I wrote this book because I fell in love with stories of endangered foods from around the world: plants that had fed people for thousands of years; breeds of animals once revered and now forgotten; skills, knowledge and techniques honed by successive generations of farmers, foragers and cooks. - P5
‘I love the unusual taste of this fruit … they’re so sweet and refreshing. Each one of these trees is precious, each one gives us such different flavours. These trees are also a part of my identity, my family history and my village. These trees tell a story. Only a fool would risk losing these treasures.’ - P7
Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it.1
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring - P8
Kavilca (pronounced Kav-all-jah) had turned eastern Anatolian landscapes the colour of honey for four hundred generations (around 10,000 years). It was one of the world’s earliest cultivated foods, and now one of the rarest. - P1
Kavilca’s rarity is emblematic of the mass extinction taking place in our food. We are losing diversity in all the crops that feed the world. Yet diversity was the rule for millennia; thousands of different types of wheat have been recorded, each one distinctive in the way it looked, grew and tasted. Few of these varieties have survived into the twenty-first century. - P1
Many aspects of our lives are becoming more homogeneous. - P2
What we’re being offered appears at first to be diverse, until you realise it is the same kind of ‘diversity’ that is spreading around the globe in identical fashion; what the world buys and eats is becoming more and more the same.1 - P2
Consider these facts: the source of much of the world’s food – seeds – is mostly in the control of just four corporations; half of all the world’s cheeses are produced with bacteria or enzymes manufactured by a single company; one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer; from the USA to China, most global pork production is based around the genetics of a single breed of pig; and, perhaps most famously, although there are more than 1,500 different varieties of banana, global trade is dominated by just one, the Cavendish, a cloned fruit grown in monocultures so vast their scale can only be comprehended from the view of an aeroplane or by satellite.2 - P2
This diversity was stored and passed on in the seeds farmers saved, in the flavours of the fruits and vegetables people grew, the breeds of animals they reared, the bread they baked, the cheeses they produced and the drinks they made. - P3
I came across it in a village called Büyük Çatma, north of the part of Turkey where the very first farmers began cultivating wheat 12,000 years ago. - P3
‘It’s over-simplistic now,’9 he said of the global food system. ‘We have a complete loss of diversity.’ - P4
The endangered foods in this book are part of the bigger crisis unfolding across the planet: the loss of all kinds of biodiversity. - P4
|