Spring equinox. A day of turning over the earth-churning up dark garden soil buried beneath the winter’s leaf litter—to replenish it with sunlight. A day of humus-stained hands and hopeful hearts. Laurie and I pass the daylight hours weeding, tilling, watering, and planting. We work to make a place for vegetables, herbs and beans in all the unsown garden beds around our desert home.

Down on the soiled knees of our jeans, we plant one heirloom seedstock after another, watering them, covering them with netting, and then placing larger meshed frames over them to deter the birds. Once one bed is done, we move to the next, then the next. Even when we return inside the house for a moment to get a drink or to bring out more seeds, we are never far from the musky fragrance of soil bathed in warm sunlight.

This day of toil marks the first phase of a fifteen-month ritual I have begun, one involving my sweetheart Laurie as well as many of my kin and old friends. The ritual extends beyond the planting of vegetables in our backyard; it includes the tending of a small orchard and some terraces of agaves and prickly pears in front; the gathering of desert greens, yucca blossoms, cactus buds and fruit in the wildlands beyond our fence; the hunting of gamebirds and the capture of other creatures out where the desert wilderness seems boundless. We search for other food producers hidden in our own neighborhood, discovering those who locally grow vegetables, dress out game or can fruits that complement our own. The ritual then moves indoors to the drying rack, chopping block, the hand-cranked grinder, the stove, and the dinner table.

It has no single name. It might be termed “a communion of neighbors.” It might be thought of as a “return to the old ways” of subsisting on native resources. As some kind of shorthand to myself, I say I am “coming home to eat.” I have initiated an extended communion with my plant and animal neighbors, the native flora and fauna found within 250 miles of my home. The intent: to make me a direct participant, as fully and as frequently as possible, in the making of that which sustains not only my life but the lives surrounding me as well. At last I want to bear the brunt of what my own eating of the world involves.

Like most everyone I know, I have eaten food of sorts and drunk various beverages all my life, and yet I am like that proverbial fish who has no clear concept of water. At last, it has become painfully evident to me that the kinds of food I eat and who I’ve shared them with say more or less everything about how I’ve lived. I realize how deeply, how desperately I need to go home. To go home, farther than I have ever gone home before, to hunt and to hoe, to saw and to sickle, to smoke and cure, to sup, to imbibe and to dine on what is divinely local.

Friends and neighbors are keeping a healthy skepticism about my current project. They ask me over and over again to explain the rules. “Will we have to eat turkey vulture if you find one rotting on the roadside? Will you remove all the cactus spines from the prickly pear fruit before you put it into the salad?”

I try to say something reassuring, but I don’t have any hard and fast rules, only a few tentative hypotheses about what “eating locally” might ultimately mean. This is no diet, and it has no defined zones, other than a 250-mile loop around my home that I drew this morning on an old Arizona Highways map.

I am inclined to give most of my culinary attention to native plants and animals, those which have adapted to the pathetic-looking, alkaline earth and the scant, brackish waters of our desert homeland. I hope to wrest roughly four out of every five meals from locally grown foodstuffs, and I hope that nine out of every ten kinds of plants and animals I eat over the coming months will be from species that were native to this region before the first humans arrived here over ten thousand years ago. No factory chickens, no pond-grown trout or salmon, no feedlot anything. But I’m all for free-ranging turkeys and quail, doves, and maybe even Muscovy ducks. Fish and shellfish from the Sea of Cortes, wild “pork” from javelina, maybe some fat lizards, and a snake or two….

Now that I have scared off a few potential dinner guests, I retreat once more into the garden and wander out to what I call the Minstrel Hut, where I do my writing. Last winter solstice, I had a friend help me make a roof out of a satellite dish. The dish is perched eight feet off the ground on a metal ring welded to four upright metal poles. Beneath its rim, it is surrounded by a circular wall of living ocotillo branches.

I intended to plant a few squash seeds at the base of the ocotillo walls. Now another possibility emerges. As the last daylight fades all around me, I toss shovelsful of peat, sand and compost into the dish, water it thoroughly, then plant a dozen squash seeds in the moistened soil within the rim. Over the next fifteen months, squash vines will cascade down from elevated heights like Rapunzel’s hair from her tower. Satellite dishes into squash planters, I say, an adage for today’s place-makers.

