What's a locavore?

While the Firefox spell checker does not yet recognize it, locavore was chosen as the word of the year for 2007 by the New Oxford American Dictionary. In choosing locavore as its word of the year, the Dictionary is recognizing a growing trend among environmentally conscious individuals to eat seasonal foods grown or raised near their own homes. Several testimonials of locavores have been published in recent years and I have read two of them this winter. I am of course saving plenty of time for the seed catalogs.

The first locavore account I read was Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life written by the accomplished author Barbara Kingsolver, along with her husband Steven Hopp, and her daughter Camille Kingsolver. Step one for the Hoppsolver clan was to move from the parched Sonoran desert to the verdant hills of Appalachia which are much more suited to raising and growing our conventional foodstuffs. In Appalachia, Kingsolver and company grew and raised much of their own food and sourced what they didn't grow or raise from local producers whenever possible, drastically reducing their food footprint.

Kingsolver's fellow author and friend, Gary Paul Nabhan details his decidedly different approach in Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods. Unlike Kingsolver, Nabham remains in the desert and eats the traditional foodstuffs of Native American groups living within 250 miles of his Arizona home. By feasting on roasted mescal, cactus fruits and pads, tortillas made from mesquite pod flour, grasshoppers, quail, and other traditional foods, Nabham builds a strong relationship with the land that sustains him, that quite literally builds him molecule by molecule. For the Native Americans of today who are disproportionately affected by diabetes, a restoring of ancient food and cultural traditions has the added benefit of improving health.

Like Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, both of these books further convince me of the unsustainable nature of our modern agricultural system. They motivate me to consider ways in which I can reduce my food footprint. I will continue to try growing food crops on a small scale and will by the bulk of my seed from Native Seed/SEARCH, an organization co-founded by Nabhan that conserves seeds of heirloom crop varieties that are adapted to desert environments. I may also consider some of the traditional food crops of the Chihuahuan desert, but I think I'll pass on the grasshoppers for now.