- Good evening, I'm Scott Sanders. And I'm grateful to all the people who are doing all of this good work
- on behalf of our community and the neighborhood and all the creatures that share it with us. When Gary
- Nabhan was a teenager, late in the war-torn 1960s, he dropped out of high school and went to work repairing
- railroad tracks near the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, where he grew up.
- One day he was driving spikes into railroad ties and looked up to see half a dozen great blue herons
- flying overhead. They seemed to be looking for a place to land among the steel mills and the power plants,
- following some ancestral memory of what Indiana used to be like. Unable to spy any water, the herons
- kept on flying.
- And some part of the young Gary Nebhan flew on with them. He discovered in himself a deep ancestral
- urge to learn about these great birds, about their lives and the lives of other creatures, and about
- the great natural cycles that embrace us all.
- Hold it. Some 30 years later, our own Sycamore Land Trust here in Monroe County has helped protect over
- 300 acres in a place called Bean Blossom Bottoms, which includes a rookery for great blue herons. Many
- people gave their money and labor and time
- to make sure that these majestic birds would have a place to breed and feed and rest in our neighborhood.
- And one of the inspirations for all of this effort was the work done over the years by Gary Nabhan as
- a scientist, a writer, a teacher, and a conservationist. He contributed greatly to the brain drain from
- Indiana when he decided to leave.
- going to college in Iowa and then Arizona, and then graduate school in Arizona. Once he settled in the
- southwest and started eating food laced with chili peppers and listening to salsa music and chasing
- lizards in the shadows of cacti, he fell in love with the desert and the native people who had made
- their lives in the desert. I blame our loss on the Indiana dunes
- where Gary played as a boy and where he developed a taste for sand. As a teacher at the University of
- Arizona, as a writer in residence at the Sonora Desert Museum, and now as director of the Center for
- Sustainable Environments at the Northern Arizona University, and above all, as an ethnobotanist and
- a lyrical writer, Gary has deepened our understanding of the relations between people and nature.
- At the heart of his work are these questions. How have long settled people survived in a place without
- ruining it? How can we learn to live in our own places without damaging either our home ground or the
- planet? His 14 books include The Geography of Childhood, Cultures of Habitat,
- enduring seeds, and the desert smells like rain. I keep his books in my bedroom in case I wake in the
- night and need to hear a sane, funny, passionate, and reassuring voice. Gary has won many honors, far
- too many for someone who still has so much hair
- Among them, I will mention only that he won the John Burroughs Award in Natural History for his book,
- Gathering the Desert. He has won Guggenheim and Lannan Fellowships for his writing. He has been named
- a Pew Scholar and a MacArthur Fellow for his contributions to art, science, and conservation. Finally,
- I must tell you that he is a man who loves
- Food. Loves to grow it, gather it, cook it, share it. Once when I was at his house in Arizona, he served
- a meal with enough chili to make my insides feel as though I had swallowed molten lava. For dessert,
- he offered homemade vanilla ice cream. I thought something cool at last.
- As I lifted a tablespoon-sized bite to my mouth, I noticed the little flecks of vanilla beans set off
- against the white. Gary watched me closely. And as I swallowed, I was astounded to discover the ice
- cream was even hotter than the rest of supper. Oh, he says, those little bits, those aren't vanilla.
- Those are jalapenos.
- He is a spicy man on the page and in person, one of the most intensely alive people I have ever known.
- I think of him when I grow discouraged about our ruinous way of life in this country. I think of him
- when the day's news makes me wonder if we will ever figure out how to live more decently and wisely.
- I think of him every time I see a great blue heron
- wading in one of our streams or flying overhead. I am glad that he has flown back to Indiana,
- if only briefly. Please welcome Gary Napier.
- going to tell you a story about a year of eating locally, a year that also happened to be a watershed
- in the history of global food politics. It is the story of finding kindred, food-loving souls within
- a 250-mile radius around my home in the desert and sharing with them the pleasures of gardening and
- gathering, pit roasting and fermenting, feasting and frolicking.
- But it is also a story of juxtapositions about how the remaining farmers, fishermen, and foragers within
- my food shed struggle with challenges, insults, and absurdities different than the ones which our ancestors
- faced a century ago. Wherever I foraged with my neighbors for wild greens, hunted for quail, or sown
- heirloom crops, we have seldom been out of the earshot
- of the global vending machine. It can still be heard dropping its hermetically sealed packages of textured
- soy protein, genetically engineered tortillas, and artificial spices no matter how hard you or I try
- to get away from its noise. Fortunately, I'm not the only one wondering about what kinds of ancient
- culinary melodies are being drowned out by the noise of that transnational vending machine.
- If I can be so bold as to proclaim that we have just lived through a defining moment, the equivalent
- of a Boston tea party for food, I would say that the spring of 1999 to the spring of 2001 was indeed
- such a moment. Farmers refused to grow certain patented seeds hoisted upon them
- by transnational corporations, and students destroyed experimental fields and labs where genetically
- engineered crops were being developed. Consumers demanded that the contents of foods be labeled on their
- packages and boycotted companies with deceptive advertising. Mobs attacked McDonald's and Starbucks
- as part of the protests against a World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle.