Squashes are native to the Americas, and have been in my neighborhood a long time—sixteen hundred to two thousand years, maybe. Their wild relatives, the coyote gourds, grow all around my yard. My O’odham neighbors, who are the region’s oldest continuous inhabitants of this desert land, love to pick the tender young squashes for early season eating.

But the squash variety I plant came directly from another desert valley half way around the world, where my Lebanese grandfather was born. I grew up referring to this young squash by the Arabic term koosa. When I was four or five years old, I watched my grandfather as he took a young cylindrical squash in one hand, a grooved aluminum blade in the other, and cored the unripened seeds and pith out of the middle. My mother and my aunts stuffed it with ground lamb, tomatoes, onions, and nutmeg or cinnamon, and occasionally, pine nuts.

At the time, I did not know a thing about origins. I just assumed that squashes were part of my family, that is, something familiar that I didn’t see much of in my friends’ homes. Whenever we ate Sunday dinner with our Lebanese kin during the tail end of summer, the fragrance of steamed, nutmeg-laden squash would splay my nostrils. The aroma would tell me that my mother and my aunts had fixed something for my grandfather that made him moan with love and appreciation for his American daughters, my married-in Irish mother included. These women knew that the mere sight of platters piled high with stuffed squash and grape leaves made him feel reconnected with the valley of his birth.

Today, I will eat the last of last year’s squash for dinner, but this winter squash is too big to core as my grandfather once demonstrated to me. I will layer between its steamed slices onions and native spices, then sauté them in sunflower oil. And as I take the first mouthful, I will close my eyes and see if it tastes of home. Because I have farmed squash, studied them, painted them, and even hand-pollinated them, their taste reminds me of a long vine of connections.

During my fifteen-month experiment in local eating, I have often pondered the turn of phrase, “homemade taste.” The taste of homemade food is not simply the soup your parent made when you were sick as a child, the carrot torte you won at the cake walk in the grade school, or the fresh tortillas sold door to door by the Mexican widow from the next block over. This phrase can be taken in, chewed over, and savored in very different ways.

One of the oldest forms of sustenance in this region is mescal, the pit-roasted heart of the century plant or desert agave, a succulent plant that occurs all around my home. Its fibers have been found in human feces left behind in the caves in the desert borderlands some 8,500 years ago. If local flora was going to compose much of my diet, mescal clearly belonged on the menu.

The week of April Fools, I invited two friends from Cucurpe, Sonora, to show me how to roast mescal. We found big blushing rosettes near ready to send up their flower stalks, and trimmed their leaves down to nubbins, using special tools called coas that I had once purchased in Tequila, Jalisco. When we were done, the plants looked like giant pineapples, and were ready for roasting.

One of the Sonorans, Chano, who was of Opata Indian descent, guided us through the construction of the barranco where the agaves would be roasted. A six-foot-deep hole in the ground that looked like a dry well, its circular walls were formed out of cracked up slabs of concrete piled into a cylinder. We tossed in three armloads of mesquite wood, let it burn for four hours, then heaved basketball-sized agave heads into this oven, and covered the hole with tin and dirt. We checked the temperature of the barranco every few hours, as we sat around telling stories and making quail traps. Forty hours later, we opened it up to sample the baked mescal.

Shoveling off a six-inch cap of dirt from the mouth of the barranco, we were overwhelmed by a musky fragrance of caramel. The smoky hearts of agave had turned sweet and amber in the process that Beto and Chano called la tatemada, “the earthen roasting.” We pitch-forked the roasted heads and lifted them out of the barranco. I pulled a few caramelized leaf bases off the largest and handed Chano one of them to sample. He ran the leaf fibers through his teeth, skimming the roasted sugars off the fiber, chewing the smoky pulp. Then he closed his eyes silently to compare them with roasted mescal he had tasted at other times in his life, clear back to his childhood.

Chano opened his eyes and smiled, then signaled me with hand jive, “thumbs up.” A dozen friends poured in around the pit-baked agaves, and one by one, tasted mescal for the very first time.
“It’s like baked yams.”
“You eat it like sugar cane.”
“It’s sorta like black-strap molasses.”
Although we all ate our fill, we were left with one hundred fifty pounds of the mescal to share and savor over the coming months. It was perhaps the first traditional-style tatemada of agaves in the Tucson basin in over a half century, renewing a custom that had been practiced here for millennia. The oldest baked good known from the desert borderlands had come home, and had landed in our mouths.

