DAN SALADINO

KAVILCA WHEAT KAVILCA WHEAT Extract from Part Two: Cereal Kavılca Wheat - Büyük Çatma, Anatolia Over thousands of years, various cultures and empires have claimed the soil of Büyük Çatma, on Turkey’s eastern border. But while different people came and went, a rare source of continuity has been a particular type of grain, Kavilca, an emmer wheat, one of the first plants domesticated by Neolithic farmers, which still grows in the fields around the village. Kavilca is now endangered, but it has been grown over centuries for good reason – it has qualities we can’t afford to lose. It was harvest time, and the last uncut field of golden-yellow Kavilca formed an oasis against the backdrop of the grey-green mountains. The mature ears of wheat were now so heavy they bowed down, their long, protective bristles waving in the wind. Dasdemir walked among the chest-high stalks, picked off an ear and broke it apart. The grains were encased in a tight-fitting, protective shell, a glume. He rubbed it between his fingers. ‘Most wheat gives up its grains easily,’ he said. ‘Kavilca is stubborn.’ Kavilca also produces lower yields than modern varieties. I was starting to wonder why it hadn’t gone extinct long ago. Resilience is part of the answer. The land around Büyük Çatma is high and harsh, a tough place to live, for people and plants. At an altitude of 1,500 metres, temperatures drop to below –30°C in the winter, and heavy snow can close the village off for weeks. During the spring it rains and the air is damp, an invitation for all kinds of diseases to attack crops. Few crops do well here. Kavilca is an exception; it evolved in this environment over thousands of years, adapted, survived and thrived. Dasdemir and the other farmers viewed Kavilca as an inheritance, handed down by their ancestors. ‘We have an emotional connection with this food,’ he said. ‘We love the way the wheat looks in our fields, and the smell and taste of the grain when it’s cooked.’ From the field, we went in search of the only local miller stubborn enough to still work with the stubborn wheat. Erdem Kaya looked tired when we arrived at his mill on the outskirts of the village. During harvest time, he finishes work at one o’clock in the morning and starts again at six. A beanpole of a man, dressed in a green overall, unshaven and melancholy-looking, he lives and works alone. His father had been a miller, he had been born in the mill and it was all he had ever known. The grey-stone mill stands beside the Kars Çayi River, the source of the power for the two large circular grinding stones inside. A sweet smell hung in the air like freshly baked cake. Kaya disappeared up a ladder and pulled a long wooden lever to start the flow of water. The whole room seemed to creak and then sigh as machinery juddered into life, a series of belts slapped into action and the giant stones began to turn. Modern bread wheat is free-threshing which means its naked grains easily come loose from their ears, ready to be milled into flour. Because of their tough hulls, Kavilca grains have to be milled twice. The first step removes the husks. After these outer shells have been separated (winnowed away), a second round of grinding breaks the grains into tiny pieces, leaving it looking like fine shingle on a beach. It is the most difficult wheat Kaya works with, but also the most satisfying. ‘When they cook with it in the village, I can smell it from the mill,’ he said. ‘That’s not true with the other grains.’ He handed us a sack of Kavilca and we left him to his work. The aroma Kaya described wafts from a variety of traditional Anatolian dishes that feature Kavilca, one of which was cooked with the grains we had collected from the mill. Back in the village Erdal Göksu and his wife Filiz, also farmers, roasted a goose on top of the cracked wheat so that its fat dripped down and cooked the grains. Filiz moved around the kitchen, a white, embroidered scarf covering her head, and added bowl after bowl to the table: cream and soft cheeses, pickled cabbage, peppers stuffed with spiced lamb and, at the centre of it all, a large dish piled with Kavilca shaped into a ring, its brown grains glistening with the fat and juices from the goose, with flakes of tender, buttery meat in the centre. The grains tasted rich, nutty and satisfying. ‘This is a taste we recognise deep within us,’ Filiz said, ‘we feel it in our bodies.’ Standing in a field of Kavilca in Eastern Anatolia Kavilca wheat Erdem Kaya, the miller Erdem's mill BACK TO ALL