- Other countries fought against the corporate control of farmland, seeds, and genes and banned loads
- of US agricultural products potentially harmful to butterflies and babies. The launching of the slow
- food movement in the United States made me aware that there are at least 60,000 like-minded souls in
- Europe and Latin America alone. This story then celebrates the sensual pleasures of food without ignoring
- It's global politics, for we will hardly be able to savor such pleasures any longer if we do not decide
- how to unplug that omnipresent vending machine. That's the introduction of a book that's coming out
- in just two weeks. I wish I could have brought copies with me. It's from the last independent publisher
- left in New York City, WW Norton.
- As you may know, all the other New York publishers are now owned by just four companies that produce
- 75% of the book sales in the United States, thanks to their agreements with Barnes and Noble and Borders.
- But there are healthy counter movements in publishing happening, just as there are in food production
- and sustainable design and sustainable transportation.
- I'm really pleased to be able to read you parts of this book. It's really the first time I'm presenting
- the ideas of the book as a whole. And I'm really happy that that's happening in the state where I grew
- up, although Scott continues to remind me that growing up in Gary, Indiana does not really make me a
- Hoosier. There's something about the Northwest region
- of Indiana that is somewhat unhoosierly, at least to the superficial eye. I'm also really grateful to
- have just spotted Tom Sernak, one of my oldest friends from the Indiana Dunes in the audience. Don't
- know how he hears about things, but he seems to always do. Tom runs with a number of friends and
- family members to Save the Dunes Council, the first conservation organization I ever joined when I was
- 18 years old and the annual dues were only $8 a year. Things have changed since then. I'm going to interlace
- some brief readings of segments of the book with a few commentaries now and then, but try to give you
- a sense of this sweep of
- One year of eating locally, that is my wife Lori and I tried to get four out of every five of our meals
- from the foods that grew within our desert food shed, the Colorado River watershed in the adjacent upper
- reaches of the Sea of Cortez. We spent part of the year on the Sea of Cortez working with indigenous
- communities there and part of the year in Arizona
- teaching and doing other things. We're now in Flagstaff where we've just helped launch the first farmers
- market in northern Arizona that's occurred there in 50 years and have also published a regional sustainable
- foods directory that's now going out to about 8,000 people in that region so that they can buy directly
- from farmers who used to get over three quarters of
- a dollar on every dollar that you and I bought as consumers and now they get about seven or eight cents
- of that dollar whereas most middlemen get at least as much as they do in this chain of food passing
- through six to ten hands from the time it's produced and the place it's produced before it travels some
- fifteen hundred miles and then lands in your mouth.
- In a sense, one of the biggest grievances I have is that with farmers only getting eight or nine cents
- of each dollar that we pay for the food that we eat as consumers, they don't have as much slack to invest
- in the land stewardship that they'd like to see and we'd like to see. Being involved in community-supported
- agriculture, your farmers markets, and many of the other things that you all deeply care about helps
- remedy that situation.
- So I'm going to talk first about some things that Lori and I did in our yard and around our house. And
- although the plants and animals are different, they're things that any of us can do wherever we live.
- Perhaps trying this out in one of the driest, hottest regions of the world, hottest in the sense that
- we have more kinds of chilies and the best kinds of hot chilies. I don't care much about.
- air temperatures since my brain cells were burned out many years ago when I first lived in the desert.
- When we say the desert is hot, we mean because it's so rich in wonderfully hot chilies. By trying this
- out there and then extrapolating to and visiting other things that are happening elsewhere in this continent,
- I think we demonstrated that this can really be done almost anywhere from
- parts of Long Island up to the coastal areas of Alaska and certainly through the Midwest and South and
- Western states. The final parts of this, if I don't explain it well when we come to it, were generated
- by a walk that Laurie and I did across our entire food shed, one radius of this 250-mile
- diameter circle that we were interested in. And we walked with elders and young people from two different
- cultures at the start of the walk, and we were joined by 180 additional people of four other cultures
- for the last day of that walk to celebrate the desert's bounty, its biodiversity, and how that relates
- to maintaining
- both our health and the heritage of desert cultures. And I'm really grateful to all the people who were
- both our teachers and guides on that trip and the young people who joined us in that effort. Some of
- them who had not only spent their entire lives without ever eating native foods for an entire week.
- We cold turkeyed any product from outside of our region.
- But in a couple cases, some of the young walkers with us admitted that that was the first time in five
- to 10 years that they had been off drugs or alcohol. And they really felt that this walk, this pilgrimage,
- put them on a path that saved their life. And I'm humbled by their stamina and desire to see such dramatic changes.
- in their lives since the little changes we were making nearly broke our backs. So here goes. This whole
- effort started out two springs ago just outside of Tucson. Spring equinox, a day of turning over the
- earth, churning up dark garden soil buried beneath the winter's leaf litter, trying to replenish it
- with sunlight.
- a day of humus-stained hands and hopeful hearts. Lori and I pass the daylight hours weeding, tilling,
- watering, and planting. We work to make a fertile place for vegetables, herbs, and beans in all the
- unsewn garden beds around our desert home. I took a pick in my hand, a pick known as a Pulaski, and
- loosened the dry, compacted alkaline soil.
