The modern feeding frenzy

EATING TO EXTINCTION: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

Author: Dan Saladino

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 

Price: $30

Pages: 464

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 Mr Saladino to the Tanzanian honey hunt. A broadcast journalist for the BBC, he specialises 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.

The culprits have gotten bigger, too. What started as the grocery chains’ demands for uniform products with a long shelf life has metastasised into something so 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.

Mr 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 colours 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.

Of course, some 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.

Mr Saladino leaves no doubt 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. 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, Mr Saladino meets Vivien Sansour, a Palestinian woman who scours the West Bank for old strains of squash, tomatoes, wheat and sesame.

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.

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