Ah, glorious food. Living on a sailboat with a fridge that is currently out of order, food is indeed a key consideration from day to day. Fresh vegetables go mouldy quickly, so I have a list that I update daily, prioritising what needs eating first. Tinned things - pulses, beans and the occasional fruit - last forever, so are a godsend. Rice, bulgur wheat and the recently discovered giant couscous are all staples.
To be honest, I think about food most of the time anyway, don't you? So does Dan Saladino in his book Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them. He goes in search of some of the most ancient staple foodstuffs on Earth, and presents them here as case studies for a trend that is taking over our food chain globally - namely, that traditional values, methods and food varieties are being supressed in favour of productivity, coupled with global homogeneity.
Eating to Extinction is divided into ten sections, such as Vegetables, Meat, Cheese or Fruit. Ten?, you might ask. Indeed - because although Saladino has dug admirably deep and traveled the world in search of these rare foods, and has carried out in-person research that is hugely valuable, there is a lot of ground being covered here. Each of the ten sections is further divided into at least two, more often three varieties: four cereals, six sea-based foods, and the stranger categories - such as stimulants or cereal - also include at least two varieties each.
Each individual item is covered in a chapter, including the author's experiences, as well as covering local food-based traditions, personal histories, or initiatives to save said food. This, unfortunately, does mean that the pace of the book is a bit slow. In the first few sections, lots of short chapters cover a wider variety of grains and pulses than my brain can't store (unlike the fascinating grain stores we meet along the way), and the snippets of various people trying to salvage heritage breeds often doesn't give a deep enough insight to make us care. Later, a chapter about bison especially stood out for me as not really finding its place in this book, barely touching on the topic of food. These chapters read almost as if the author is trying to meet the minimum of three varieties per section.
Among the many varieties of not-so-interesting grains and cereals I trudged through, however, there were a lot of interesting nuggets of information in other parts of the book. I never knew oyster stout was called that due to brewers plopping oysters into their dark porters for added flavour; and reading about Georgian wine and its mystical fermenting in clay pots underground felt like reading fantasy. Black Ogye Chicken is a breed exclusively found in Korea, and is black from beak to toe, absolutely worth a look. Most fascinating to me was a chapter about fermented, wind-dried meat (Skerpikjøt) produced on the Faroes as a delicacy, painting vivid images of meat hanging in sea-wind battered wooden sheds called 'hjallur', and providing a fantastic glimpse into island culture and history.
By the end of the book, a picture does build up slowly, as the patterns too often repeat: a depressing present time of traditional values and methods disappearing in favour of globalised, homogenous food supplies. Chapters do tend to finish on a somewhat hopeful note that the individual forerunners and preservers might be able to hang onto, or bring back, traditional methods and varieties once again.
After all that, I feel I sound quite negative about this book. I can only praise the author's effort and knowledge that has gone into such a wide-ranging, colourful collection of stories. I do think it could have done with some trimming down here and there, but on the whole it is a fascinating discussion of what we eat, how much of it is our decision, and how these choices influence the planet and us as people. It's less of a foodie book, more of a food book - if that makes any sense at all - but the message comes through loud and clear.
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