Eating to Extinction (Saladino)

Eating to Extinction:
The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino (2022)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

Note that this was finished a couple months ago, in 2022, but for some reason didn't write the blog entry.

WOW I actually read a 2022 book in 2022. It must've been brand-new when I heard about it on NPR and first got it from the library.

I heard Saladino interviewed on NPR on Saturday morning (on The Splendid Table, I believe -- I was out walking). THe book sounded interesting so I reserved a copy. The ebook might not have been available yet, so I had the hardcover, which I carried back and forth to work for a while and even sat in my yard over the summer reading it. Then I learned that the ebook existed, and I finished the book faster after that.

Basically, the book traces the history of food (grains, animals, sweets, beer, etc) over the past 12,000 years. There are "landrace" grains that have survived for millenia that are being squeezed out and destroyed by development and by the Green Revolution of the 20th century, which meant to maximize food output by specializing in just a handful of seeds at the expanse of existing foods. Once seeds are lost, we can never get them back. There have been attempts over the past century to save and catalogue these food varieties.

By homogenizing our food system, we not only lose variety, but we open the food supply up to blights and other diseases that could spread like wildfire. Meanwhile, the displaced seeds survived hardships for 12,000 years.

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