Easter came soon after the mescal roast, and with it an unseasonal snow. While driving into town to Laurie’s house one morning, just before I reached the city limits, I saw feathers fly up above the truck in front of me. A split second later, I saw the body of a bird on the pavement in front of the Blazer and swerved to avoid hitting it. When I pulled to the side of the road and walked back, I found a Gambel’s quail, its neck broken, but its body still intact, bloodless. I arrived at Laurie’s door with bird in hand.

She wasn’t that surprised. She knew that before the year was out, she might find a little rattlesnake meat in a fritter. She’d even begun to express a morbid curiosity about all the animal innards that might fall upon the cutting board, and tried to remind me why Yahweh set up a series of food taboos for Moses and Aaron. I said something about a roadkilled bird being worth two under the tire, and asked her to keep it in the refrigerator till dinner time.

That evening, after plucking and gutting the quail, I stuffed its cavities full of garlic and wild oregano from my garden and basted it in a prickly pear syrup glaze. Laurie made a salad of wild greens, and we sat down to eat.

We were just cleaning up the dishes when the phone rang. It was my mother’s voice, trembling. I knew that something had happened to my step-father Chuck Buxton, her already-ailing husband. He had just died at the hospital. As soon as I could pack my clothes I was out the door and on the road to my mother’s home in Glendale, two and a half hours north.

In a moment such as this, I did not think to pack a single homegrown food to eat over the following days. But once I got on the road, I realized how desperately I would need a few locally produced foods to fortify me. I picked up a dozen turkey eggs near the gas station in Abra Valley. I snatched two bags of Sonoran acorns in a Mexican mini-market at Casa Grande where I made a bathroom stop. A Pima man sold me a bag of roasted piñon nuts at a street corner while I was crossing the Gila River Indian Reservation. I munched on a few acorns and piñons on the drive up, brooding over the ways I could best help my mother.

After I arrived at my mother’s house, we spent several hours talking and making calls to our kin. Later, she dispatched me to do errands. As I picked up the items on her grocery list, I threw into the basket some chiles, damiana tea, prickly pear pads, and tomatillo salsa.

The next morning I stopped by the Farm at South Mountain to say hello to my former student, Diann Peart. Diann gave me fresh flowers as well as a bunch of I’itoi’s onions, a desert-adapted scallion-like shallot. For years, this desert heirloom had been kept alive by just one O’odham lady named Ida Lopez, who lived out in the middle of the Papago Indian Reservation. Twenty years ago, I took a gift of green scallions away from her yard, and colleagues at Native Seeds/SEARCH propagated and distributed tens of thousands of them for planting in gardens around southern Arizona. Since that time, their progeny have been nurtured by scores of desert gardeners, including Diann. She was but one of many old friends and former students who offered gifts during the course of the year to honor our mutual interests in local cuisine. I left my brief visit with her replenished by her generosity, and by the box of greens and some freshly cut flowers for my mother.

Throughout the four days, despite the need to deal with funeral arrangements and family regroupings in the most urbanized area within the entire Sonoran Desert, I found a way to keep my diet dominated by locally grown foods. While the globalized food economy clearly dominates Phoenix as it does other big cities, an almost-invisible, informal food exchange network can still be found there. Vegetable gardeners hidden in backyards and vacant lots. Medicinal herb and spice peddlers working out of camper-trucks and double-wide trailers. Street-corner vendors of nuts, fruits and acorns. Their network goes back a long time, perhaps to the ancient Chichimecans who once traded turkeys, seeds, and macaws back and forth between Mesoamerica and the desert Southwest.

Much of that old-time way of living and trading has recently died in the desert borderlands. But there is enough of it surviving to remind me of how the world once worked. It is cause for celebration, even during times of loss and grief.

The snows are behind us, and Chuck’s ashes have been scattered in the desert. I awoke this morning to realize that I might miss another desert harvest if I don’t watch out. I call a number of friends, arranging for four different afternoons of gathering and processing cholla cactus flower buds, a little-known delicacy of my Tohono O’odham neighbors and their Akimel O’odham kin in the Phoenix area. Over the last five hundred years or more, these tribes have shaped a diet out of the flora and fauna of southern Arizona.

Though I have gathered cholla buds off and on for twenty years, this harvest yields new meanings now as part of the 250-mile ritual shared with my neighbors. I learned to pit-roast cholla buds from gracious Akimel O’odham families living along the Gila River just south of Phoenix. Today, I am out with some of the sons, daughters, and granddaughters of those same families.

