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Cargando... Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them (edición 2022)por Dan Saladino (Autor)
Información de la obraEating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them por Dan Saladino
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. This was my second attempt at reading this book. It just looked so loooong that I couldn't face it although I thought I might be interested in the actual content. So, I started in the middle with Stichleton cheese and worked my way out, reading at random whatever caught my fancy and ended up reading most of the book. Who wouldn't be interested in the fact that we have many foods that are disappearing? The same arguments about animals becoming extinct apply to foods. Loss of diversity leads to greater dangers in a food being wiped out; lower diversity for wildlife and lower diversity for our gut microbiome. Often the people that continue with these foods are passionate about them or are part of a long tradition of making/growing them and when they die, so do the ways they know. This makes Saladino's book really important in that it highlights what these foods are. Stichleton cheese has suffered because it is made with raw milk. Can you imagine the French refusing a cheese made with raw milk? Stilton can only be made with pasteurised milk to be called Stilton. Pasteurisation did save many, many people from tuberculosis amongst other things but in eradicating raw milk we also lost something else. Perry was also interesting - a cider type drink made with pears. I used to live in Worcestershire, one of the counties that made Perry, and in my time there orchards disappeared at an alarming rate. Now Perry trees are few and far between and their location has to be kept a secret. It is a delicious drink, quite deceptive and why wouldn't the future of pears one day be dependent on some of the genes included in perry pears? There used to be over 4000 varieties of potato, almost as many of corn, hundreds of varieties of apple and cheeses made where the sheep were grazing. Now we have one main type of potato - 2 or 3 if we are lucky - and half of the world's cheese made with bacteria and enzymes from one company. It seems we have forgotten what happened with the Irish famine where everyone grew the same potato so that when blight hit, it got every single plant. This food monoculture is a danger to the planet and to our health. Saladino has taken on the role of alerting us to the plight of these foods but it is someone else's work to share with us how we can change this, what we can each do without it costing us the earth. This is quite a look at the decline of the diversity of the foods we eat and the drinks we drink. It is a complaint against conformity in our food supplies, against monoculture, big business, and standardization. Besides it being ostensibly about food and agriculture, this also a travel book, in time and place. You will visit places you’ve never been before or ever gain access to. Sort of like Anthony Bourdain sitting down for a bowl of noodles in a Vietnamese greasy spoon with the President of the United States. If I have one complaint it’s that author fails to acknowledge the utility of standardization in government policy. While it sounds quaint and beautiful there being cheeses and alcoholic beverages made from unpasteurized milk or open vats of fermenting hops, there are reasons these standards developed: to protect people. Standards were not developed to rob people of choice. We live in a litigious world, like it or not. Also, people want cheap food. Grocers minimize their losses — and food waste — by sticking to known quantities. Do we all have at least some idea of where our food comes from and how those systems work? By late 2023, I would argue that almost all adults do (and this title was published at the start of the year). For that reason, I am less certain of the need for this narrative than the author is. It did go deep into the ancestral origins of agriculture, in some unique ways and in many parts of the world, all of which are genuinely interesting stories. But as a collection of multiple stories, it was harder for me to knit the anecdotes and histories together into a larger point. Whew. That was a slog despite it being directly up my alley. I did my undergrad in Sustainable Foods & Bioenergy Systems, this could have been a text in one of my classes on monocultures or biodiversity. But this was written for lay people, there's no scientific nomenclature here, and there's often anecdotes here and there. It just contains too much! The fate of many of these foods is the same, so to go through the process for dozens of foods is pretty grating by the end. It's incredibly well researched, but I think I'd just refer to someone interested in one of these foods to it's section, rather than recommending the entire text. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
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"Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of the roughly six thousand different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these-rice, wheat, and corn-now provide fifty percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still: The source of much of the world's food-seeds-is mostly in the control of just four corporations. Ninety-five percent of milk consumed in the United States comes from a single breed of cow. Half of all the world's cheese is made with bacteria or enzymes made by one company. And one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer. If it strikes you that everything is starting to taste the same wherever you are in the world, you're by no means alone. This matters: when we lose diversity and foods become endangered, we not only risk the loss of traditional foodways, but also of flavors, smells, and textures that may never be experienced again. And the consolidation of our food has other steep costs, including a lack of resilience in the face of climate change, pests, and parasites. Our food monoculture is a threat to our health-and to the planet. In Eating to Extinction, the distinguished BBC food journalist Dan Saladino travels the world to experience and document our most at-risk foods before it's too late. He tells the fascinating stories of the people who continue to cultivate, forage, hunt, cook, and consume what the rest of us have forgotten or didn't even know existed. Take honey--not the familiar product sold in plastic bottles, but the wild honey gathered by the Hadza people of East Africa, whose diet consists of eight hundred different plants and animals and who communicate with birds in order to locate bees' nests. Or consider murnong-once the staple food of Aboriginal Australians, this small root vegetable with the sweet taste of coconut is undergoing a revival after nearly being driven to extinction. And in Sierra Leone, there are just a few surviving stenophylla trees, a plant species now considered crucial to the future of coffee"-- No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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This engaging and readable books takes us with Dan Saladino as he visits hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, Bere barley growers in Orkney, German lentil growers, apple growers in Kazakhstan .... and so many more. Each adventure was full of interest, and left me with a desire to try the foods and drink he sampled. It also left me with a determination to do what I can to support the remaining foods being saved by passionate and committed producers. The most important book I'll read this year. ( )