EATING TO EXTINCTION
The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them
By Dan Saladino
“Ach-ech-ech-ech!”
The birdcall clacks through the canopy in the Tanzanian bush not far from Lake Eyasi. Down below, Sigwazi, one of the thousand or so members of the Hadza tribe, hears it and calls back. Both bird and man understand the message and soon they are off on a treasure hunt, by foot and by wing, that ends when the bird hovers over a nest of African honeybees high in the branches of a baobab tree.
Sigwazi nimbly climbs the tree. He holds burning leaves in a not fully successful effort to ward off stings as he rips the nest apart with one hand and tosses chunks of honeycomb down to the rest of the hunting party. The bird, known as a honeyguide, waits while the Hadza suck out the honey and protein-dense larvae. The beeswax that they spit out on the ground will be its payment for the bee-spotting services.
There are easier and less painful ways to get a sugar rush, and at least one of them has come to the Hadza recently. As Dan Saladino writes in “Eating to Extinction,” the last hunter-gatherers in Africa can now buy cans of brand-name soft drinks from a mud brick hut deep in their terrain, far from any city or road. This and other threats to a way of living and eating that stretches back tens of thousands of years, if not more, brought Saladino to the Tanzanian honey hunt. A broadcast journalist for the BBC, he specializes in chasing down foods that are disappearing for one reason or another. “Eating to Extinction” tells the stories of dozens of these endangered tastes and makes a reasoned case for saving them in which nostalgia and sentimentality play very little part.
In the 1970s and ’80s, another journalist, Raymond Sokolov, went on a similar odyssey in the United States, tracking down local specialties — Virginia ham, Key limes, Kentucky burgoo — that were being left behind. In 1982, when he collected his finds in the book “Fading Feast,” the chief causes of decline were supermarkets and the erosion of regional differences.
The scope of “Eating to Extinction” is wider. Saladino reports from countries on every continent except Antarctica. The culprits have gotten bigger, too. What started as the grocery chains’ demands for uniform products with a long shelf life has metastasized into something so vast and all-encompassing, yet so nebulous and faceless, that nobody has come up with a more precise term for it than “the food system.” What we really mean is profit-minded corporate logic set free on a global scale at an incalculable cost to health, economic stability, cultural coherence and joy.
Saladino has an 18-year-old backpacker’s willingness to light out for remote destinations far from the usual food-writer feeding troughs. He clambers over snow-covered terraces dug into the slopes of the Cordillera Apolobamba range of the Bolivian Andes, “one of the highest, toughest, coldest places on earth to live,” with a shaman who points out medicinal plants on the way to a patch of the tuber known as oca.
Along with potatoes, uncounted varieties of oca are tended by Indigenous Quechua and Aymara people in these mountains. Oca in colors from cream to safety orange were bred over centuries to thrive at specific elevations. Now these microclimates are under attack from changes in the macroclimate. New pests are blighting oca crops, driving people from the slopes to cities in search of work.
Variations on this scene replay in chapter after chapter. Global changes to the environment and the food marketplace don’t just threaten unique flavors; as traditional ways of eating disappear, communities lose their ability to feed themselves. Local economies collapse. Money flows in one direction, out, into the accounts of a few corporations that will grow richer if everyone on earth eats only the foods that they control.
Eating keeps us alive, of course, but one theme of Saladino’s deeply humanist book is how many of the things we consume can’t survive without us. Heirloom vegetables and grains, like the O-Higu soybean that once grew across Okinawa, will be unknown if we stop planting them. Livestock breeds like the Middle White pig, also known as the London Porker in the days when it was “ pig of choice,” will die out if we stop raising them. The Georgian wines fermented by wild yeasts in clay pots called qvevri that were around before wine barrels will dry up if we stop drinking them.
Of course, other foods depend on us to clean up the mess we’ve made. Greedy fishing fleets and lazy policing have nearly emptied stretches of ocean that were once so crowded that 18th-century sailors reported getting stuck in traffic jams of giant cod. Factory methods applied to farming have polluted rivers, cleared forests and caused low-yielding but nutrient-rich local crops to be muscled out by blander, less fortifying ones. And we’re just starting to calculate the threats of climate change, which didn’t enter Sokolov’s notebooks at all.
Saladino’s eye for detail is photographic when he is describing places and things; it is less so when it comes to his human subjects. He introduces us to dozens of people — behind every idiosyncratic food product lies an even more idiosyncratic producer — but they rarely spring to life in the sorts of small, vivid character sketches Susan Orlean or John McPhee might have given us.
He leaves no doubt, though, that the diversity he set out to record very much includes distinctive people like Sally Barnes, who runs the last smokehouse in Ireland that preserves only wild Atlantic salmon. Barnes tailors her technique from fish to fish and can “read” the needs of each one. “I feel like I’ve become a wild salmon myself,” she says, “a creature swimming against the tide.”
As global markets have hollowed out communities that once fed themselves, an opposing idea has taken root: reclaiming old foods as a form of resistance. For those people, swimming against the tide has political overtones.
The Mexican group Sin Maíz, No Hay País (Without Maize, There Is No Country) promotes Indigenous strains of corn over the commodity corn that flooded Mexico after NAFTA, which the group wants to see renegotiated. Later in the book, Saladino meets Vivien Sansour, a Palestinian woman who was inspired by the group to scour the West Bank for old strains of squash, tomatoes, wheat and sesame.
“To tell me that our seeds are not worth saving and planting is like telling me that we as people have no worth and no future,” Sansour says.
She looked particularly hard for a watermelon called jadu’i, which once sweetened tables from Beirut to Damascus but was believed to have died out. Finally she met an old man living in the West Bank who had given up farming and thought the world had forgotten about jadu’i. But he kept a packet of seeds in the back of a drawer, just in case.
