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Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them
Top of the pile
83
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
84/100Critics
74/100Scholars
90/100Author:
Dan Saladino
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
February 1, 2022
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. In Eating to Extinction, 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 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.
What The Reviewers Say
Eating to Extinction is a celebration in the form of eclectic case studies.
At a time when many of us are staying closer to home, it is exhilarating to join the author on a pilgrimage to some of the last strongholds of traditional food culture. The book is an immensely readable compendium of food history, cultural lore, agricultural science, and travelogue. There are new flavors to imagine and places to visit on every page.
Saladino’s method is digressive, and all the better for it.
Saladino has an 18-year-old backpacker’s willingness to light out for remote destinations far from the usual food-writer feeding troughs.
