Dan Saladino’s recent book Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them explores crops that are disappearing due to colonization, corporate consolidation, and the climate crisis. In doing so, Saladino champions the preservation of genetic diversity, traditional food cultures, and ultimately the planet.
As a BBC radio journalist, Saladino explains that he has been telling stories of different foods and the people who grow and prepare them for more than a decade.
“One thing that struck me was that everywhere I went, I found stories of people celebrating particular food cultures, and the foods and ingredients, skills [and] knowledge that were unique to their parts of the world.” Saladin tells Food Tank. “And at the same time, I discovered that there were many people who had to fight for [the] survival of these foods and these food cultures.”
Saladino explains that in 2007 he traveled to Sicily for a program on citrus. Despite the fruit’s importance to the local economy and culture for more than 1,000 years, Saladin met farmer after farmer who gave up their crops the following year. “They could no longer compete as small farmers with the staple crops that were grown in different parts of the world.”
In Eating to Extinction, Saladin collects some of these stories that have stuck with him. His examples range from a hardy variety of wheat grown in Turkey to a nutritious root vegetable grown by indigenous communities in Australia. Like the citrus fruits in Sicily, these foods are also in danger of extinction.
As these crop varieties disappear, the fragility of the food system increases, says Saladino. But spreading risks across many different crops, rather than relying on just a handful of monocultures, can increase resilience. “Agricultural biodiversity will not solve all of the world’s food problems,” Saladino tells Food Tank, “but it is an essential component of the future of our food.”
Listen to the full conversation with Dan Saladino on “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg” to learn the link between taste and resilience, how colonization and racism have resulted in the decline of biodiversity, and the steps eaters can take to prevent it. These foods go extinct. .
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Photo courtesy of Loren King, Unsplash