- Lori, a few feet away from me, wisps of blonde hair streaming over her face, turned it over shovel full
- by shovel full. I sifted the decomposed matter rescued from our compost pit of food scraps and clippings
- until I had separated out the smaller grain particles, returning the larger chunks back into the pit.
- We folded in leaf litter and organic soil gleaned from beneath mesquite trees and poured this mixture
- into the beds.
- establishing a new blend of local earth. Down on the soiled knees of our genes, we planted one heirloom
- seed stock after another, watering them, covering them with netting, and then placing larger mess frames
- over them to deter the birds. I mulled the names of the seeds as we buried them snugly in their beds.
- Mesilla Valley chili pasilla, Papago pinto tepary bean, Mrs. Burns lemon basil,
- Zuni Tomatio. It was a canicle of desert seeds, sung into the darkness in hope that they would rise
- again into light. This day of toil marked the first phase of a 15-month ritual, one involving my sweetheart,
- Lori, as well as many of my kin and old friends. The ritual extended beyond the planting of vegetables
- in our own backyard.
- It included the tending of a small orchard and some terraces of agaves and prickly pears in front of
- our house, the gathering of desert greens, yucca blossoms, cactus buds, and fruit in the wild lands
- beyond our fence, the hunting of game birds, and the capture of other creatures out of the desert wilderness
- that seemed boundless around us. We searched for other food producers hidden in our own neighborhood,
- discovering those who locally grow vegetables, dress out game, or can fruit which complement our own.
- The ritual then moved indoors to the drying rack, the chopping block, the hand crank grinder, the stove,
- and the dinner table. It had no single name. It might be termed a communion of neighbors.
- It might be thought of as a return to the old ways of subsisting on native resources at a time when
- globalization is all the rage. My friend Jack Kloppenberg called it coming back into the food shed.
- As some kind of shorthand to myself, I've decided to call it coming home to eat.
- I've lost my interest in those movable feasts or global smorgasbords, which have been the most pervasive
- secular rites celebrated by humankind since the Industrial Revolution began. Let me try to be more precise
- about what this ritual entails, for precision is not normally my inclination. I have initiated an extended communion
- with my plant and animal neighbors, the native flora and fauna found within 250 miles of my home. I've
- chosen to eat with them as well as to eat them. I've decided to join in what Italo Calvino calls the
- ecstasy of swallowing each other in turn, as we were aware in our turn of being swallowed. Calvino suggests
- that we must swallow our pride
- and erase the lines between our bodies and that of sopa de frijoles, huachinango, alabera, cruzano,
- and enchiladas. For the moment, as I pick up a clod of clay, roll it into a marble-sized ball, and tuck
- it into my cheek, I think, let me stick to this earth a while longer. Still, this ritual is simple in
- its intent to make me
- a direct participant as fully and as frequently as possible in the making of the bread and wine, which
- sustains not only my life, but the lives around me as well. At last, I want to fully bear the brunt
- of what my own eating in the world entails. I want to escape the trap that I, like most Americans, have
- fallen into over the last four decades.
- Obtaining nine-tenths of our food from non-local sources with shippers, processors, packagers, retailers,
- and advertisers gaining three times more income off each dollar of food purchased than farmers, fishermen,
- and ranchers do. I want to reduce the distance that my food travels before it reaches my mouth and my mind.
- so that I can reduce the ignorance which my friend Jim Harrison describes with such devastating simplicity.
- As Jim says, the majority of our population that eats beef, pork, and chicken has never known an actual
- cow, pig, or hen. However straightforward my intentions have been, the road back home
- has been chock full of holes and marred with curves, bumps, and sudden diversions. It has taken me more
- than a year to get to this point of beginning in earnest. What I had hoped this ritual might do, as
- most rituals eventually do, was to move me beyond abstract intention into the unanticipated peculiarities
- of practice. Each day's bread, each season's batch of wine might rise and take shape
- in its own weird and wonderful way. The folks that I make and break bread with are surely part of this
- communion as well. Every mouthful I take will be flavored and graced by their presence. After our planning
- was finished by dusk, I went into the house to complete one last chore for the day. It was a cleansing.
- One cognizant of the fact that the average American brings home some 3,300 pounds of foodstuffs each
- year for his or her own consumption. Of course, much of that is never eaten. It is nearly two and a
- half times the weight of what most of our contemporaries in other regions around the world consume.
- And much of it comes from their farmlands.
- While hoping to curb my excesses in eating and wasting, I had also decided to purge my kitchen cabinets
- of all the foods whose origins were distant or unknown from me and whose presence would distract me
- from my mission. Instead of eating them myself or just tossing them away, I would take them to a drop-off
- box for the Community Food Bank of Tucson in the hope that they would find some use by those without
- the slack to buy them, to waste them.
- or even to give them away. I went through one cabinet after another looking at things as if
- I had Alzheimer's. How did that get there? Did I ever really buy something called marshmallow blasted
- fruit loops? Did I ever think that the home baked fruits offered
- to me by Kraft Foods of Cherrytown, New York, were produced by employees that have a passion for food
- and a deep love for the taste of home-baked bakery goods. I had never even noticed how far the foods
- in my cabinets had traveled in order to have the honor of being eaten by an American.
