For Thanksgiving this year, I remembered a poem I wrote several years ago – about the connection between food and family, between food and life.

My grandmother has food allergies, and for almost forty years ate a daily diet of lamb, dates, and spring water. Period. No vegetables or cooking oils, no Thanksgiving pumpkin pie or strawberry shortcake on a summer’s day, no variation. I, in contrast, was raised to enjoy all the tastes of the earth, and to this day have no understanding of what her experience with that diet might be. But while I can’t fully comprehend, I can somehow appreciate her life through the simple act of eating a plump Madjool date. The ancestral pull of family and tradition cannot be ignored, and is somehow so directly linked to the experience of eating – to the taste, smell and texture of our food.

This Thanksgiving, allow the food you eat to be that connection to the past – and with each bite forge a new commitment to preserving the integrity of the food you love and the land it grows on, for the future. The Thanksgiving tradition, for all of its historical controversy, is the closest thing we have in this country to truly honoring, en masse as a nation, our land and food.

Those of you reading this blog already know what to do: Buy the food that honors our agricultural legacy for this day, ignore convention and include some of your quirky family favorites, forgo the free frozen turkey at the supermarket and opt for a free range or heirloom bird instead, slip some local ingredients into that cranberry relish….and above all, share the bounty so it doesn’t go to waste.

Happy Thanksgiving, from my family to yours.

In my grandmothers honor

I eat the roast of lamb and date from the palm and
Taste the splendor of our food
In my grandfathers slipstream
I ride swiftly across the continental divide and
In my great grandmothers spirit
I sit and burn the pinyon and sage with open arms
To the ones from the dark beyond
In my grandfathers shadow
I walk beneath the greatest giant of the earth and
Live in the world of the trees
In my great grandfathers laboratory
I study the leaves of the Amazon and how they
Change in time and space
In my grandmothers love
I awake by day and realize
They are all as close as this food
That we eat.

Oakland, Ca. 2006

Photo: Library of Congress

Gary Paul Nabhan, PhD., is an Arab-American writer, lecturer, food and farming advocate, rural lifeways folklorist, and conservationist whose work has long been rooted in the U.S./Mexico borderlands region he affectionately calls “the stinkin’ hot desert.” This poem was written for Slow Food Nation and will be read at Changemakers Day.

The Earth has grown tired of making fossilized food
Tired of having to pump fossil fuel as well as
Ancient groundwater up from her very innards
To let them spill onto our fields & orchards
Where frantic crops are forced to suck it all up.
What oozed out of the aquifer and oil well
Now bleeds with additives, fertilizers & pesticides
So that we might eat.

We too have grown tired
Tired of all those so-called “fast” foodstuffs
That are all actually frozen in time
While being freed from their attachments to place
So that they might be flung
Half way across the hemisphere
To fly into our mouths
Like so many stones shot from a catapult.

Our bodies are tired of taking in
Anything in need of thawing out, that is,
Anything micro-waved in a frigid plastic sack
Anything cloistered in a rigid sealed box
Anything taken off the range & locked in a feedlot
Anything with a patented genetic modification
Anything once wild that has been captured & broken.

Instead, your bodies are desperately searching for
Any food brought to you live
Plucked straight from the vine
As the golden crookneck squash blossom has been
The one that had been sunning among
The twining tendrils just moments before
Or like those plucked from the teeming tidepool
As the athletic octopus has been, limbs all akimbo
Shifting its shape and its colors
Even as it dives into ever warmer water.

There are many among us who want to be sure
That food makes it out of this century alive
Alive like the vinegar mother looming in the shadows
An amorphous banshee waiting to transform
One more glass of spoiled wine or mug of dubious cider
Into something sour, but sharper and finer.

Our bodies want our distracted minds to remember this:
It is those slow foods,
The ones which have moved the least
      From field to feast
That move us most deeply
For they have remained dynamic & delectable
So as to dance in our dreams forever.

Our dirt-tired Earth Mother is asking us to step outside
For she is angry that some of us can barely see or smell
Just what it is that is growing in our own backyards.

She is asking us to stop—stop—
Before we drill and pump another drop
Of that greasy petrel that has settled
Way down deep in her bowels
Since way, WAY back in the Pennsylvanian,
When tons of marsh plants fell, then died & fermented
For she is tired of burping & farting up gas for us
As if countable kilocalories
Are all that we know how to eat.

Every morning of your life
You can choose to break fast
With the dead, or slowly browse among the living.
Every sundown from now on
You can commune with the fresh & local
Or do rarified dining with the distant & the fossilized.
Watch out, you had better get ready:
Some sassy, salt-of-the-earth waitress is lurching
Toward your table: she wants to know whether
You have finally decided what you really want to eat.