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(More customer reviews)The book Chasing Chiles, Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail is not merely a tome dedicated to exploring climate change and it's impacts on agriculture, though it does this well, it is a celebration of life. By focusing in on the stories of one food, chile peppers, the three authors were able to dig deeply into the complex ways in which all food touches our lives, providing readers (well this reader at least) with enough sustenance to care deeply about the fate of chiles specifically and food, land, and culture, in general through learning about the fragility and import of biodiversity in our food system. I find myself left with not just a taste for more chile peppers, but with a sense of concern, and conversely, a hope for their future.
Written by three active figures in the good food movement--chef and Slow Food USA board member Kurt Michael Friese; author, conservationist, ethnobotanist, father of Renewing America's Food Traditions Alliance, and local food hero Gary Paul Nabhan, and my friend and fellow Slow Food Biodiversity committee member the agroecologist Kraig Kraft--this work brings together the insights of their varied expertise to explore the vast ramifications of climate change on food.
The three gastronauts take us from Sonora and its Chiltepines, to Florida and its Datils, to the Yucatan and its Habaneros, to the Gulf Coast and its Tabascos, to New Mexico and its diverse Native Chiles, to Maryland and the history of Fish peppers, and to Wisconsin and Southern Illinois and Beaver Dams, telling the stories of peppers and the amazing people dedicated to keeping them available. They weave in language, history, music, art, politics, tragedies, and recipes along the way.
Threats to biodiversity are in the multitude. Loss of small farms, farmers, and farmland, environmental degradation, industrialization of agriculture and our food system, and the decreasing understanding humans have of how land, food, culture, and health are tied together have been major players in loss of biodiversity for decades, but climate change may be throwing a whole host of new threats into play. In Chasing Chiles we learn about how temperature changes, floods, drought, storm damage, pestilence from shifting weather patterns seem to be increasing perils. While each locale will respond differently to climate change, Friese, Nahban, and Kraft remind us that to create resilience in our food system (i.e. to ensure food remains available to make it onto our plates) we must increase biodiversity among all food crops to provide a buffer. As all locales will respond differently to shifting weather patterns, so too will each varietal respond differently to these shifts.
I would be remiss in not mentioning certain personal and professional affinities for this subject matter. For I found it deeply gratifying to experience the synchronicity of burning my tongue on a soup flavored with Chiltepines found on a recent trip to Tucson and visit to Native Seeds as I sat down to begin reading and then to finish the book as I awaited the appearance of dozens of Beaver Dam pepper seedling I started to grow out here in the state they've been home to for nearly a hundred years. And as a dietitian, I must note the clear connection between biodiversity and health: as we've moved away from diverse diets towards increasingly refined, industrialized, mono-crop diets our health has suffered. By restoring biodiversity to our gardens, fields, and wild places we can restore our health. This book ends hopefully with some meaningful principles to eat and grow food to counter climate change.
Chasing Chiles is one hot, wild ride. And one worth taking.
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Chasing Chiles: Hot Spots Along the Pepper TrailChasing Chiles looks at both the future of place-based foods and the effects of climate change on agriculture through the lens of the chile pepper-from the farmers who cultivate this iconic crop to the cuisines and cultural traditions in which peppers play a huge role.
Why chile peppers? Both a spice and a vegetable, chile peppers have captivated imaginations and taste buds for thousands of years. Native to Mesoamerica and the New World, chiles are currently grown on every continent, since their relatively recent introduction to Europe (in the early 1500s via Christopher Columbus). Chiles are delicious, dynamic, and very diverse-they have been rapidly adopted, adapted, and assimilated into numerous world cuisines, and while malleable to a degree, certain heirloom varieties are deeply tied to place and culture-but now accelerating climate change may be scrambling their terroir.
Over a year-long journey, three pepper-loving gastronauts-an agroecologist, a chef, and an ethnobotanist-set out to find the real stories of America's rarest heirloom chile varieties, and learn about the changing climate from farmers and other people who live by the pepper, and who, lately, have been adapting to shifting growing conditions and weather patterns. They put a face on an issue that has been made far too abstract for our own good.
Chasing Chiles is not your archetypal book about climate change, with facts and computer models delivered by a distant narrator. On the contrary, these three dedicated chileheads look and listen, sit down to eat, and get stories and recipes from on the ground-in farmers' fields, local cafes, and the desert-scrub hillsides across North America. From the Sonoran Desert to Santa Fe and St. Augustine (the two oldest cities in the U.S.), from the marshes of Avery Island in Cajun Louisiana to the thin limestone soils of the Yucatan, this book looks at how and why climate change will continue to affect our palates and our producers, and how it already has.
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