Coming Home to Eat is a personal story. A man’s personal experience trying to grow crops in Arizona, a man’s personal relationship with indigenous groups trying to reclaim their ancestral dietary traditions, even a man’s (graphically) personal intimacy with his girlfriend blindfolded under a peach tree. It is a hyper-idealized narrative about Gary Paul Nabhan’s endeavor to experience his daily nutritional intake on a more fundamental and traditional plain.
Nabhan’s experience is remarkable. He consumed the vast majority of his meals from what he calls his “foodshed,” the land encompassed circumscribed in a 250 mile radius around his home. He purged his pantry of canned and processed food, and refused to buy fluff foods – nothing built on a foundation of ingredients like high fructose corn syrup or highly processed grains. He learned to cook numerous new recipes, met dozens of local gardeners and ranchers, and even organized a food pilgrimage with multiple indigenous peoples of his foodshed.
The contrast between this temporary experiment and the Monsanto masters of genetically modified seed patents that Nabhan highlights is absolutely astounding.
And ironically, this is Coming Home to Eat’s principle (and sizable) flaw. The bigger picture is fascinating and an important arena where most Americans need significant education, but Nabhan rarely steps back with a larger perspective to discuss how his story fits in to a global and cultural context. Additionally, he focuses almost exclusively on the aforementioned narrow hyper-idealism. Every food he tries, from a desert sand parasite to a common Western tuber, is delicious and unequaled in past experience. Adjectives like succulent, rich, flavorful, complex, fulfilling, and anything else in the positive spectrum abound.
Such a focus can prove interesting and useful in the context of demonstrating the pleasures of unfamiliar foods, but the zoomed-in one-dimensionality of the perspective is also alienating. What about what must have been a fairly long period of trial and error to arrive at a recipe that actually tastes good? What about the difficulties of the compromises one must make to conduct an experiment like Nabhan’s, or the guilt one must feel when they pull over on the side of a sweaty Arizona highway to satisfy a craving for cold, refreshing ice cream? And what about the context of professional situation? Not everyone works in the academic world where they do not have a steady job with hours that prevents them from expending all the effort necessary to live like Nabhan did.
Nabhan’s book is an accomplishment in that it shows that alternatives do exist to current American dietary practices, and as a country we have lost touch with much of the tradition and human personality previously inherent in our food. This book is heavily saturated with rosy ideals that are quite distant from the average person’s life or experience with their food. Nabhan’s work would be much more effective in its impact on the environmental, agricultural, and resource use movements if the author had embraced a larger perspective and, to quote Nabhan himself, really brought it home for the ordinary American. They need to know what this all means for them, and once that’s accomplished, to understand what kind of action they can take in their own lives. Not enough attention is paid to the audience; there is no real argument or persuasion. Coming Home to Eat is like a B-level oil painting. It portrays one man’s story from one limited perspective and does a good job of it, but lacks over-arching context on the entire human experience. It is difficult to imagine an ideal audience for this work. Those educated on environmental  and food issues of the day will be turned off by a lack of new information or arguments, and those new to the issues might be pushed away by what appears to be over-zealous worship of a lifestyle so foreign from their own.
Coming Home To Eat, Gary Paul Nabhan ** / 2 of 5 stars
Enjoyable Reading: 3/5
Applicable to Business: 1/5
Behavioral Insight: 1/5