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Eating to extinction : the world's rarest foods and why we need to save them / Dan Saladino.

by Saladino, Dan, 1970-

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

Agrobiodiversity.

Agrobiodiversity conservation.

Food industry and trade -- Environmental aspects.

9780374605322 (hc.)

Alternate title:

World's rarest foods and why we need to save them

1st American ed.

xi, 450 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

"Originally published in 2021 by Jonathan Cape, Great Britain"--T. p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 378-427) and index.

"Dan Saladino is a food journalist who has worked at the BBC for 25 years. For more than a decade he has traveled the road, recording stories of foods at risk of extinction -- from cheeses made in the foothills of a remote Balkan mountain range to unique varieties of rice grown in southern China. His work has been recognized by the James Beard Foundation, the Guild of Food Writers, and the Fortnum and Mason Food and Drink Awards. His book 'Eating to extinction, the world's rarest foods and why we need to save them' is a pathbreaking tour of the world's vanishing foods and his argument for why they matter now more than ever. Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of the roughly six thousand different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these--rice, wheat, and corn--now provide fifty percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still: The source of much of the world's food--seeds--is mostly in the control of just four corporations. Ninety-five percent of milk consumed in the United States comes from a single breed of cow. Half of all the world's cheese is made with bacteria or enzymes made by one company. And one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer. If it strikes you that everything is starting to taste the same wherever you are in the world, you're by no means alone. This matters: when we lose diversity and foods become endangered, we not only risk the loss of traditional foodways, but also of flavors, smells, and textures that may never be experienced again. And the consolidation of our food has other steep costs, including a lack of resilience in the face of climate change, pests, and parasites. Our food monoculture is a threat to our health--and to the planet."

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