Book Evaluation- Eating the Landscape

Katie Wandrey

Professor Santos

English 102-042

13 March 2018

Book Evaluation

            Enrique Salmόn enlightens his audience with his non-fiction book, Eating the Landscape. While capturing the pure essence of indigenous culture, he focuses mostly on food preparation, cultivation, stories, and ceremony. Salmόn takes us through his journey of self-revelation starting in his grandmother’s kitchen and ending in Jackson Hole, Wyoming with the organization Center for Whole Communities he is a part of speaking of the iwίgara ways and how the Rarάmuri incorporate these practices and beliefs. Everything in between these special places Salmόn makes sure to provide the details and background so that we can understand and soak in the values and ways of indigenous culture and truly immerse ourselves into it. As I said earlier, he only focused on the food culture of indigenous people, yet he connects this seemingly small piece of culture to the whole idea of native’s way. By including the interconnectedness of family, language, and all social interactions, Salmόn achieves his goal of informing his audience of the traditions and overall culture of indigenous people.

            During a trip to Indiana to educate students at Erlham College, Salmόn talks about monocropping and how it goes against native farming he says, “I have had many opportunities to walk and work in small-scale Native and Hispano cornfields where one feels invited to stroll among the wide, uneven rows. Around the monocropped fields, I felt no such invitation…” (110).  Without saying, Salmόn expresses that there is no life among the fields of non-Native farmers. They have acres and acres of land with one or two crops, almost like giant buildings in New York that hold hundreds, maybe thousands, of people doing the same job every day, almost like slave work. Monocroppers create fields filled with slave crops- always planting the same seed and usually getting the same result. However, Natives plant multiple crops in the same area and spread out their crops so that they can all breathe together and grow together as a diverse family filled with life and breath rather than monotonous crops living in a breathless land. This strengthened this book in my opinion because it gives the audience a distinction between why the Natives farmed the land the way they did and how western civilization has changed that notion of growing crops for the sake of the cycle of life and turned it into a lifeless cycle of profit.

            Salmόn talks in his first chapter mostly about his roots and connections to his family and how family, in general, is the very roots of every human and crop that connect us all. He quotes Leslie Silko when she talks about the dependency of collective memory that passes down through generations to maintain an entire culture and then Salmόn says, “…food becomes the medium through which a complex of collective memories from generations of preparing tamales remains alive and intact” (9). The notion of traversing tradition, memory and ceremonies is prevalent throughout Salmόn’s book and affects many aspects of his focus; indigenous food culture. This notion strengthens his narrative due to the reoccurrences of resilience to continue tradition, finding one’s identity through celebrations and following the footsteps of ancestors as one tends to the landscape.

            Vic Muῆoz says it best in Sage journals, “While there are no recipes in this book—for how to cook, how to think, or how to live— Salmόn provides knowledge of how food and land are inseparable from identity and culture in TEK” (Muῆoz). I would recommend this book to those who wish to further their spiritual connection to the land that lives around them. Salmόn creates a guideline by sharing stories with his audience of his own journey towards enlightenment of indigenous culture and writes between the lines for others to follow him along the path. By following iwίgara ideals, one can truly find the path that many generations of indigenous people walked for decades, which is why they should pick up Eating the Landscape and read it cover to cover.