"Close your eyes," I tell the uninitiated who come out to join us. "Imagine that someone put a delicate vegetable the size of a marble into your mouth." You could not put your finger on it exactly, but its taste reminded you of asparagus tips, artichoke hearts and capers. As I guide them through the cactus patches below my home, the sound of our tongs brushing one thorny cactus branch against another makes a tinny, scraping noise like that of an out-of-tune fiddle.

Earlier I had gotten coals burning in an earthen pit, and prepared an eight-foot-long box lined with window screen for removing the stickers. We pour out bucketsful of cactus buds into the box, and use brooms to sweep them across the screen, knocking most of their spines off them. We pick up the de-spined buds with our tongs and refill our buckets with them, pouring half the loads in the roasting pit, and half into big pots of boiling water on the stove. We cook the buds both ways—pit-roasting them as the O’odham have done for centuries, when they lived with scarce water, and boiling them on the stove.

While waiting for the buds to cook, we load my dining room table full of traditional foods the cactus crew has brought along: tepary beans, posole, acorns, pinyon nuts, and a wide variety of other foods. Just before everything is out on the table, a quiet Akimel O’odham elder asks if he could offer a blessing in the Pima language. I call everyone into a circle. Suddenly we are all quiet, as this elder whispers a blessing that he has crafted in his heart for us, for the food, and for the land, thanking the Creator, the Earthmaker, for all we have been given.

The smoky taste of the pit-roasted buds is worth the extra effort of cutting wood, preparing a pit, and waiting overnight. They taste of this earth. The spicy bite of mesquite smoke inundates every plant cell of the cholla buds, and every animal cell of the humans who stood around the smoldering roasting pit. I feel some holy sort of spirit rise up around us in the smoke, the wind, the songs we share.

Pit-roasting is an art predating agriculture. Although we typically think of Ice Age hunters roasting freshly killed mammoth meat over the coals of blazing bonfires, it is likely that women and men of the Pleistocene roasted just as many plant foods over those red hot embers.

The caloric cost of eating is not merely the number of calories produced by the fruit, nuts, meats and roots we eat nor those we feel as heat while roasting, baking, grilling or boiling our fare; it is also the effort expended in hunting and gathering, in processing and butchering. Archaeologists estimate that most hunter-gatherers directly consumed a total of some 2,500 to 3,500 calories on the average day, although averages didn’t mean much to those who foraged in highly seasonal environments. My friend Peter Vitousek estimates that most Americans require 46,000 calories each day to produce the food they eat. But ecologist Stuart Pimm disagrees.

“Way low,” he argues. He goes on to explain that that estimate does not at all cover the many ways in which we consume fossil fuels to transport our groceries, supply our gas stoves, power our barbecues, and cool our wine cellars. What Peter and Stuart do agree on is that over forty percent of the earth’s annual productivity is funneled into feeding just one species, our species, undoubtedly at the expense of the myriad other creatures trying to feed themselves on this wayward ark.

After the cholla bud harvesters leave late in the evening, I walk outside, beyond my gate, and peer into the open pit where the cholla buds had been steamed, roasted, and smoked. The branchlets of desert broom in the bottom of the pit are charred, their aromatic oils reduced to a black tar. The heavy trunks of mesquite have been transformed fluffy, grayish-white ash. The ashes and branches of desert broom rustle and stir in the relentless wind. I hear in my head the echo of words said in my presence many times over the last forty years, but now I feel them etched into my muscles as well:

“This is the body that has been given up for you. Take and eat it. Do this is memory of me.”

Eating is perhaps the most direct way we acknowledge or deny the sacredness of the earth. It has been a year now since I began my modest attempt to focus on the foods of my local landscape, and I have decided that it has been more like an extended meditation than a diet or an experiment. I have brewed and chewed over my relationship to desert soils and salty waters, to ancient traditions and modern trade networks, and to other lives: those of my human, plant and animal neighbors.

I realize that I will never be a full-time hunter-gatherer and concede that I may never be successful enough as a gardener or farmer to gain all of my food on my own land for a year or more running. I accept that desert farmers and hunter-gatherers suffered unremitting hardships over the centuries. And yet there is another part of my head, heart and heritage that keeps me from writing off these food traditions as anachronisms, as once marginally useful but now obsolete pursuits. I am glad I have had a chance to hand-pick cholla buds and pit-roast mescal. I can no longer ignore that there are extraordinary flavors to savor, texture to tongue and to crunch between my teeth—wild flavors and textures that I can no longer live without for very long. The wild foods I have stumbled on during these months have been like little saviors for me, reminders that life still goes on all around me, and that more often than not, life tastes good.

