Gary Paul Nabhan is a Lebanese-American who has spent time in his family's villages, homes and convents in Lebanon, Oman and Syria. The Kellogg Endowed Chair in Food and Water Security for the Borderlands at the University of Arizona, he has also lectured at universities in Italy, Lebanon and Oman. Among his 34 solely authored, co-authored or edited volumes are Arab/American: Landscape, Culture, and Cuisine in Two Great Deserts and Desert Terroir: Exploring the Unique Flavors and Sundry Places of the Borderlands.

For two decades he has been tracing the agricultural, culinary and linguistic diffusion of seeds, trees, recipes and farming practices from the Middle East to the Americas in four waves: Phoenician and pre-Islamic colonization of ports on the Iberian peninsula and possibly the Canaries; Mozarabe and Sephardic refugees from the Spanish Inquisition leaving Spain to settle in the Canaries or go through "blood cleansing" to ship to the Americas; early Spanish, Mozarabe and Converso settlement in the Jesuit and Franciscan era in the Southwest, Northern Mexico and Yucatan peninsula, and recent Levantine immigration from the 1880s to the present into the desert borderlands.