- For instance, the brand of boiled baby clams I buy now and then at a corner store was packaged in California
- but grown in aquaculture farms off the coast of Thailand, or what's left of them. The other products
- that I had, like capers, said that they were made in Mexico, although I'd been assured by scientists
- that this odd little condiment was only grown in Sicily, France, and Spain.
- As I completed my kitchen cupboard food inventory, I discovered that I had unknowingly purchased food
- from six of the top ten food and beverage companies in the world. Nestle, Philip Morris, ConAgra, PepsiCo,
- Coca-Cola, and Mars. The ten titans of the food and drink business collectively sell more than $220
- billion of processed agricultural products in the global market each year.
- In other words, trademark products from these multinational nations now generate about one-tenth of
- all retail sales of foods and beverages across the earth. That amounts to the average equivalent of
- $33 worth of processed foods and canned drinks for each of the 6 billion people living on this planet
- or orbiting around us in satellites at this moment. Together with 41 other transnationals,
- these 10 global food giants are among the 100 largest economies in the world. In other words, only 49
- countries generate gross national products on the same order of magnitude that these global food barons
- do. However eclectic I thought my taste in food had become, this inventory revealed that the bulk of my diet
- had been brought to me by just a handful of food processors and distributors. My cupboard, fridge, and
- pantries contents in Arizona were dominated by agricultural commodities that had been bred, produced,
- processed, and distributed by the same companies active everywhere from Argentina to Zaire. And these
- companies, while dominating more and more of the world's commerce, were becoming fewer and fewer in number.
- as mergers and acquisitions in the food industry recently toppled a trillion dollars a year. In contrast,
- we still seem enamored by that phrase, a taste of homemade food. We still go into restaurants, still
- buy things in grocery stores that claim to be homemade. But homemade food is not simply the soup that
- your parents made
- from a package at your house when you were sick at a child, the carrot tort you won at the cake walk
- at the grade school across the street, or the fresh tortillas sold door to door by the Mexican widow
- from the next block over. It is also the oral pleasure that arises from the flavors, minerals, the sourness
- or the sweetness of the very ground that we walk on, the very soil the seed breaks through,
- as they take in the air, which we ourselves have recently breathed. To really say homemade food and
- mean it, we must taste the earth that we stand on in it. In addition to what we have learned to grow
- at home, we became interested in making weekly contacts with people like ourselves that enjoyed the
- taste peculiar to our region.
- Esperanza, the mesquite tortilla lady, met me on a highway corner once a week and delivered two dozen
- fresh tortillas made from mesquite beans, a product that is not even commercially available in the United
- States. Ms. Soto, the egg lady, offered us turkey eggs, duck eggs, goose eggs, and aracana chicken eggs
- whenever I showed up
- showed up at her house where four of her sons were lounging around on the couches. The folks at the
- National Fruit Market at 12th and Aho Way whose vegetables and fruit came from a dozen farm towns around
- southern Arizona called me up whenever something special came in. I also visited an old Chinese grocery
- that sold venison from Globe, Arizona, 100 miles northeast, and shrimp from of all places,
- Gila Bend, Arizona, down the dry river from me 100 miles. I never figured that one out. The Rodriguez
- Fish Market, which featured Sea of Cortez catches brought in daily from Rocky Point, Sonora, which is
- Arizona's adopted seaport, offered us cabrilla and guacinango. All of this reminded me of one simple
- fact. While I was busy obtaining four out of five of my meals,
- from within a half day's drive or a 10 day walk of my home. Most of my fellow citizens in Arizona were
- sourcing four out of five of their meals from distant lands. By 1980, Arizonans were already gaining
- less than a third of their food supplies from Arizona crops, livestock, poultry, and eggs. Nevertheless,
- Through my contact with Esperanza, the tortilla lady, and Ms. Soto, the egg lady, I no longer doubted
- that there were others in my neighborhood, county, and state who preferred informal networks of food
- exchange to purchasing groceries at supermarket chains. As Lori and I spoke on the telephone with family,
- neighbors, and friends living in other regions of the continent, they would tell us of their delight
- in finding similar networks where they lived.
- a small harbor on the Atlantic seaboard where you could purchase fish directly from the boat on which
- it was caught. Flea markets, swap meets, and garage sales where berries, jerk meat, and sour mash whiskey
- could be purchased out of the trunks of cars amidst used exercise equipment, velvet paintings, and eight
- track tapes of Elvis live in Las Vegas. Church bazaars where
- Old farmers would auction off their home-cured hams, or a couple spinsters would offer the sassafras
- root beer they had brewed up. Without involving any advertising agencies, shipping firms, fancy packaging,
- or middleman markups, millions of pounds of American foods have been brought with cash in hand,
- bartered for, or given away as gifts every summer of our lives.
