Nabhan: In a way, I’m interested in the creative tension between honoring the farmers in all the centers of diversity where our food historically emerged from, and honoring the farmers who provide us our food.  Because hopefully, more and more food systems, regional food sheds, are starting to re-emerge.

French: But how did we get detached from them in the first place?

Nabhan: You know, when I think about that I think about the incredible dramas that we have in the American literary canon about that change – from East of Eden, with john Steinbeck telling us about the first shippable produce on freezer cars out of California that now so dominates much of America for most of the year.

So, having shippable produce was something that University of California Davis and other agricultural colleges began to select for over nutrition and over flavor, and because of that we became less interested in where our food came from, and more in its east transformation into a commodity.

French: Yes, like the square tomato, the holy grail of packable produce!

Nabhan: Yes, what a terrible idea!  It’s such a different way of looking at the world than terroir, where you say “Obviously this came from this place, because all the wines this region have this incredible taste to them, or oysters from Hog Island, or Peugeot Sound, have this particular flavor.  You can blindfold chefs and they can tell you a Sonoma Gravenstein apple from another kind of Gravensteins because of the flavor.  But now our food has become placeless, and a lot of other values went out the window when that happened.

French: Are you the cook at home?

Nabhan: Yes, most of the time, through my wife makes great stews and soups

French: So she’s the Fall and Winter cook, then?

Nabhan: Yes.

French: How do you like to cook?

Nabhan: It’s one of the great joys, it’s completely out of the mind and into the body and the senses.  Cooking is kind of a magical moment fro me, and I love taking something all the way through…so butchering a lamb, seasoning it with spices that I’ve collected, roasting it in the wood fired oven outside, making sauces to baste it with, and so I love that sort of beginning to end immersion in something that may take a whole day.

French: In your estimation, how many people in the US might have experienced something like that in their lifetime, even once?

Nabhan: I haven’t even thought about that?  What’s your guess, have most rural people done that, I don’t know?

French: I think if you changed the question to include a farmer who then grew their food to eat, it would certainly be a much larger number…

Nabhan: Yes.

French: …but if you take to the level you are taking about, where the spices you gathered, and all the marinades you make yourself and you cook it in a wood fired oven where you probably chopped the wood yourself…

Nabhan: Yes, and I also made the wood fired oven…

French: …and made the oven.  So if you take it to that level probable very few.

Nabhan: But I don’t want to make it into a Martha Stewart kind of thing, that’s not it.

French: No, of course.

Nabhan: Martha Stewart has sort of made a parody of all of this.  But what’s interesting to me about it is tracking the story. I mean, the food is so much more memorable, such a deeper part of my imagination if I can tell over dinner who we originally got our sheep from, and the story of butchering them with my Navajo friend who’s been a sheep herder since age 6, and how the grape leaves that we’re having as a side dish, that I used to import grape leaves from Lebanon until I realized I could use Arizona wide grape leaves to do dolamdas instead of bringing in Lebanese ones.

French: Do the Navajo butcher different from a western butcher?

Nabhan: Yes, that’s interesting.

French: How are the cuts different?

Nabhan: Well, lambs are pretty easy to butcher.  I’ve never butchered a cow, but have butchered many pigs and goats and all of that.   After one of us holds the neck, and one of us bleeds it.  He will literally use his elbow to separate the skin from the carcass, and does some really really interesting things, separating out the legs first.

French: But, isn’t it hanging?

Nabhan: We will put it down on a tarp.  We hang it to bleed it, take it down, remove the back legs, and then separate out the whole rib cage and all of that.  And then sever the front legs.  And then he uses all the tripe, the intestines and all.  I haven’t done blood sausage or anything like that.  But I do use all the scraps that people usually toss.  These subtleties are where he cuts that are different from what most trained butchers would do.

French: Speaking of the farmers and how many people have worked with their meal from beginning to end, how is it that farmers, with so much land, are now so poor as a rule?

Nabhan: You can see that even in the United States right now, a lot of our farmers are so in hock they can’t even afford their own food.  It’s a better deal for them to sell as much of their food as possible, and then get cheap food from a local warehouse, and try to pay off all their debts.

And it’s so odd, the way that the government has subsidized farmers has ended  up putting farmers up on a treadmill to pay back larger and larger debts and so that’s why both in the United States and internationally, farmers have one of the highest suicide rates of any professions.

French: Well, it used to be chefs, but that’s declined recently.

Nabhan: Vandana Shiva talks about this, but it’s in part because of this thing where I heard a very poignant story from a friend of mine in the Midwest.  A farmer realized that his farm, that had been in his family for 4 generations, that he had so over borrowed and  he couldn’t pass it onto his kids, and he had to tell his wife that they’d have to move into town, and he couldn’t even face it, so he went out to the barn and shot himself.

French: And yet, one could argue from a positive perspective that the reason for these food polices were created was to feed the nation, not bankrupt people?

Nabhan: Yes, but look at the current financial mess, you know the cheap mortgages weren’t supposed to bankrupt the nation either….

French: So, the issue you’re getting that is a true cost pricing?  What is the real cost of food security?

Nabhan: When Earl Butz, former Secretary of Agriculture, said “Get big or get out,” he was telling farmers to buy larger equipment.  So they bought a 400,000 lb thresher, and thought that based on current yields and prices, I can probably pay that back in 10 years.  But them maybe it’d be 15 years, and perhaps they didn’t account for fuel and management and the whole thing shifts.

French: What’s your take on Biomimicry as a solution to some of these environmental issues?

