Argues that Zapotec agricultural and dietary theories and practices constitute a valid local science, which has had a reciprocally beneficial relationship with European and United States farming and food systems since the sixteenth century. This title analyses the rich meanings that campesino families attach to their crops, lands, and animals.

By setting his ethnographic study of the Talea de Castro community within a historical world systems perspective, he also skilfully weighs the local impact of national and global currents ranging from Spanish colonialism to the 1910 Mexican Revolution to NAFTA.At the same time, he shows how, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the sustainable practices of 'traditional' subsistence agriculture are beginning to replace the failed, unsustainable techniques of modern industrial farming in some parts of the United States and Europe. Roberto J. Gonzalez holds a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, where he is currently a visiting lecturer in the Department of Anthropology.