- It is the true commerce of the continent, the kind that Walt Whitman would have loved. All those cactus
- pickers, turkey smokers, and egg gatherers, and all those fishmongers, ham curers, bootleggers, and
- mushroomers, all the root beer brewers, persimmon pluckers, ginseng diggers, clamors, nocturnal crawfish
- prowlers, and crab potters still out and about in the shallows, woods, and little fields happily working
- what Whitman called
- the land of 10 million virgin farms. In the end, the more Lori and I learned about the ecological effects
- of industrializing and globalizing food, the more we had but one prevailing inclination to ensure that
- our friends and family, that what our friends and family ate supported the conservation
- and not the degradation of the creatures in our own food shed and in our own watershed. If nearly half
- of all the sunlight captured on this planet was now being funneled into fueling only our species, what
- was happening to the rest of the gang out there? Given that most of our food was coming from the greater
- Colorado River watershed and the Sea of Cortez into which it flowed,
- How is the wildlife out there faring if they only had a portion of the resources that formerly sustained
- them? Were the native plants that had supported humans for 8,000 years in Arizona still regenerating
- themselves? Were they being crushed by our big ecological footprint? That footprint, the amount of productive
- land needed to support each of us
- was size 12 acres for the average American, size 9.5 acres for Europeans, and size 1.2 acres for most
- of the residents in developing countries. Lori and I were troubled by that. We wanted to go out and
- see how the watershed which nurtured us was faring to provide all of us within its school a report card
- of its ecological health.
- When Lori and I first expressed that urge to know our food shed intimately, neither of us could have
- imagined that six months later we would complete the last leg of a trek from the Sea of Cortez back
- into southern Arizona and the Colorado River watershed with over 140 O'atam, Surrey, Yaqui, Hopi, Latino,
- and Anglo pilgrims walking along with us. We were all slowly trudging along
- behind a handful of elders who are chanting out a riveting homecoming song. We had come home to the
- foods and medicines that could nourish us without depleting the desert around us, the desert that we
- had walked through and camped in for the previous 12 days. As I caught sight of several hundred people
- there to greet us at the end of our 250-mile pilgrimage, I knew in my heart that the vision that had
- propelled us was no longer, if it had ever been,
- mine nor Laurie's nor that of any other person alone. What had happened to us was due to some collective
- affirmation that we all needed, all of us, to reengage with the lands and the seas immediately before
- us, the deep traditions about them that could guide us. By renewing our contact with the power of the
- desert and the ocean, their foods and their medicines, their songs and their stories, we could be healed.
- And as we learned in conversations with others along the way, we were not the only ones who were opting
- for local foods and medicines, rather than just accepting any organic foods, no matter where they came
- from, or any natural herb remedy, whether it was from Siberia or Chile.
- Lori and I gathered together with our neighbors, fishermen and foragers from the Seri villages, farmers
- and basket makers from the Papago Indian Reservation, seed savers from Native Seed Search, schoolyard
- gardeners from the Hashan Charter School. We joined together for a collective journey to see how our
- health stemmed from the very wildlife habitats, croplands, and cultural communities that surrounded us.
- We went out to see how badly those habitats, fields, and communities had been injured and how that had
- something to do with our own injuries and maladies. We tasted what each community we passed through
- called their local foods and took a hard look at how it was produced. We learned how to step together
- covering one long desert mile after another until some 250 miles had been completed and celebrated.
- It was then
- that we realized we would have to dedicate the rest of our lives in one way or another to restoring
- our communities to fuller health. And so we called this little trek the Desert Walk for Biodiversity,
- Heritage, and Health, a multicultural pilgrimage fueled by native foods and medicines, prayers,
- and songs. We unabashedly spoke about what ailed us. One autumn pilgrim broke the silence by telling
- us how he felt doomed
- to a premature death when he found out that he had diabetes, a disease that was not even in the community
- where he grew up a half century ago. And then a younger fittersary Indian fisherman admitted that he
- had once thought that only other tribes suffered from diabetes until he himself was diagnosed with the
- same affliction.
- By the time we had walked our 200-some miles, we had put considerable distance between ourselves and
- those Zucaritas, Tony the Tiger corn flakes, and Coca Colas. We had feasted on boiled venison,
- baked rabbit, and grilled corvina, tomatillo consumés and squash soufflés, tepary bean burritos wrapped
- in mesquite tortillas, freshly picked and lightly steamed lamb's quarters, purslane,
- tansy mustards, and cress. We had guzzled down ocotillo blossom tea and prickly pear punch, mistletoe,
- and Mormon tea. We had been presented gifts of organ pipe jam, stewed pumpkin, and pinole to eat, creosote
- bush salve, jojoba oil, and Damiana tea to lessen our aches, pains, blisters, and bruises. Our desserts
- had ranged from chia seeds soaked in cactus juice to pit roasted mezcal.
- We had walked right past stores full of sodas and beers, chips and cupcakes, knowing that they seldom
- take away our hunger and thirst. Instead, we gathered around campfires at night, listening to personal
- testimonials of hardships and rising to dance with one another as fiddlers, drummers, rattleshakers,
- and singers moved us to our feet. Then up and walking once more the next day,
- We bore witness to what was happening to the land, both good and bad. It was a slow walking meditation
- on where we've been, what we've ignored around us, and what we had yet to see. As we started up the
- very last hill before crossing the border from Mexico into the US near the last leg of our journey,
- We saw several Indian women singing on the roadside and shaking their gourd rattles. Cameramen began
- to appear everywhere, and even the customs officials were there to welcome us, waving like children
- as if they'd never witnessed someone crossing the border. I was so caught up in the rhythm of the music
- that someone had to nudge me to get me to look up on the ridge paralleling the road where we were walking.
