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.