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Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail
Chelsea Green Publishing
March 2011
On Sale: March 16, 2011
224 pages ISBN: 1603582509 EAN: 9781603582506 Paperback
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Non-Fiction
Chasing 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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