- There, moving at the same speed we were moving,
- were a half dozen Mexican hikers intent to cross the border at the exact same time that we did when
- the customs officials in border patrol were most distracted. They were in plain view to anyone whose
- eyes wandered toward the eastern horizon. But at that moment, all eyes were upon us. That was when little
- things began to go wrong. No one could find the bag of bread we had brought along for the borderline
- communion.
- The digital camera was accidentally locked inside the van, as were the keys. When they were rescued
- with another set of keys, the camera was dropped on the ground. And then, like the rest of us, it had
- trouble focusing for a while. But then the singing smoothed everyone out, and a dozen cameras flashed
- as we reached the graded cattle guard that served as the boundary between two lands, between people, cuisines,
- caloric opportunities, and ultimately destinies. Onlookers clapped while we cheered and posed for pictures.
- Suddenly, our friends from the other side appeared with an armful of the breads we had chosen to break
- on the border, not for nourishment, but for catharsis. We had chosen Wonder Bread and Pan Bimbo, the
- loaves of foul air and feeble constitution.
- They were the foods that had come out of nowhere, one elderly Indian said, the foods that had lured
- us all with their empty promises, that had seduced us like the whores and studs in a border town brothel,
- that had dazzled us with the glitter of their baggage but left us feeling hungry and heartbroken, cheapened
- and cheated, diseased and dirtied. They were the loaves that had doped us into forgetting
- what truly had nourished us over the course of our lives. Suddenly, as if he were the exorcist sent
- to drive away the devil, Adolfo, the Sari Indian elder, howled out a song and a dozen of us saw the
- bread at our feet and realized what we all must do. We leapt high then and came down hard on what stood
- between us and the sacred earth, those lousy loaves of bread.
- We stomped and danced until those plastic wrapped globs of doughy air bread melted into the ground right
- on top of the borderline. Some danced the pascola, an ancient dance of the desert, while others hooted
- and hollered, jumping up and down until the pale empty loaves were beaten flat as tortillas. Pan bimbo
- and wonder bread
- were the perfect manifestations of the vacuous nutritional promises of the industrialized food system,
- the one that had sold our health down the river. I heard echoes of the jingles from my youth, how such
- facsimiles of bread could build strong bodies 12 ways. They had popped up and spread across the Americas
- in the 30s, replacing Ash cakes, Stoddy cakes, and Johnny cakes,
- Baguettes, biscuits, and bagels, focaccias, Puglacies, and pitas, hand-shaped tortillas, and dark, seedy
- harvest loaves of all shapes and sizes, with one phantom of one standard size, machine-knifed into equally
- thick slices. A white bread for white America, which sooner or later became so symbolic
- of the dominant culture that Mexican restaurants would see Americans sit down at their tables and remove
- all the corn and wheat tortillas they had had out, replacing them with a dozen slices of bimbo or wonder.
- That bread is as substantial as foam, El Indio smirked, picking up the flattened carcass of a bimbo
- loaf after the dancing was done. Pan de espuma.
- as the bewildered customs officials let us pass, I knew that however many more miles we had yet to walk,
- we had broken bread in an altogether unprecedented sense by accepting no substitutions for true communion
- with one another and this sacred land. On our last night before we ended the pilgrimage, we had the
- true communion we had all hoped for.
- venison and cottontail, pozole and pumpkins, beans and whole grain breads that the autumn villagers
- of San Pedro had lovingly made for us. Autumn in Anglo, Sarri and Latino were leaning up against one
- another, tired, quietly weeping as each participant offered prayers and proverbs of thanksgiving. The
- leader of the autumn youth, Tony Johnson, stood up among us, then scanned the room, looking in to the
- many faces,
- around him. We started this walk 10 days ago down by the ocean. We started out there and then we walked
- all the way. I was afraid we weren't going to make it. We did. I did. It wasn't because any strength
- that I had that all of you don't have. It was because of the people who are here with us. Yes, the people
- right here, the desert people alive. That's why I walked
- I believe that we are not yet dead. Do you understand what I'm saying? We are not dead. There are people
- who say we might as well be dead because we're diabetic, that we'll die young anyway. They also say
- we're dead because some of us are alcoholics. But walking from Mexico to here, I didn't see any dead
- Indians, any dead people at all. We're all alive and we may look
- dead, tired, dirty, and ugly, but we're alive. There was some laughter, but also others were weeping.
- I felt a rush of relief wash across the room. It was out on the table. All these folks had been told
- all their lives that diabetes was in their genes, that there was little that they could do about it,
- that they should be resolved to a limited life. And now Tony, on behalf of all the Pilgrims, was standing tall
- and saying that that was a lie. A lie from deterministic scientists who had spent hundreds of millions
- of dollars trying to find the elusive gene which caused Indian diabetes instead of helping people with
- ways to live a rich life that included savory native foods and plenty of exercise out in the desert
- where they lived. And all you kids out there, don't ever tell them that you
- Don't ever let them tell you that you can't make it. Look at all these people who have walked, all who've
- helped. We never thought we would make it back, but we made it through again because everyone here was
- praying for us. Even those who may have never set foot out on the road with us, those people prayed
- and believed in us and believed we could make it. You know, when we were so far away and we missed home,
- it didn't feel like we knew where we were going. We didn't know where the next road was going to lead to.
