Research Catalog

Title

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

Author

Saladino, Dan, 1970-

Publication

• New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.
• ©2021

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 450 pages : illustrations, map; 24 cm

Summary

"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. 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 the rest of us have forgotten or didn't even know existed. Take honey--not the familiar product sold in plastic bottles, but the wild honey gathered by the Hadza people of East Africa, whose diet consists of eight hundred different plants and animals and who communicate with birds in order to locate bees' nests. Or consider murnong--once the staple food of Aboriginal Australians, this small root vegetable with the sweet taste of coconut is undergoing a revival after nearly being driven to extinction. And in Sierra Leone, there are just a few surviving stenophylla trees, a plant species now considered crucial to the future of coffee"--

Alternative Title

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

Subjects

• History
• Food industry and trade > Environmental aspects
• Agrobiodiversity conservation
• Agrobiodiversity
• Food supply > History
• Food > History

Genre/Form

History.

Note

• "Originally published in 2021 by Jonathan Cape, Great Britain."

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

• Introduction -- Food: a very brief history -- Wild -- Cereal -- Vegetable -- Meat -- From the sea -- Fruit - Cheese -- Alcohol -- Stimulants -- Sweet -- Epilogue: Think like a Hadza.
• Part one. Wild -- Hadza Honey (Lake Eyasi, Tanzania) -- Murnong (Southern Australia) -- Bear root (Colorado, USA) -- Memang Narang (Garo Hills, India) -- Mapping the wild -- Part two. Cereal -- Kavilca wheat (Büyük Çatama, Anatolia) -- Bere barley (Orkney, Scotland) -- Red mouth glutinous rice (Sichuan, China) -- Olotón Maize (Oaxaca, Mexico) -- Saving diversity -- Part three. Vegetable -- Geechee red pea (Sapelo Island, Georgia, USA) -- Alb lentil (Swabia, Germany) -- Oca (Andes, Bolivia) -- O-Higu soybean (Okinawa, Japan) -- Seed power -- Part four. meat -- SkerpikjØt (Faroe Islands) -- Black Ogye chicken (Yeonsan, South Korea) -- Middle white pig (Wye Valley, England) -- Bison (Great plains, USA) -- Spillover -- Part five. From the sea -- Wild Atlantic salmon (Ireland and Scotland) -- Imraguen Butarikh (Banc D'Arguin, Mauritania) -- Shio-Katsuo (Nishiizu, Southern Japan) -- Flat oyster (Limfjorden, Denmark) -- Sanctuary -- Part six. Fruit -- Sievers apple (Tian Shan, Kazakhstan) -- Kayinja Banana (Uganda) -- Vanilla orange (Ribera, Sicily) -- The Lorax -- Part seven. Cheese -- Salers (Auvergne, Central France), Stichelton (Nottinghamshire, England) -- Mishavinë (Accursed mountains, Albania) -- Snow room -- Part eight. Alcohol -- Qvevri wine (Georgia) -- Lambic Beer (Pajottenland, Belgium) -- Perry (Three counties, England) -- May hill -- Part nine. Stimulants -- Ancient forest Pu-Erh Tea (xishuangbanna, China) -- Wild forest coffee (Harenna, Ethiopia) -- Stenophylla -- Part ten. sweet -- Halawet el jibn (Homs, Syria) -- Qizha cake (Nablus, West bank) -- Criollo Cacao (Cumanacoa, Venezuela) -- Cold war and coca-colonisation.

Call Number

JFE 22-2300

ISBN

• 9780374605322
• 0374605327

LCCN

• 2021041139
• 40030815858

OCLC

1248687601

Author

Saladino, Dan, 1970- author.

Title

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

Publisher

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

Copyright Date

©2021

Edition

First American edition.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Standard Identifier

40030815858

Research Call Number

JFE 22-2300