Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

by Dan Saladino

In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale assault on Ukraine, the so called ‘bread basket of Europe’. The levels of interconnectedness between economies and global dependence on a small number of crops meant that ripple effects were felt far and wide.

food soon became the perfect lens through which I could understand the inner workings of the world. Food shows us where real power lies; it can explain conflicts and wars; showcase human creativity and invention; account for the rise and fall of empires; and expose the causes and consequences of disasters. Food stories are perhaps the most essential stories of all.

A global food system that depends on just a narrow selection of plants – and only a very small number of varieties of these – is at greater risk of succumbing to diseases, pests and climate extremes.

the driving force of science during the twentieth century was a relentless kind of reductionism;

Of the 6,000 plant species humans have eaten over time, the world now mostly eats just nine, of which just three – rice, wheat and maize – provide 50 per cent of all calories. Add potato, barley, palm oil, soy and sugar (beet and cane) and you have 75 per cent of all the calories that fuel our species.

food, cooking and eating became the most powerful expression of the human imagination.

Bitterness and sourness, both associated with wild foods, are often signals of health-giving properties. In the Peruvian Amazon, people gather camu camu (Myrciaria dubia), a fruit which resembles a cherry and contains twenty times more vitamin C than an orange.

decolonise our diets,’

Borlaug said the Green Revolution was only buying us time, twenty to thirty years at most. He hadn’t intended it to be a long-term fix for feeding the world but the world became locked into this intensive system. The land that was cleared, the fossil fuels used, and the water extracted – all are contributing not only to food diversity becoming endangered, but also, potentially, the endangerment of life on Earth.

One general rule is that the further north you travel in Europe, the flatter bread becomes. In places with plenty of sun and long hot summers it’s possible to grow cereals such as bread wheat, which have higher levels of the protein gluten. This chemical property adds so much elasticity to dough that, when baked, bubbles of trapped air can make it rise into a fluffy loaf. In colder northern climates, however, the lower levels of sunlight favour barley, rye and oats. These cereals have a different chemical structure and lower levels of gluten, and because of this, in the places where they’ve traditionally been grown, instead of loaves, you find flatbreads.

Paddies can be self-fertilising too because decaying plants and animal waste break down in the water, producing nitrogen which nourishes the crop. The paddy system is so productive that, throughout human history, the world’s densest populations have been rice-growing cultures.40 The surplus food generated allowed people to conceive of a future, plan ahead and divide labour, so that some people were free to craft objects, create art, own possessions or gain prestige. As farmers domesticated rice, they shaped civilisation.

food is also culture; that how maize is farmed matters; that traditional can be healthier. Maize was just maize, a commodity to be traded. Health, heritage and identity weren’t even in the footnotes of the deal. ‘Is this what agricultural progress looks like?’

In the 1950s, most seed supply in Europe and the United States was in the hands of thousands of small businesses, usually family-owned, all assisted by publicly funded research to help improve crops. Today, more than half of the world’s seed supply is in the hands of just four companies.7

Whereas roots anchor plants in soil and supply them with nutrients and water, tubers are more like underground energy banks. These storage organs can be called upon during times of stress, when temperatures fall and rains don’t come. What evolved as a means of survival for plants, a package of carbohydrate, calcium and vitamin C, in turn became a means of survival for humans. Protected beneath the soil, tubers can provide food when other crops fail.

Where nature creates diversity, the food system crushes it.

Sinclair had intended his account of the meat industry to serve as a critique of industrial capitalism but this, it seems, was lost on readers, who were more worried about the unhygienic conditions their food was being produced in. Sinclair said later of his book, ‘I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.’51 As Joshua Specht curtly puts it, ‘He hoped for socialist revolution but had to settle instead for better food labelling.’

We don’t really understand how the salmon finds its way back to its river (it could be a combination of memory, smell, solar navigation and use of the Earth’s magnetic fields), or how it knows it is time to return. We do know that the salmon will do anything to get back home.

Each day, an individual oyster will filter and clean 200 litres of seawater and, as they build up in numbers, they create a safe haven for other sea animals: about a hundred or more different species can live on and among oyster beds.42 When oysters accumulate in the millions (and even billions), they construct buffer zones that can help protect coastlines from erosion.

farmers are the custodians of biodiversity,

Placing grapes inside a qvevri is a low-intervention way of allowing a wine to develop and stand on its own feet. The Georgians describe the wine in the buried qvevri as being wrapped in the mother’s embrace, with the earth as mother.13

In the face of climate change, water shortages and increasing disease, the concern is that Arabica might not have a big enough genetic toolkit to adapt fast enough, or even at all.

although robusta has a higher caffeine content than Arabica, its taste is inferior. If the best Arabica is sweet, delicate, bright, floral and fruity, robusta is coffee’s sledgehammer blow, a full-on caffeine kick with notes of woodiness, hints of tobacco and even rubber.

There is an old Palestinian saying that Sansour shared with me before we said goodbye. ‘He who does not eat from his own adze [a farming tool] cannot think with his own mind.’ This is why a watermelon, a grain of wheat or a tiny sesame seed is such a powerful thing. Each one can be a small taste of freedom.

Brazil, for example, introduced a national policy in which at least 30 per cent of food for school meals had to come from local farms.3 In Copenhagen, businesses supplying apples to schools were given contracts based not just on volume but on the number of different apple varieties they could supply, which led to a revival of local orchards.4

I use the word maize instead of corn. The former is indigenous in origin whereas the latter is European.

Nutritious traditional foods are becoming marginalised, day by day, bite by bite.’