Eating to Extinction

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

De: Dan Saladino

Narrado por: Dan Saladino

This audiobook is read by the author.

Dan Saladino's Eating to Extinction is the prominent broadcaster’s 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 6,000 different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these - rice, wheat, and corn - now provide 50 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 800 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.

From an Indigenous American chef refining precolonial recipes to farmers tending Geechee red peas on the Sea Islands of Georgia, the individuals profiled in Eating to Extinction are essential guides to treasured foods that have endured in the face of rampant sameness and standardization. They also provide a roadmap to a food system that is healthier, more robust, and, above all, richer in flavor and meaning.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

©2022 Dan Saladino (P)2022 Macmillan Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

2022, New Yorker Best Books of the Year, Long-listed

2022, Time Magazine Best Books of the Year, Long-listed

2022, Amazon.com Best Books of the Year, Long-listed

Very Interesting and So Necessary

The history and relevance of our foods, the humans who have tended them and what can be done to save an ailing earth is well written and read. The narrator was the author and he did an excellent job.

Homage to Oysters

Who knew we owed so much to oysters? Thank you, excellent creatures of the sea!

An Eye-Opening Journey Through the Lost Diversity

Eating to Extinction is an absolutely fascinating deep dive into the history of the food we eat today—how it became what it is and what other varieties once thrived before falling out of favor. The book sheds light on the forces that have shaped our modern food system, highlighting the loss of diversity and its consequences.

At times, it left me feeling sad and even helpless as an individual to effect meaningful change. However, it also reinforced the idea that knowledge is power. The more people who understand these issues, the greater the chance that those in a position to make a difference might take action.

Eye opening ingredient and foods review

Appreciate the global angle to ingredients and foods that the author brings. The value of biodiversity in an area “functional” and “cultural” to humans, layers on top of other kingdoms widely covered and researched.

Fantastic!

A very interesting and compelling read regarding human culture, the world we live in and the crazy complex interface that is how we sustain and nourish ourselves. The tone stayed light despite some serious subject matter and the examples were fascinating.Yet another reason to fight to preserve biodiversity amongst others!