard, cupboard, pantry and refrigerator that our neighbours did not. The yoghurt or lebna made by my aunts was more viscous, more bitingly sour and easier on my stomach than the flavoured, sweetened, pasteurised, homogenised ghost of yoghurt in American grocery stores. The vine leaves we picked from the sand dunes around our home were selected for a particular shape of leaves - their ‘female’ lobes were more rounded and cohesive - than those seen in Greek or Jewish delicatessens. The anise-flavored arak bootlegged by my uncles made the mass-produced ouzo from the liquor store pale by comparison.

From my earliest visits to other households in America, Mexico, Ecuador, Italy and Oman, it became obvious that each ethnicity - indigenous, immigrant or refugee - sampled, named, sustained and savoured its own slice of the planet’s biodiversity on its own peculiar terms.
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• Did you know that Gary’s essay from his Arab/American book is cover story of the July 2008 edition of the Journal of Arizona History? It includes two photos of Hadji Ali, the first Moslem Arab-American.

• Did you know that Gary’s Wild Apples of Kazakhstan essay that was the cover story of the Spring 2008 Orion magazine is inspiring a film documentary in Kazakhstan?

• Did you know that Gary’s botanical travels following explorer Nikolay Vavilov will be released as Where Our Food Comes from by Island Press in mid-September?

• Did you know that the list of 1080 place-based heritage foods at risk complied by Gary and his RAFT colleagues is the first-ever redlist of food plants and animals unique to North America?

• Did you know that there are two Gary Paul Nabhans, one born in Worster Massachusetts, another in Gary Indiana, less than two years apart?

• Did you know that Gary’s books have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese and French?

• Did you know that Gary was awarded the Premio Gaia by the Sicilian government for his creative writing and conservation work?

You could feel that spring had come to the Berkshires after a long and gray winter. Wherever we went around Great Barrington, farmers and gardeners were hoeing the ground, planting seeds, adjusting water lines, patching up chicken coops, or moving livestock between pastures. By noon on Saturday, many of us congregated at the Route 7 Grill near Great Barrington, to sample and discuss the foods and brews unique to the Berkshires, and ponder what they meant to our society as Earth Day of 2008 loomed before us. We sipped hard cider made from heirloom Baldwin Apples, nibbled at freshly-picked spring greens, passed around Berkshire blue cheese, and savored barbecue sandwiches from brisket smoked not fifty yards from where we were sitting. As the warm sun poured down upon us and the first daffodils broke out into flower in the pasture beyond us, I drifted off into a reverie about folks were eating when the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970.

I remember that day because I had taken a leave of absence from my freshman year in college to work as a cartoonist and cub reporter at Earth Day headquarters in Washington, D.C. Like many times before and since, I was essentially playing hookie from my normal responsibilities to engage with others in promoting a somewhat novel way of looking at the world around us: we wished to have all human inhabitants on this little planet understand how their actions and consumption patterns affected the entire biosphere in which we lived. But while we worked fourteen hour days writing newsletters and press releases in a little office on DuPont Circle, we were oblivious to the fact that our own eating patterns might be contributing to the planets problem.

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It was a wild way to break in the New Year, sharing local game and fish with hunters who donated their venison, pronghorn antelope backstrap and javelina “pork roasts” to their friends at the Cattle Baron in Flagstaff, Arizona. As we were sitting waiting for the first meat to come out of the roasting pit, I began to daydream about whether such an event would have even been “on my screen” some twenty years ago, as the local foods movement was first taking root.

Back before the founding of Chefs Collaborative, there were only 60 CSAs in the entire country, and some 1755 farmers markets; today there are more than 1700 CSAs and nearly 4400 farmers markets blessing our cities, towns, and rural landscapes. Over the last few years, there has been a 22% annual increase in local food sales in or near the communities where it was produced. Local food sales in the U.S. now top $5 billion a year, up from $2 billion/year in 2000. The many “local food challenges” are tangibly helping family farmers stay on the land, and attracting others to take up farming. In Oregon alone, the number of farms has grown from 26,700 in 1974, to more than 40,000 today. Books like Joan Gussow’s This Organic Life, Deborah Madison’s Local Flavors, Brian Halweil’s Eat Here, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Barbara Kingsolver and Steve Hopp’s Animal, Vegetable and Miracle, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon’s Plenty, and my own Coming Home to Eat have certainly helped inspire more folks to eat locally. However, the real work has been done on the farm and in the kitchen.

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