Eating to Extinction Quotes

“memang narang, we still make use of its linguistic legacy. References to the fruit can be found in Sanskrit and ancient Hindi literature, including the Charaka Samhita, a medical text thought to be a thousand years old. It’s here the word narang or naranga first emerges, which along the Silk Road became the Persian neranji, and eventually naranja in Spain, laranja in Portugal, arancia in Italy and orange in France. In the 1590s, soon after the arrival of the fruit on British shores, Shakespeare included the reference ‘orange tawny beard’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

“This idea is part of a compelling argument that it was honey and bee larvae, as much as meat, that made the human brain larger and helped us to outcompete all other species. Meat eating gets all the glory, the argument goes, because stone tools used in hunting turn up in the archaeological record, while evidence of eating honey does not. But there are plenty of other clues. Our closest relatives in the animal kingdom – chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans – all eagerly gorge on honey and bee larvae, nature’s most energy-dense food. And in the earliest rock art discovered, inside caves in Spain, India, Australia and South Africa, there are depictions of honey collecting dating back at least 40,000 years.”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

“Over millennia, food, cooking and eating became the most powerful expression of the human imagination. So, when a food becomes endangered, another seed lost, another skill forgotten, it is worth remembering the epic story of how they got here.”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

“Consider these facts: the source of much of the world’s food – seeds – is mostly in the control of just four corporations; half of all the world’s cheeses are produced with bacteria or enzymes manufactured by a single company; one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer; from the USA to China, most global pork production is based around the genetics of a single breed of pig; and, perhaps most famously, although there are more than 1,500 different varieties of banana, global trade is dominated by just one, the Cavendish, a cloned fruit grown in monocultures so vast their scale can only be comprehended from the view of an aeroplane or by satellite.”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

“In the place where our ancestors first evolved, sugar in plastic bottles is replacing the sweetness of the food that helped to make us human, honey.”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

“Across the whole of Africa, two-thirds of the continent’s productive land is now at risk of becoming degraded, half of this severe enough to lead to desertification. The biggest cause is overgrazing of livestock.”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

“One-third of the Earth’s land surface is now dedicated to food production – a quarter of this for crops, three-quarters for grazing animals – and farming’s expansion into the wild is continuing (nearly 4 million hectares of tropical rainforest are lost each year).”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

“Deforestation to make way for monocultures of soy, palm oil and cattle has contributed to thousands of the world’s wild food species becoming endangered or threatened with extinction.”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

“The farms, plantations and industries that feed most of us are destroying the habitats of many traditional societies.”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

“farmers in southern Mexico added toxic mineral lime to corn, to extract more nutrients from the grain and make a soft dough for tortillas.”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

“[Biodiversity] is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms – folded them into its genes – and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady. E.O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

“The science writer David Quammen puts it: 'When we disrupt ecosystems, we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts, and when they happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it. And so, they spillover from wild animal populations and into human ones.'

Perhaps COVID-19 will prove to be a wake-up call. We now have the most selfish of reasons to save biodiversity -- our own welfare.”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

“We can't continue to beat the planet into submission, to control, to dominate and all too often destroy ecosystems... We can't retreat into past; but rather than squander what went before we can use our inheritance as a source of strength, as a resource to rebuild with.”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

“Done at a certain time, depriving plants of water places them under stress and sends them into survival mode; to increase their chance of reproduction they begin to produce as much seed as possible. The rice paddy was born out of these careful observations, and it became the most productive food system ever devised.”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

“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.”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

“To reach the most isolated Hadza camps from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city, involves an eighteen-hour drive by jeep. Their home is set among a patchwork of shrubs, rocks, trees”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

“The human diet has undergone more change in the last 150 years (roughly six generations) than in the entire previous one million years (around 40,000 generations).”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them