Eating to extinction The world's rarest foods and why we need to save them

Review by Booklist Review

Into this maelstrom of climate change that all of us are now experiencing, to varying degrees, Saladino, longtime reporter for the BBC's The Food Programme, brings more bad news, seeded with some good. He lays out a diverse menu of millennia-old, hardy, tasty, supremely nutritious foods now missing from the diet of a world that's scarcely taken notice: bere in Scotland, the Andean oca, the ancient wild citrus memang narang grown in far-northeastern India, the South Korean black Ogye chicken, and nearly all 1,000 varieties of banana but the Cavendish, which has monopolized the world trade but now faces a devastating, widespread fusarium wilt. However utterly despairing these tales read, Saladino profiles those who are finding ways to regenerate these foods against implacable odds: a barley miller on the Orkney Islands, an American botanist helping the Bolivian and Peruvian governments save the oca, an Indigenous people of India protecting their precious store of memang narang, a lone South Korean chicken producer, and a botanist who's using "reconstructive breeding" to apply ancient, lost traits to create a more-resilient, Cavendish-like plant. A deeply saddening, too-familiar story containing yet a kernel of hope.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

BBC journalist Saladino debuts with an illuminating survey of vanishing varieties of food and the people struggling to preserve them. "Of the 6,000 plant species humans have eaten over time, the world now mostly eats just nine," he writes. This decline of dietary diversity, driven by the demand to produce crops on "an epic scale," has triggered a nutritional and cultural depletion that's spanned the globe, as made evident by the sweeping scope of Saladino's research. He explores populations that still source their food from the wilds, such as the Hadza, a shrinking tribe of Tanzanian hunter-gatherers who derive 20% of their calories from honey. Endangered types of wheat, oats, and crimson-tipped rice are uncovered in Turkey, Scotland, and China, respectively, while red peas--brought by enslaved Africans to the U.S. low country--nearly met their demise at the hand of real estate developers on Sapelo Island, Georgia. In South Korea, a small family farm fights to preserve the Yeonsan Ogye, "one of the rarest chickens on Earth," completely black in color, down to its beak and bones. The result is an agricultural investigation that's fascinating in its discoveries while sorrowful in documenting what has been lost. Agent: Mel Flashman, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Jan.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

Saladino, a BBC food journalist and broadcaster, explores the physical and cultural extinction of thousands of foods that had traditionally been part of the human diet. Even if it feels like contemporary Western societies have more access to more foods than ever before, Saladino asserts that people are missing out on the nutrition of the thousands of foods that are not part of their diets. Not only have people become distant from the sources of their food, but they often don't know how to grow or prepare them, resulting in homogenized diets. Additionally, the mass-production of fewer foods is unavoidably altering the ecosystem. The result of research throughout Saladino's lengthy career, this book takes readers on a global journey to taste foods at risk of extinction, like Tanzanian honey (plus fruits, vegetables, grains, meats, and even sweets and alcohols). In the resulting hefty volume, Saladino does a comprehensive job of describing the economic, cultural, and industrial forces that have impacted food production, while refraining from the shaming tone and unrealistic propositions sometimes found in similar books. VERDICT Foodies and slow food enthusiasts will appreciate this deep dive into the history and diversity of global foods and the call to preserve them.--Jennifer Clifton

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

Fascinating descriptions of Indigenous and mostly disappearing foods, plus an alarming message. Veteran BBC food journalist Saladino emphasizes that world food production exploded after World War II when scientists produced superproductive grains, plants, and livestock. Though these developments drastically reduced famine, the mechanics involved require enormous inputs of chemicals, fertilizer, and water. Relying on elite, high-yield species eliminated those that didn't measure up, diminishing their diversity. Today, rice, wheat, and corn provide half of all human calories. Most global pork comes from a single breed of pig, and more than 95% of U.S. dairy cows are a single breed, the Holstein. Limiting food diversity has been enormously profitable for large corporations, but the future consequences make scientists uneasy. "We are living and eating our way through one big unparalleled experiment," writes the author. Having defined the problem, Saladino chronicles his travels around the world, describing dozens of vanishing edibles and pausing regularly to deliver the history of the major foods and food production. Readers will be intrigued and educated by his interviews with experts who warn of our disastrous dependence on a shrinking number of standardized foods. Commercial barley can't survive in the cold, infertile islands north of Scotland, but its ancestral variety does fine. Although nearing extinction in the wild, Atlantic salmon is a familiar food item because almost all of them are farm raised. Bred to be faster growing and meatier, they have become a bland domestic food animal no less than the chicken or cow. Though there are more than 1,500 varieties of banana, most markets are dominated by the Cavendish, a cloned fruit grown in immense monocultures visible by satellite. Being genetically identical, they can't evolve and so can't develop resistance to disease, which inevitably spreads like wildfire. One specific disease is currently devastating the Cavendish, but scientists are working to edit the plant's DNA "to find a fix against the disease." A delightful exploration of traditional foods as well as a grim warning that we are farming on borrowed time. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---