As the first year of my “coming home to eat” ritual came to an end, I tried to imagine a way to distill what I had learned and share it with my neighbors. For my indigenous neighbors in the Sonoran Desert especially, what I had been attempting in a personal way may be critical to their survival. These people currently suffer from the highest incidence of adult-onset diabetes in the world, due to diet change away from the fiber-rich native foods that sustained them for centuries. Because I had learned that no one can truly eat locally without a support network of friends and neighbors, I wanted to end this first year with an event that would inspire this kind of support among families and communities. I thought of doing a pilgrimage across the region, connecting many of those who live within the 250-mile radius of my neighborhood.

And so this past spring I walked with two dozen friends, of four cultures, from the Sea of Cortez coast to my Abra Valley home. On this “Desert Walk for Heritage, Health and Biodiversity,” we ritually shared the flowers, flesh or fruit of some twenty-three native plant foods, eight plant medicines and teas, and another eight species of native fauna. While walking 230 miles across the Sonoran Desert over twelve days, we embraced the roadside greens, and rabbits that were abundant in desert fields, and eschewed the genetically-engineered corn, the feedlot beef, and the barley-based beers that have dowsed our region in grease, empty calories and drunkenness. We walked ten hours a day, communed with local villagers, danced and sang in the evenings, but more than anything else, we prayed.

We prayed when we left the ocean, prayed each time we shared food as a community, prayed to help our relatives suffering from diabetes, obesity, arteriosclerosis, alcoholism and other diseases that afflict those of us with starving souls. We realized how little we really need of those things which superficially fill us up, but really make us hungrier. We found we could do fine without hamburgers, cappuccinos, vinos and exotic fruits. What tasted best to us were the foods that came to us freshest, the ones which grew from the deepest cultural roots, picked and cleaned and cooked by our neighbors and our very own hands. And then we folded our hands, bowed or raised our heads to the sky, and prayed together in gratitude for all that lives and grows at our very doorsteps. We prayed in O’odham, Seri, Spanish, and English, each of us articulating the feeling of sacredness in a different way.

When we finished our pilgrimage, many people asked us what we felt like now that we had eaten native foods for so long. Did we feel leaner? Cleaner? Did our blood sugar and HDL/LDL levels change?

In response to such questions, the only thing I could initially say was that I felt blessed. Blessed by the prayers and courage of those I walked and ate with, blessed by the prayers of those whose villages and cities we walked through, who offered us support and resolved to do something about their own eating patterns. I felt blessed to live in a region where food traditions still run deep, where enough of the old ways remain to enable their restoration. Sure, our fitness improved, our blood sugar and cholesterol levels probably declined, and we are better for it. But more important than any health statistic was the feeling of gratitude for those around us, and for all the others who are also struggling to come to peace with themselves, their foodways, and their homelands. If just one more person turns away from fast foods, alcoholism or binge-eating, if even one more person turns homeward to become a better steward of his or her local food heritage, the blessing will have been passed on to others in a deep and lasting way.

When I arrived at home at last, two weeks of pilgrimage behind me, I walked into the backyard and found that my garden was filled with dozens of vegetables ready for eating. As I knelt between the rows, picking enough vegetables for a salad and a stir-fry, I admitted to myself that I did feel different, bodily, than I had ever felt before. After a year of eating more fresh vegetables and more wild potherbs than ever before in my life, I felt greener inside. That little garden that Laurie and I had renovated last spring had grown n size and in abundance, keeping the taste of fresh green things in our mouths most of the year. And over the course of the walk, I had this preternatural sense that my body was turning green from the inside out, as lambsquarters, wild asparagus, watercress, tomatillos, prickly pear pads and cholla buds filled my belly and transformed themselves into my own cells. I felt recharged by local chlorophyll. Cell by cell, I was being transformed into the place and the grace I now call home.

Thanks to both Orion Magazine and Gary Paul Nabhan for granting us permission to display this article. This article is from the forthcoming book Coming Home to Eat. More information regarding the "Desert Walk for Heritage, Health, and Biodiversity" can be found at the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum's website: www.desertmuseum.org/dw/index.html.