- The only thing familiar to us, the only things that made us feel at home was those foods and our songs,
- the ones that come from our traditional way. And I realized that no matter where we were, where we go
- in this world, if we have our foods, our songs, our language, we'll always be home. And as he spoke,
- I realized that the words in his language for healing, wildness, and wholeness came
- from the same roots, and somehow, over the two weeks that had just passed, we had walked all the way
- down to those roots. I lost about eight pounds during that walk, and as expected, my HDL-LDL ratio improved,
- confirming that all those high-fiber-rich native foods probably do have the health benefits that we
- had learned about earlier.
- But walking has its health benefits, too. And so does foraging. And so does praying. And so does singing
- and laughing and community building. If the native foods are worth eating only for their value in reducing
- blood sugar or cholesterol, we might as well just extract their soluble fiber-making genes and insert
- them in some easy-to-grow, easy-to-prepare, nutraceutical packaged food. But they are also
- good for the land and good for our souls. I have come to love their flavors, even though some of my
- friends like Scott still remind me that they're a little too hot for their acquired tastes. I don't
- doubt that they are right, since I still serve meals at my table that my friends and family don't have
- the guts to eat.
- But their acceptability to consumers is not really what is keeping them from being more widely embraced
- and adopted. The real bottleneck in the revival of local grown foods is a cultural, or more precisely,
- a spiritual dilemma. If we no longer believe that the earth is sacred, or that we are blessed by the
- very bounty all around us, or that we have a caretaking responsibility given to us by the creator,
- It doesn't really matter to most folks how much ecological and cultural damage is done by the way we
- eat. It doesn't matter whether we ever participate in the butchering of our own meat instead of letting
- someone else do it, the harvesting and grinding of our grain, the foraging and drying of our herbs,
- until we stop craving to be somewhere else and someone else other than the animals
- whose very cells are constituted from the place on the earth that we love the most, then there is little
- reason to care about the fate of local foods, of family farms, or healthy landscapes and communities.
- We continue on adding to our dooryard garden, harvesting what we can from the wild lands around our home,
- raising minor breeds of livestock and planting native seeds. The percentage of food that we get from
- local sources will no doubt vary through time, but I'm sure it will never return to the abysmally low
- proportion it was before we began this modest experiment. We can't go back to ignoring where we're situated
- in the food chain, that cascade of energy that can be shunted in the direction of regeneration or
- in the other direction towards Desolation Row. Whenever I have doubts about whether all this effort
- has been worth it, I go out into the wilds beyond my backyard and simply taste a fruit or flower freshly
- plucked from a local tree or vine. My mouth, my tongue, and my heart remind me what my mind too often forgets
- that I simply love the flavor and scent of where I live and all the plants and creatures I live with.
- Thank you.
- if you're shy I can write down the recipe for jalapeno ice cream. It's really a series of concentric
- circles is the best way to say it. In other words, we focus most of our foraging and
- and food growing very, very close to home. But I would think that most of our grandparents would find
- it absurd that I chose a 250-mile radius. In the desert, that made sense, not only because of the low
- productivity per acre, but traditionally, the people like the ancestors of the folks that we walked with
- did that pilgrimage to the ocean and back up watershed. And so I think you can define it as a series
- of nested sets where you might try to aim to get fully a third of your food from very local within an
- hour's walk of your home, another circle where you try to get another third that's the people who come
- into your local farmer's market, and the other third
- from those distinctive habitats within a certain day's walk or drive from your home. The key thing for
- me is that we've lost the chance to observe how our food is grown. If I can get to a farm or to a fishing
- grounds within a day and really see, I feel a lot more comfortable than I do buying
- strawberries in the winter that are labeled organic that also say that they come from Puerto Monte in
- Chile. I will never be able to see what organic means to Chileans, and I never know whether they're
- grown without pesticides and herbicides, but grown with slave labor. I want to know how the food is
- grown, and I also want to know who knows it. So however far you travel,
- within a day or a week should be one of the guidelines so that you can actually go out and see the foods.
- That's why I like the community-supported agriculture projects that have as a requirement that you actually
- work on the farms or farms where the food's being produced. It's still just kind of a hollow victory
- to have locally grown foods if it's just delivered to your doorstep every day and you never see the
- farms every week or whatever it is. Good question.
- Way back there. Household products and clothing. Great question. That's a much more subtle and complex
- issue. But at the Center for Sustainable Environments, we're having a lecture series and then a task force.
