Library Journal - Audio
03/01/2022
The world's food supply is becoming monolithic, with a very few companies controlling the breeds of animal and plant in human diets, writes BBC food journalist Saladino. His work begins with a call to action—a plea to listeners to examine their own diet's impact—then transitions into a discussion of the evolution of food from the Big Bang to the present day. After building the argument that listeners should take seriously the homogenization of food sources, Saladino discusses particular species that are going extinct, taking listeners on a global tour of heritage food sources from Asia, Africa, North America, and elsewhere. The audiobook benefits from having Saladino as the narrator; it feels as though he is having a conversation with listeners, building his case that humans should consider our diets and their impact on the global food chain. Saladino begins by discussing wild foods (honey; herbs), then goes on to cereal, vegetables, meat, seafood, fruit, cheese, alcohol, and more. Saladino also introduces listeners to people who are working hard to preserve each of these food sources. VERDICT Suitable for anyone curious about where our food comes from or concerned by the human impact on our world.—Stephanie Charlefour
Publishers Weekly
09/27/2021
BBC journalist Saladino debuts with an illuminating survey of vanishing varieties of food and the people struggling to preserve them. “Of the 6,000 plant species humans have eaten over time, the world now mostly eats just nine,” he writes. This decline of dietary diversity, driven by the demand to produce crops on “an epic scale,” has triggered a nutritional and cultural depletion that’s spanned the globe, as made evident by the sweeping scope of Saladino’s research. He explores populations that still source their food from the wilds, such as the Hadza, a shrinking tribe of Tanzanian hunter-gatherers who derive 20% of their calories from honey. Endangered types of wheat, oats, and crimson-tipped rice are uncovered in Turkey, Scotland, and China, respectively, while red peas—brought by enslaved Africans to the U.S. low country—nearly met their demise at the hand of real estate developers on Sapelo Island, Georgia. In South Korea, a small family farm fights to preserve the Yeonsan Ogye, “one of the rarest chickens on Earth,” completely black in color, down to its beak and bones. The result is an agricultural investigation that’s fascinating in its discoveries while sorrowful in documenting what has been lost. Agent: Mel Flashman, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
"Eating to Extinction is a celebration in the form of eclectic case studies . . . What Saladino finds in his adventures are people with soul-deep relationships to their food. This is not the decadence or the preciousness we might associate with a word like “foodie,” but a form of reverence . . . Enchanting." —Molly Young, The New York Times
"An immensely readable compendium of food history, cultural lore, agricultural science, and travelogue. There are new flavors to imagine and places to visit on every page." —Richard Schiffman, The Christian Science Monitor
"Eating to Extinction tells the stories of dozens of . . . endangered tastes and makes a reasoned case for saving them in which nostalgia and sentimentality play very little part . . . Saladino has an 18-year-old backpacker’s willingness to light out for remote destinations far from the usual food-writer feeding troughs . . . [A] deeply humanist book . . . Saladino’s eye for detail is photographic when he is describing places and things." —Pete Wells, The New York Times Book Review
"[An] impressively researched book . . . Saladino brings his subjects to life, even breaking bread with them as he seeks out these rare and important foods. His evocative descriptions make a culinary case for preserving them." —Hannah Wallace, The Washington Post
"Fascinating . . . A delightful exploration of traditional foods as well as a grim warning that we are farming on borrowed time." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Into this maelstrom of climate change that all of us are now experiencing, to varying degrees, Saladino . . . brings more bad news, seeded with some good . . . A deeply saddening, too-familiar story containing yet a kernel of hope." —Alan Moores, Booklist (starred review)
“Dan Saladino’s stories of endangered foods form a rallying cry to us all to protect the world’s diversity before it’s too late. But this is also a book filled with optimism; it captures the energy of a global movement of people dedicating their lives to saving the plants, the animals, the flavors, and the food knowledge we must preserve.” —Alice Waters
“This is a big book with a simple message: that we all need to pay more attention to what we are (and are no longer) eating. Behind everything we eat there are people, places, and stories. When we lose diversity in our food, we threaten also the culture and history of the land and the people who produce it. As the world becomes increasingly homogenous, preserving these things—keeping hold of diversity—matters. Dan Saladino manages to highlight the urgency of this matter while also inspiring us to believe that turning the tide is still possible.” —Yotam Ottolenghi
“I’ve long admired Dan Saladino’s journalism for its broad scope and passion. The same qualities animate his first book, Eating to Extinction, an inspiring account of endangered foods and food cultures across the planet. Everyone who cares about what they eat will want to know its stories.” —Harold McGee
"This inspiring and urgent book is one of the few food books that has ever given me goosebumps. Eating to Extinction is a love letter to the huge diversity of foods enjoyed by human beings. A story full of both loss and hope." —Bee Wilson, author of The Wall Street Journal's "Table Talk" column
“Over the course of the handful of millennia we humans have been growing food, Dan Saldino tells us in his incisive book Eating to Extinction, we have foolishly whittled down our original diet from over 6,000 species of plants to just nine. Rice, wheat and corn make up half of our calories. By digging at the roots of this top heavy arrangement Saladino delivers profound truths about our food system while taking the reader on a fabulous journey of taste, texture and provenance.” —Paul Greenberg, bestselling author of the James Beard award-winner Four Fish.
