TracyFood

Book review: “Coming Home To Eat” by Gary Paul Nabham 17 May 2007 11:54 pm

Posted by Tracy in : advice, books, cooking, eating, environment, local food, politics, reviews, sustainability , trackback

Let me get this out of the way first: I do not recommend this book. It was due back at my friendly local public library last Thursday, and before that I had it at home for two months, during which I only managed to read the first 110 pages, all of which felt vaguely like a punishment. If you’re looking for a good read about the local food movement, check out Brian Halweil’s Eat Here: Reclaiming homegrown pleasures in a global supermarket, which has no right to be a much better book, but nonetheless is. Coming Home To Eat tells the story of a year in which Gary Paul Nabham tried to base his diet on foods grown, fished, or gathered within two hundred miles of his home in Arizona, preferably species that were native to the bioregion before it was changed by humans and agriculture in particular. Sounds good, right? The 100-mile diet kids took on more of a challenge, sort of, but then again Nabham beat them to the punch by five years, and his goals are in some ways more interesting than theirs:

…four out of every five of my meals from locally grown foodstuffs… I refused to count calories, kilowatts, or acre-feet. Instead, I decided to count species. I hoped that nine out of every ten kinds of plants and animals I would eat over the coming months would be from species that were native to this region when the first desert cultures settled in to farm here several thousand years ago. (38)

Unfortunately, that “four out of five” rule leaves Nabham with room to justify spending $50 on “nutraceutical” food at Safeway to make brunch for his long-suffering girlfriend, now his wife, Laurie. That chapter, in which he actually describes himself as smirking at his own cleverness, was the last one I read and it made me very glad to be returning the book to the library. While I have no doubt Nabham was intending to nauseate his readers with his elaborate descriptions of margarines, artificially flavored instant oatmeal, low-fat strawberry mousse mix laced with aspartame, diabetic-friendly coconut cookies, and of course Spam, I found his oddly gleeful and self-righteous tone far more sickening. I found myself wondering if Laurie is some kind of masochist, and what the hell she sees in such an ass.

If the shiny new 100-mile diet book currently rocking the U.S. publicity tours as Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally is too much like Coming Home to Eat, I don’t want to read it, either. Maybe I’m just sick of the marketing already (apparently the publisher is afraid bookstores will stock it in the diet/food ghetto if they’d stuck with the straightforward Canadian title?) or maybe it’s sour grapes because after all, where’s my freaking book, but so far I haven’t been too impressed by the author interviews or all the “tee-hee look at the lengths privileged white kids will go to feel better about their consumption patterns” tone of so much of the 100-milers’ media coverage. I gather people are getting burned out on No Impact Man in a similar way. But I digress. Back to Gary Paul freaking Nabham and Coming Home to Eat. I should perhaps have known there was going to be trouble as soon as I read the second chapter, in which he purges his pantry of non-local foods:

If you think exposing your underwear drawer to the public would be embarrassing, imagine what it would be like giving a tour of your pantry to all the food activists and farm reform folks you’ve evern known. As I opened the cabinet, knowing that I would have to “tell all,” a box of Betty Crocker’s Pudding in the Mix Supermoist White Cake Mix fell out onto the counter.

Although I could not recall buying it or, for that matter, ever baking a white pudding cake in this house, there it was, thanks to General Mills in Minneapolis. I blamed the pudding cake’s presence on a recent visit from my mother. Whether we wanted them or not, she always brought with her a grocery bag full of mainstream American foods, perhaps as a counterpoint to all the weird dishes I placed on the table.

Nevertheless, other items that I found in the pantry were just as mysterious to me. (43)

He goes on and on for four pages about all the bad stuff in his kitchen, industrial products manufactured and sold by a small handful of scary-huge transnational corporations, and the closest he comes to accepting his responsibility for any of the bad foods is to whine about how bad it is and how ashamed he is to find it in his house, to realize the ignorance of his food ways — the implication being that now, of course, he knows better, and far better than us, his readers. Um, shut up? And by the way, I’m only ashamed of the contents of my kitchen when I’ve cooked something that didn’t turn out well, or maybe when I’ve failed to keep it clean (ants! ew!) But I digress. Again. To get back to the passage at hand, I’d like to call attention to the way in which he blames his mother for a box of cake mix — and blame is his word choice, not mine.

In fact, the way Nabham writes about his mother was for me perhaps the most offensive aspect of Coming Home to Eat — which is saying something, because his “nutraceutical brunch” chapter starts with a rant that actually includes the phrase “kids these days” and ends with a supremely creepy nigh-pornographic meditation on eating ripe peaches with his girlfriend. Yuck. But somehow both of those pale by comparison to Nabham’s response to the death of his mother’s husband. Just read what he writes about visiting his mother’s house shortly after receiving the sad news:

When I entered her pantry — perhaps for the first time in more than two years — I was surprised to find that it had very little food stored in it, (60) other than a second refrigerator filled with canned beverages. Instead it was filled with boxes of all sizes. I suddenly realized that my mother and Chuck no longer stored several weeks’ worth of food in the back room as they had done for most of the years of their lives since the Great Depression. Instead their larder was stuffed with boxes holding various electrical food-processing technologies, from the simplest blender to the most complex espresso machine.

It was a dazzling display of so-called labor-saving devices. [I have excised a long list of brand names and models.]

Perhaps these machines were the trophies that Chuck and my mother offered one another for having survived the depression. They no longer had to do stoop labor, or peel and dice vegetables by hand. They were finally freed from the menial chores that had been associated with food getting and food processing for more than ten thousand years. With these tools, with the Minute Rice that was premeasured into plastic bags, ready for boiling, and with the Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinner poured out of a box into the microwave, they had gained the leisure time that their own parents never knew. They had joined the 90 percent of American families that keep microwaves in their homes, who no longer had to “slave away” for hours in the kitchen and the barn. They could relax, and watch TV, which encouraged them to be more insatiable consumers, convinced that there would always be producers of anything they needed out there somewhere. Chuck could rest in peace, for his widow would never again be constrained by laboring in the food chain that had imprisoned his own mother most of her life. (61)

About his own mother and late stepfather he writes this crap! And then because apparently it wasn’t enough to get all judgmental on them, he waxes melodramatic about himself (of course) in the next paragraph: “I dreamed of cogs and gears and conveyor belts for most of the night… the conveyor belt had looped around and around with nothing at all upon it” (61-2)

Whining, self-righteousness, smirking about the nasty tricks he plays on his girlfriend-now-wife, and talking shit about his own mama? Gary Paul Nabham should be ashamed of himself. My mom and I have our differences and all, but I know they’re personal, even when they aren’t private. I don’t make out like our disagreements are symptoms of everything I think is wrong with the world — I have more respect than that. All of which is I guess to just say “happy Thursday after Mother’s Day, everybody!” It’s actually been such a good day that even ranting about this stupid book can’t bring me down. I hope yours have been similarly awesome.

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Gary Paul Nabham, Ph.D. Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002.