- eco-regional task force through the fall and winter that's called Foraging a Greener Economy for the
- Colorado Plateau. And we're actually going through food, fiber, non-timber forest products like small
- diameter timber that can be used for housing or furniture making, medicines, basketry materials, and
- all of those things. And what we're really looking towards is
- ecoregional certification of products. When we look at the Forest Stewardship Council's recommendations
- for green certification, certifying that wild foods are sustainably harvested or that cultivated foods
- and medicines are organically and sustainably grown. Very quickly, after giving you the general guidelines,
- they say, unless these are adapted and refined to fit
- constraints and conditions of your own locality, your own climatic and ecological region, these are
- kind of abstractions. And so we're trying for food, fiber, medicine, utensils to try to figure out what
- sustainability means for our particular ecoregion and for the cultural mix that we have there. And so
- I can't speak immediately about
- household products at the level of detail that I wish I could. But I think it's a very key issue, and
- thank you for bringing it up. Yes, a couple rows in front there. What's your realistic diagnosis for
- a dying planet that's going to double itself within one or two years? How do you approach communities
- under such dire circumstances?
- You know, my basic approach to life is that I'm an intellectual pessimist, but a glandular optimist.
- And fortunately, my glands are still functioning. In other words, you could intellectually convince
- me that we are on a dying planet in dire straits.
- that our music doesn't sound as good as the other dire straits. But the fact of the matter is, however
- myopic it seems, those small acts that all of us are capable of on a daily basis still give me hope
- that I can't think of any other way to reshift our collective priorities, build
- sustainability into our communities except by taking the modest baby steps each day that each of us
- can do. I just don't know any other way to do it and however naive that may seem with the population
- up to six billion and rising and already 40% of all the solar energy on this planet being shut into those
- 6 million people instead of the other 250,000 species on this planet. Each little step we take still
- gives me hope. And I... That's right.
- You know, the number of voices, the size of the chorus is really rapidly growing and I don't want to
- just talk about, you know, numbers like 60,000 people as paid members of the slow food movement or
- how many people identify themselves as environmentalists or willing to pay more for organic food or
- any of that. I mean, those are pretty crude indicators of what's happening and maybe still a drop in
- the bucket. But some things really give me this sense that we are at a turning point. And one of those,
- again, was that when I started this project, the very month that I started at Science Magazine,
- had a survey comparing how Europeans and Americans thought about genetically engineered foods, medical
- research, such as a stem cell research stuff that's been in the news lately, and chemically and genetically
- modified agricultural production. And this was a huge issue in Europe by that time, spring of 1999.
- less than a quarter of all Americans cared about it at all. They redid this survey three months after
- the WTO conflict in Seattle. And the American awareness of these issues and concern about them was nearly
- up to the level of Europeans. Now, as an aside, I'm not saying that students should burn
- experimental fields of genetically engineered corn or go and throw rocks through the windows of Starbucks.
- But the fact of the matter is that that's what we heard about it, WTO, instead of the Paul Hawkins and
- the Wes Jacksons and the Mary Ann Motts who've been involved in talking about these issues for 20 years,
- who have offered
- sane green business strategies for getting more of these healthy foods and products into the marketplace.
- It was not a bunch of tree huggers and wackos that dominated either Seattle or Genoa. And so I think
- I'm sort of a slow learner on this stuff that there's many, many people
- both on this continent and other continents, way far ahead of me. And I think we're simply devoting
- more and more time and intellectual concern to how to resolve this dilemma. Yes?
- Yeah. You know, we're not really good at convincing even our family and closest friends that McDonald's
- is a cruddy deal on intellectual grounds. I mean, probably the least likely person to be convinced of
- this stuff is my own mother.
- and probably your dorm colleagues. And I don't think we convince people about this issue by ideological
- fervor alone. The thing that has brought more people back into using the native seeds, the vegetable
- seeds that we've saved through Native Seed Search, a nonprofit I started 18 years ago, is
- the taste and the textures and the gorgeous colors of these things, not the idea of biodiversity conservation
- or conservation of germplasm. I mean, if germplasm, it sounds like something you want to use Bactin
- on. The point is that we need to convince people of the sensual pleasures of these things, of exposing
- them to it, so that
- McDonald's seems so boring to them that they just walk by it. And that's what's happening in Italy with
- the slow food movement. They even got the pope to say that fast food is anti-Christian. I mean, this
- is a great thing, that we're meant to eat in communion with one another slowly, considerately, with
- reverence for our food, so that fast food is
- You know, it's a bad deal. I mean, the other comparison that I like that you can try it on your dorm
- mates, and I was horrified when I saw this, that I'd actually been quoted in Dr. Dean Adell's book on
- health and diet on this. I can't believe I actually let this slip out of my mouth. Fast food is like
- quick sex. It makes you feel
- satisfied for about three seconds, and then you spend about another four years feeling guilty about
- it. I mean, it's just not satisfying in any real sense of that term. And so you can use some analogies
- like that. Don't say that it came from me, or don't imply that you've had a lot of experience with
- quick sex so that you know what you're talking about, but, you know, get it across to your buddies.
- Oh, well. Any other questions? I just want to honor all the many things that you all are doing in this
- community, not only the Simply Living Fair, but a great and vital farmers market, the radio stations
- and newspapers,
- that have covered the fair and had offered interviews about this topic. It's such wonderful people whose
- hearts are in the right places, such intelligence that I really honor all of you who've devoted time
- to these efforts and hope that the fair this weekend will inspire you to commit yourselves in an even
- deeper way to these issues. Thank you very much.