"This is a work of staggering importance. If we relinquish control of the food supply to industrial technology, we lose not only our cultural heritage and good taste, but the ability to feed ourselves in a sustainable, local and meaningful way. Dan Saladino sounds a call to action, not a swan song of bygone foodways, and it should be required reading on the lists of everyone concerned about food." —Ken Albala, professor of history at the University of the Pacific
"Eating to Extinction is an exhaustively researched and fascinating account of endangered food and drink. As a study of biodiversity and cultural creativity its message is alarming yet hopeful." —Paul Freedman, professor at Yale University and author of Ten Restaurants that Changed America
Library Journal
01/01/2022
Saladino, a BBC food journalist and broadcaster, explores the physical and cultural extinction of thousands of foods that had traditionally been part of the human diet. Even if it feels like contemporary Western societies have more access to more foods than ever before, Saladino asserts that people are missing out on the nutrition of the thousands of foods that are not part of their diets. Not only have people become distant from the sources of their food, but they often don't know how to grow or prepare them, resulting in homogenized diets. Additionally, the mass-production of fewer foods is unavoidably altering the ecosystem. The result of research throughout Saladino's lengthy career, this book takes readers on a global journey to taste foods at risk of extinction, like Tanzanian honey (plus fruits, vegetables, grains, meats, and even sweets and alcohols). In the resulting hefty volume, Saladino does a comprehensive job of describing the economic, cultural, and industrial forces that have impacted food production, while refraining from the shaming tone and unrealistic propositions sometimes found in similar books. VERDICT Foodies and slow food enthusiasts will appreciate this deep dive into the history and diversity of global foods and the call to preserve them.—Jennifer Clifton
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2021-10-26
Fascinating descriptions of Indigenous and mostly disappearing foods, plus an alarming message.
Veteran BBC food journalist Saladino emphasizes that world food production exploded after World War II when scientists produced superproductive grains, plants, and livestock. Though these developments drastically reduced famine, the mechanics involved require enormous inputs of chemicals, fertilizer, and water. Relying on elite, high-yield species eliminated those that didn’t measure up, diminishing their diversity. Today, rice, wheat, and corn provide half of all human calories. Most global pork comes from a single breed of pig, and more than 95% of U.S. dairy cows are a single breed, the Holstein. Limiting food diversity has been enormously profitable for large corporations, but the future consequences make scientists uneasy. “We are living and eating our way through one big unparalleled experiment,” writes the author. Having defined the problem, Saladino chronicles his travels around the world, describing dozens of vanishing edibles and pausing regularly to deliver the history of the major foods and food production. Readers will be intrigued and educated by his interviews with experts who warn of our disastrous dependence on a shrinking number of standardized foods. Commercial barley can’t survive in the cold, infertile islands north of Scotland, but its ancestral variety does fine. Although nearing extinction in the wild, Atlantic salmon is a familiar food item because almost all of them are farm raised. Bred to be faster growing and meatier, they have become a bland domestic food animal no less than the chicken or cow. Though there are more than 1,500 varieties of banana, most markets are dominated by the Cavendish, a cloned fruit grown in immense monocultures visible by satellite. Being genetically identical, they can’t evolve and so can’t develop resistance to disease, which inevitably spreads like wildfire. One specific disease is currently devastating the Cavendish, but scientists are working to edit the plant’s DNA “to find a fix against the disease.”
A delightful exploration of traditional foods as well as a grim warning that we are farming on borrowed time.
