Eating to Extinction, Dan Saladino
Eating to Extinction, Dan Saladino
3 Rating(s)
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Eating to Extinction
The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

Author: Dan Saladino

Narrator: Dan Saladino

Unabridged: 16 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/01/2022


Synopsis

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 six thousand different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these—rice, wheat, and corn—now provide fifty 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 eight hundred 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

About Dan Saladino

Dan Saladino is a renowned food journalist who has worked at the BBC for twenty-five years. For more than a decade he has traveled the world recording stories of foods at risk of extinction—from cheeses made in the foothills of a remote Balkan mountain range to unique varieties of rice grown in southern China. His work has been recognized by the James Beard Foundation, the Guild of Food Writers, and the Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards.


Reviews

Goodreads review by marta the book slayer on January 11, 2022

I'm just as a surprised as you are that a book about food didn't excite me as much as I assumed it would. I think this stems from two things (and really maybe they are the same thing): 1. the topics felt a bit repetitive despite focusing on different food 2.the style of writing was hard for me to pa......more

Goodreads review by Emily on August 19, 2024

Full disclosure: I put off reading this book because I HATE the title! It sounds like it is implying that rare foods are being eaten too much, when in most cases the problem is that they are being grown and eaten too little. However, it turns out that Mr. Saladino knows that perfectly well! In this......more

Goodreads review by Tim on January 13, 2022

My thanks to Netgalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an unbiased review. 4.5 for sure! Truly a book written for those who grow, cook or enjoy food as well as history buffs! Exploring thru a wide variety of food-types, Saladino delivers to us the unvarnished truth of how human consumption is cha......more

Goodreads review by Glen on April 09, 2022

I won this book in a goodreads drawing. A reporter travels the world, looking for food that may be going the way of the dodo. Some of it reads like the last five minutes of a National Geographic program on PBS. The rest of the book, where the explorer tells us the history and savors the flavors of the......more

Goodreads review by Bagus on February 04, 2022

These days, the expression “You are what you eat” has acquired more popularity. It entered the English lexicon through the publication of Victor Lindahr’s 1942 book You Are What You Eat: How to Win and Keep Health with Diet. But long before that in 1826, the French lawyer and politician Jean Anthelm......more


Awards

  • New Yorker Best Books of the Year
  • Time Magazine Best Books of the Year
  • Amazon.com Best Books of the Year