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

⚡️ 10 Quotes from the book

“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).”

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“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.”

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“The farms, plantations and industries that feed most of us are destroying the habitats of many traditional societies. Manufactured and branded products from the industrialised world make it into the furthest reaches of the Amazon forest and the African savannah, in a form of neocolonialism through food.”

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“Wild foods are also becoming endangered at a time when we are struggling to understand what our diets should look like. We look to incomplete science for answers but ignore lessons already learned.”

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“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.”

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“The maize boom produced more calories but helped to make the global food system more uniform, less diverse and increasingly brittle.”

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“Soy protein has made a greater impact on our planet and transformed diets more fundamentally than any other plant material in recent history.”

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“Atlantic salmon are paradoxical fish. On the one hand they now count among the rarest of the ocean’s animals: few of us will ever get to see one (or eat one). Yet, thanks to fish farming, the Atlantic salmon is also one of the most ubiquitous animals in the world.”

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“Just as we evolved to be able to digest milk, a gene mutation in our past increased our ability to metabolise alcohol. This gave an evolutionary advantage as it meant humans could forage from the forest floor and across savannahs, eating up large quantities of fallen and fermented fruit without becoming ill.”

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“We can’t retreat into the past; but rather than squander what went before we can use our inheritance as a source of strength, as a resource to rebuild with. The endangered foods in this book helped make us who we are; they could be foods that show us what we can become.”

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