Nabhan: To harvest water from fog, and from micro-crevices…

French: Yes, exactly.  How many of these technological advances are possible, and how much should we just look backwards to what is already there, that is my question.  How much can we trust technology of the future to solve these big issues we are facing?

Nabhan: I dream of a little bit different way.  I like to think of it as …and I’m really excited by the imaginations of the authors of this work.  But even if you are excited by that, why would you throw away the parts of the tried and true solutions from the past.  So, if we invent some new ways of water harvesting that we didn’t have before, great.  But why throw away the system my ancestors created where the water is harvested off bedrock and put into a horizontal cistern where it is stored without any evaporation.  Why would you abandon that for some completely novel but untested water harvesting system?  Let’s save all the parts, and keep what we’ve learned from the past, and there’s no contradiction about loving innovation and still loving the traditional parts as well.

It’s like a jazz musician who incorporates very ancient riffs into modern music.  Is he being disrespectful, or does he not want to advance the music?  No, it’s both modern and classic.  It’s the same thing with chefs, yet it’s so interesting that how we define that line between tradition and innovation.

If you would have told someone 25 years ago that a guy like Rick Bayless who takes traditional Mexican cuisine and used that as his portfolio of “riffs,” this language to do innovation around, people would say “French is where the culinary world is, you’re never going to get Mexican as high cuisine. Come on now!”  But he’s excelled at exactly that!

Tradition and innovation are so interconnected.  The irony is that fast food and GMOs have become static and that’s why they fail.  Traditional agriculture is dynamic and innovative that’s why it’s not going to fail.

To say the every McDonalds is going to cook the hamburger in the same way, every time – that’s trying to freeze something in time.  If you say, “I want 20 million acres of corn planted with the same variety,” that’s the same quest for the static.  But we need dynamic, instead.  Fast food isn’t fast, it’s still.   It’s trying to stay in the same place, it’s not innovation.

French: As a chef personally, I’ve been trying to integrate more native food into my food, and it’s remarkably difficult to do.  For example, some foods that are California native are now only available if imported from South America, not where it naturally comes from.  Do you think there is a role for native foods, and if so what is it?

Nabhan: Well, I was going to say that the interesting thing is… it’s someone like David Parker saying that even the great peaches and nectarines developed in California in the 1950’s are already not available.  You can’t find them anywhere.

French: But I hear this a lot: “If they aren’t here, that must be because they weren’t very good.  There’s a reason that they are lost.”

Nabhan: That’s unbelievably idiotic.  And so, we have 19 apples left in American grocery stores out of the 14 thousand found in this country.

French: Even 19 are more than you find in many stores.

Nabhan: Yes, and so I hear people say that they have heard that certain apples aren’t that good, like some of the heirlooms, so there must be reasons that they disappeared.  But that’s if we think of an apple as a desert food for fresh eating.  How about for hard ciders, and sauces, and apple butters, and cider blends?  I went to a little place in Michigan that had these extraordinary blended ciders.

And so we now have some of the rarest apples in the US, thought to be extinct, and some of the finest apple cider I’ve ever had was from a blend of some of these rare apples.  People are thinking that they must have been lousy, but they are thinking about eating the apples fresh, the week it was picked, but some apples improve over time and are better to eat in January.  It’s like saying a record fell off the music charts so obviously that music isn’t very good any more.  It’s very weird logic.

French:  Are we shifting in the right direction right now, in the sustainable food movement?

Nabhan: Maybe, but what worries me is that there are a lot of secular missionaries, and I’m not disparaging what they say or how deeply they mean it, but I don’t want to be converted to anything.  So, anything that stinks of being a movement, I worry about.

French: You mention missionaries.  Who holds the moral high ground, of the religions in the world, in terms of the food issue.  Are there religions or movements that hold a viewpoint that would keep us going in the right direction?  Or is science the answer?

Nabhan: Jeez, interesting question.  Well, I did an essay years ago about “A spirit earthly enough.”  I find within every major religion…I find people who’s spirituality isn’t other-worldy but is a spirit that is Earthly enough to be made manifest right where we live. The whole idea that heaven and hell are right here in this world with us, and are what we choose to see manifest right here in our own lives and in our community.

For instance, in the Mennonite and Amish traditions, even if we disparage evangelical and puritans for whatever reason, there are people there that deeply love the integrity of food the same way that Michael Pollan is talking about.

We can see that in monasteries, I can see it in Ramadan in Muslims, I can see it at seder among my Jewish friends, that there are certain Rabbis that guide the criteria for kosher that decided that kosher shouldn’t’ include GMO’s, because this is a deeply spiritual issue.  Can we say the food is acceptable if it is literally manipulating “God’s handiwork” to use that metaphor?  And I can say that I have found an element of that in nearly every religious tradition I can think of.

French: Do you personally have a spiritual tradition?

Nabhan: I’m a Franciscan Lay Brother.  And so I think deeply about the world in terms of what St. Francis of Assisi thought about, but even when he was captured by Muslims, he went to the mosque with them and backed off from trying to convert them. And so I’m more concerned that any participation in the spiritual tradition for me should be really personal and not about bringing anyone else too it.

French:  Did you think about trying to go farther down that path?

Nabhan: Well, I’m going to be ordained as a priest by next year.  But it’s not unrelated to anything else I do, so it’s …my point is that it informs my ecology and restoration, and my ecology informs my Franciscan beliefs.

Gary Nabhan will be in San Francisco on April 29th,  speaking about the Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) program and the book by the same name.  Hosted by CUESA, the presentation will take place in the Port Commission Hearing Room in the Ferry Building, and will be followed by a tasting of rare and endangered foods found at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Buy tickets here.