Conscious Choice: Eat Local, Really Local

November 2007

Eat Local, Really Local

This Thanksgiving, revive an endangered local foods tradition

By Lisa M. Hamilton

Thirty years ago, Gary Paul Nabhan went to a different kind of Thanksgiving celebration. The feast was held on the Gila River Reservation, just south of his home in Phoenix and home to the Pima Indians. The meal was composed entirely of foods that the native ancestors would have eaten long before there were Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. Instead of turkey and stuffing, there were tepary beans and mesquite pod flower pudding, cholla cactus flower buds and wild greens.

While cooking, an elder named Ruth Giff lamented that these foods were threatened. She turned to Nabhan and asked him if the same was true for him. “Are the foods that matter to you also in danger of being lost?”

Her question was the springboard for what has become Nabhan’s mission: to reconnect himself and other Americans with the myriad foods disappearing in our globalized economy and culture. Across the country, he and others have identified more than 1,000 endangered and threatened fish stocks, fruit trees, seed varieties, and other foods. In Arizona alone, he estimates, fifty percent of the foods grown before the Dust Bowl era are gone.

To save them, he promotes eating locally — really locally. “This is not just eating the same mesclun greens that are grown from coast to coast,” he said. “This is about eating bison on the eastern plains of Colorado, piñon nuts in Nevada. This eating goes deeper. It’s about place. It’s about reinstating local histories and traditions.”

There is a tangible value to place-based eating, Nabhan explains. Broadening our diets and agriculture to include locally native foods means a biodiversity that buffers against the crisis that would come if one of our mainstream staples — corn, wheat — was plagued by disease.

“But perhaps more importantly,” he says, “these foods give us great pleasure. In turn, that pleasure reminds us to take care of this food: Don’t overfish the salmon runs; nurture the bison back to sustainable numbers. By eating these things we remember their value and are inspired to protect them.”

Because eating in place is as much personal as it is geographical, Nabhan has not simply adopted the traditional Pima Indian diet. Instead, he has blended foods native to Arizona with his own Lebanese heritage, and come up with a cuisine that is truly unique. For Thanksgiving this year, he’ll be eating hummus made from tepary beans and sprinkled with sumac berries, as well as his own Navajo churro lamb, roasted in the Lebanese fashion but flavored with desert oregano and sage.

Pawpaw Custard

First a favorite of the indigenous tribes that roamed the temperate woodlands of North America, the pawpaw has found new fans among backyard organic growers.

1 cup of pureed pulp from ripened Zimmerman’s pawpaws
1 cup of cream or half and half
1 cup of milk
3 fresh eggs from pasture-raised Dominique hens
4 ounces of superfine sugar
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
1 dash of salt
2 ounces of grated, roasted coconut

Preheat oven to 350°. In a large glass bowl, mix the pureed pawpaw pulp with coconut, then add the cream, milk, eggs, sugar, vanilla, coconut and salt. Beat this mixture until smooth, except for the bubbles, which form. Pour this custard mixture into eight custard cups. Line the bottom of a large baking pan with a dishcloth, then place the eight custard cups in the pan. Add boiling water to the pan, until it rises two thirds of the way up the side of the cups. Bake at 325°F for forty-five minutes. Remove from the oven just before the custard is set in the center. Check to see if it is set by inserting a knife near the edge of the custard; if done, the knife should come out clean.

Olympia Oysters Tucked Into Patties of Ozette Potatoes and Camas

24 Olympia oysters, shucked and washed
2 sage grouse eggs
2/3 cup wild onions or 1/2 cup roasted Inchelium garlic
2 tablespoons sea salt
2 teaspoons nettles, steamed and chopped
2 cups camas root, precooked or pit-roasted and mashed
2 cups Ozette potatoes, cooked and mashed
2 tablespoons Indian ricegrass (Montina brand rice flour)
4 tablespoons eulachon grease or flaxseed oil

Preheat oven to 275°. Slightly brown the oysters, then remove from heat. In a bowl, mix the eggs, onions or garlic, salt, precooked nettles, camas and Ozette potatoes; mash and blend them into a batter of even consistency. With rice grass flour on your hands, shape the batter into patties four to five inches in diameter and half an inch thick. Place a browned oyster in the middle of each patty, burying it in the batter until it is fully hidden. Drizzle eulachon grease or flaxseed oil in a nonstick skillet, set to low to medium heat, and fry two patties at a time until golden brown, for no more than six minutes each. Serves five.

Recipe excerpted from Renewing America’s Food Traditions book, 2008, Chelsea Green Press

Carol’s Sierra Beauty Apple Pie

The following recipe is adapted from one offered by Gowan’s Oak Tree, an orchard of award-winning California heirloom apples, which seasonally features the Sierra Beauty for use by restaurant chefs and home cooks in California.

5 – 6 ripe Sierra Beauty apples, peeled and cored
¾ – 1 cup of turbinado sugar, depending on the sweetness of the crop
3 tablespoons of unbleached whole wheat flour
3 teaspoons of freshly-ground cinnamon bark
3 pats of unsalted butter
3 tablespoons of cream or “half and half”
2 pie crusts of your own tradition

Slice the apples and place them in a mixing bowl. Add the cane sugar, cinnamon and flour, then mix them with the slices until all surfaces of the apples are fully coated. Pour the mixture into one piecrust. Place the pats of butter atop the coated apple slices, then place the second pie crust upside down over the first, and crimp the crusts together until the apple mixture is sealed inside. Cut decorative patterns for the vents in the upper crust. With a pastry brush, coat the upper crust with cream, then sprinkle the moist surface with sugar. Place the pie into an oven that has been pre-heated to 350 degrees. Bake the pie for fifty to sixty minutes. Remove from oven, cut eight slices and serve them warm.

Carol’s Sierra Beauty Apple Pie

The following recipe is adapted from one offered by Gowan’s Oak Tree, an orchard of award-winning California heirloom apples, which seasonally features the Sierra Beauty for use by restaurant chefs and home cooks in California.

5 – 6 ripe Sierra Beauty apples, peeled and cored
¾ – 1 cup of turbinado sugar, depending on the sweetness of the crop
3 tablespoons of unbleached whole wheat flour
3 teaspoons of freshly-ground cinnamon bark
3 pats of unsalted butter
3 tablespoons of cream or “half and half”
2 pie crusts of your own tradition

Slice the apples and place them in a mixing bowl. Add the cane sugar, cinnamon and flour, then mix them with the slices until all surfaces of the apples are fully coated. Pour the mixture into one piecrust. Place the pats of butter atop the coated apple slices, then place the second pie crust upside down over the first, and crimp the crusts together until the apple mixture is sealed inside. Cut decorative patterns for the vents in the upper crust. With a pastry brush, coat the upper crust with cream, then sprinkle the moist surface with sugar. Place the pie into an oven that has been pre-heated to 350 degrees. Bake the pie for fifty to sixty minutes. Remove from oven, cut eight slices and serve them warm.

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