Republished with permission from the January issue of the Ester Republic.

This January marks the third calendar year that I’ve written the column for the ER, and though I have often mentioned or drawn upon the writings of others, I have never come right out and provided a legitimate, start-to-finish book review. It always seems a bit pedantic when a columnist chooses to write a book review solely for the sake of, well, writing a review. Book reviews should be transparent, authorless, written only for one of two reasons: either for the purpose of making more people aware of a work that might change the way they think about the world, even if just a very small piece of it (like the one I review below), or to provide a counter-perspective on a work that, if left unchallenged, might do real damage through misinformation (think Michael Crichton’s State of Fear). Of course, inescapable are the assumptions by the writer that 1) people care what they think and 2) they are qualified to identify books that should be suggested and books that should be challenged. But, I figure if you are reading this column, then you have already admitted a marginal interested in my opinion, and that being the case, I imagine you will allow me some liberty on number 2.

Where our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine, by Gary Paul Nabhan, is the gift I wish to share with you this month.  The very first emotion I experienced when picking up this book was gladness: of finding something so refreshingly different from the tidal wave of largely-uninspired ‘food books’ that have, with the success of Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, erupted from publishing houses faster than Harry Potter sequels. Like Nabhan’s others (Why Some Like it Hot, Cultures of Habitat, Singing the Turtles to Sea), it approaches many poignant issues of food, health, and power sideways—through a good story. And has he found a good, true story! Forget Tom Cruise’s eye-patch-wearing, Hitler-assassinating, cinematic exploits; Nabhan tells a far more captivating, widely-unknown, true tale. Oddly enough, it also involves Hitler.

            By way of a little background, Nikolay Vavilov is a fellow that worked for Russia’s Bureau of Applied Botany just after the turn of the 20^th century. His task was no less than to collect and catalog the food crops of the world, and he did so tirelessly, building at the same time the world’s most comprehensive seed bank in Leningrad. This is the seed bank that protected (and still protects) more than 380,000 seeds, roots, and fruits of roughly 2,500 species of food crops. From the Amazon, to Ethiopia, to the U.S. Southwest, Nabhan recreates, as best as he is able, the trek taken by Vavilov and his colleagues, unpacking countless mysteries about the origins of food and of agriculture along the way.

            What Vavilov knew, Nabhan knows, and now we learn, is of the richness of history in our foods. Vavilov saw each food crop as a monument, a totem to be read, with tales of origins and lineages, hardship and plenty, culture and spirituality. These are the same foods that we so demean today by calling them ‘staples:’ little more than substitutable caloric inputs to a standard dietary equation. Thanks to Nabhan, it is as if we re-encounter them for the first time with each turn of the page. The common ground between their stories is striking, and the sheer timeline of it all humbling. One cannot read this book and not learn a new reverence to be paid every time they sit down to a meal. Nor could one ever again undervalue the contribution to life in the broadest sense made by each farmer who has taken, or still takes, the time to make next year’s crop just a little hardier or a little sweeter, by saving seed.

            Of course, I promised you drama, and be certain that in this Nabhan does not fail. His narrative weaves a gripping cautionary tale, with twists and turns that repeatedly make the reader exclaim out loud in astonishment or disbelief. Not surprisingly, this is where Hitler and World War II come into the picture. The dramatic twists are so visceral that I dare not give them away; let it merely be said that Vavilov’s men were good men, true food patriots, who for all their respect of food’s richness as a keeper of history and tradition, had even more for its ultimate power as the giver or taker of life.

            As I say, Nabhan likes to come at his lessons sideways, and in Vavilov he is clearly at his best. After the tale is woven and the plot revealed, not only will you be left excited and bursting with a surplus of conversation starters, but you will also find looming in the back of your mind that uncomfortable, nagging question: who controls your food?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 9:15 am by Philip Loring and is filed under Anthropology, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.