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Magic oranges, lost salmon – and a fight to save dying foods

Eating To Extinction Dan Saladino

Antonia Windsor

Jonathan Cape £25

★★★★☆

Journalist and broadcaster Dan Saladino’s book about the increasing homogenisation of our food is packed with breathtaking facts. There are 1,500 varieties of banana but we eat only one of them; the world’s seeds are controlled by just four corporations; global pork production is based on the genetics of a single breed of pig.

Saladino takes us on a worldwide journey to discover foods that are in danger of extinction. Some of the stories we may already be aware of, such as the decline of the wild salmon population due to dam-building and over-fishing. Others will be new to many readers – such as the bird that leads hunters in Tanzania to honey.

The author’s knowledge and skill as a food writer bursts out in sensuous description: ‘a sip [of perry] will fill your mouth with the bittersweet taste of ripening orchard fruit, tinged with the acid of lemon drops, the bone-dry tannins of tea leaves and the sugar of candy floss’.

Among the chapters on, for example, a medicinal root in Colorado, a red pea in Georgia and wild coffee in Ethiopia are vignettes about those attempting to preserve diversity: the vault chiselled into a mountain in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard with a million seeds, or the Danish company that stores 40,000 different bacteria, which can be bought as starters to create the cheese of your choice. Saladino moves seamlessly from the political – ‘We cannot afford to carry on growing crops and producing food in ways that are so violently in conflict with nature’ – to the personal: ‘My… uncle would prove to me that oranges possessed hidden magical powers by taking a piece of peel and bending it over a lit match, each squeeze creating a burst of miniature fireworks.’ From the romantic – ‘Bite into a traditional piece of cheese and you will be eating into history, culture and an ecosystem’ – to the rallying: ‘By preserving diverse cheeses, we can save living diversity from the ground up.’

Although the book is broadranging in its sweep of foods, cultures and countries, Saladino manages to put a lot of himself into it, too – the orange peel quote is from a chapter on the vanilla orange from Ribera, the Sicilian town in which his father was born – and the book is at its best when he has journeyed to meet the farmers and producers passionately trying to keep these dying foods alive.

At one point he references Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the 1962 book which revealed that 200 new chemicals had been invented since 1940 to kill weeds and pests. Carson’s book contributed to the banning of DDT. Let’s hope that Eating To Extinction can change the world, too.

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2021-10-10T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-10T07:00:00.0000000Z

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