Author: Dan Saladino

Published by: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021.

It took me over a year to read this book and a few more months to figure out how to put everything I read into a short summary. This book was not a bore or laborious to read–it was eye-opening and insightful and I wanted to digest its stories and science rather than gliding through the surface.

At nearly 400 pages, “Eating to Extinction” discusses the most vulnerable foods throughout the world in categories such as the wild, cereal, vegetable, meat, sea, fruit, cheese, alcohol, stimulants, and sweet. From Orkney, Scotland, to Harenna, Ethiopia, the author covers areas throughout the world where the regional foods are at the most vulnerable mostly through climate change and manmade disasters.

Saladino is a food journalist and he thoroughly researches and interviews the people affected by the changes. These people are the keepers and custodians of their regional food. Some foods are endangered due to their lack of popularity and the food tradition becoming extinct. It is the humanitarian aspect of this book that I found to be most impactful as these unique foods are losing their importance to the people who know how to cultivate it. Often due to land shortage or lack of assistance, they grow just enough to keep the food sustainable.

The foods that come from their area is endemic and native to their land. They have been successful foods that grew for generations and knew how to adapt to the types of soil and weather to survive on the land. Humans have removed some of the lands on which it grows and is replaced with modern current agricultural foods. The climate has also changed and caused sensitive plants to grow at differing elevations. People will have to farm further, causing them to be further from their homes or into territories that are not theirs to travel upon.

In respect to foods from the sea and land animals, Saladino delves into the issues surrounding farmed fish and grazing grounds and how people can strive to be stewards, working within a balance of the ecosystem.

I learned a lot from this book. I learned about food history: from the origins of apples to black chicken to issues that surround the scarcity of coffee beans. There is a sense of possible permanent loss permeating throughout the book and it can feel too overwhelming at times, but there are solutions as well. From the heirloom seed savers to prisons turned into cheese caves, it is the ingenuity of people and their willingness to work with the land rather than take advantage of it that offers hope and possibilities.

Saladino’s clear writing, his respect for humanity, the preservation of tradition and biodiversity, and his desire to learn, makes this book a must for your bookshelf.