Eating to Extinction : The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

$30 · Offered by Kitchen Arts & Letters

This is what the publisher tells us: At first glance, the foods we eat appear more numerous and diverse than ever before. In many cities, cuisines from all six inhabited continents can be found within a radius of a single mile. But this fact obscures an important truth: 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: a single species of wheat accounts for ninety-five percent of global output. Ninety-five percent of milk consumed around the world comes from a single breed of cow, and half of all cheese is made with bacteria from a single company. This consolidation has steep costs: a higher incidence of heart disease and diabetes; a lack of redundancy in the face of climate change, pests, and parasites; and the loss not only of traditional foodways, but of flavors, smells, and textures that may never be experienced again. If it strikes you that everything is starting to taste the same, you’re by no means alone. In Eating to Extinction, the distinguished BBC food journalist Dan Saladino travels the world to experience and document our most at-risk foods before it’s too late. He tells the fascinating stories of the people who continue to cultivate, forage, hunt, cook, and consume what th

• Binding: Hardcover

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