MURNONG MURNONG Extract from Part One: Wild Murnong - Southern Australia Before European invaders arrived in the eighteenth century, Victoria in Southern Australia was covered in plants of murnong, a crop that grew so thick that from a distance it seemed to form a blanket of yellow. For the indigenous people who lived here over tens of thousands of years, including the Wurundjeri, the Wathaurong, Gunditjmara and Jaara, the importance of this root is hard to overstate. Without murnong as vital sustenance, life here would have been precarious if not impossible. But by the 1860s the food was as good as extinct. From the arrival of the first colonists in 1788, when livestock was offloaded from ships, sheep began eating their way through the landscape. Before the gold rush of the 1850s, a ‘grass rush’ had taken hold across southern Australia. The region had some of the greatest expanses of grasslands in the world but, unlike the Serengeti and the American Plains, there were no migrating animals roaming free and no wildlife to plunder the murnong fields. In the first decades of European settlement, farmers introduced millions of sheep, their numbers doubling every two or three years. Awaiting the sheep were thousands of square miles of pristine grass and vegetation, and the animals loved murnong. The soil was also light and soft, so they could nose their way right through to the roots. They cropped the plants with their teeth and, along with cattle, their hard hooves compacted the soil. In 1839, just five years after the founding of Melbourne, James Dredge, a Methodist preacher who had spent a year with the Tonge-worong people living in a bark hut, recorded in his diary a conversation with an Aboriginal man named Moonin. ‘Too many jumbuck [sheep] and bulgana [cattle],’ Moonin said, ‘plenty eat it myrnyong, all gone the murnong.’ A year later, Edward Curr added in his journal that ‘several thousand sheep not only learnt to root up these vegetables with their noses, but they for the most part lived on them for the first year’, after which murnong became scarce. The state-appointed ‘Chief Protectors of the Aborigines’, the colonists on the ground and in a position to see how quickly things were changing in the Aboriginal territories, were aware of what was happening to murnong. One alerted his superiors to scenes of starvation. In the eyes of most of the Europeans, however, murnong was little more than a weed, and so the indigenous people were left looking on as more livestock arrived and swept through the landscape, eating up their supplies of food. A missionary, Francis Tuckfield, wrote that ‘the Aborigines’ ... murnong and other valuable roots are eaten by the white man’s sheep, and their deprivations, abuses and miseries are daily increasing’. The colonists introduced other invasive species which made the situation worse, including grasses that outcompeted murnong and encouraged yet more grazing and trampling by sheep and cattle. Then, in 1859, rabbits were brought to Australia. If there had been any wild murnong left, the herbivores finished it off. Illustration of murnong by Becky Ripley BACK TO ALL

WILD FOREST COFFEE WILD FOREST COFFEE Extract from Part Nine: Stimulants Wild Forest Coffee - Harenna, Ethiopia All of the coffee grown around the world can be traced back to the wild forests in the highlands of southern Ethiopia. Scientists believe that knowing coffee’s past could be an important part of securing its future. The most important species for coffee drinkers – Arabica - is not only vulnerable to the effects of climate change but it’s under threat from a devastating disease called la roya. The wild coffee trees in Ethiopia’s highland forests and in a small area of neighbouring South Sudan are the main storehouse of genetic diversity for Arabica (just as the wild trees around the Tian Shan in Kazakhstan are the gene pool for the apple). At its simplest, these forests are split into two main regions, east and west of the Great Rift Valley. In the west are the Wellega, Illubabor, Tepi, Bench Maji, Kaffa and Jimma-Limu coffee areas, and in the east, across the Rift, are Sidamo, Bale and Harar. In each of these areas, and in each of the forests, are genetically distinct populations of Arabica. Each area has a unique flavour profile, or even range of profiles. Coffee has an ‘origin’, in the same way the term ‘terroir’ is used for wine, to identify the difference between one vineyard and another. Each of the distinct populations of wild coffee trees has evolved and adapted to its own environment over hundreds of thousands of years. This diversity explains why, in the west in the Agaro region, in the Jimma-Limu zone, coffee may be sweet and subtle, with notes of citrus, tropical flowers and stone fruit (such as peach), whereas coffee from the Bale Mountains is usually fruity and floral but with added notes of vanilla and spice. Each of these coffee areas is also home to different communities. One of the lesser-known wild coffee forests (and one of the hardest to reach) is Harenna, 250 miles south-east of Addis Ababa, set within the Bale Mountains which has some of the highest peaks in East Africa. This is a biodiversity hotspot; thousands of plant species can be found here, along with endangered punk-haired Bale monkeys, lions and the rare Ethiopian wolf. Much of the mountain forest here has been so inaccessible that this biodiversity remained largely undocumented until the end of the twentieth century. Harenna is dwarfed by the Bale Mountain massif, which has peaks of over 4,000 metres, and even in the dense forest where the coffee grows (at 1,500 to 1,800 metres) there’s often a cloud of mist above the high canopy. Harenna might appear to be completely given over to nature but within the coffee forest are villages, hamlets and single smallholdings. The forest is currently home to around 3,000 people, and for most of them coffee is their life. Their livelihoods depend on gathering beans from trees that can be completely wild or semi-wild (tending them makes harvesting easier). The wildest coffee grows on wiry branches of tall, spindly trees; the red, cherry-like fruits are picked and tossed into long, cylindrical straw baskets draped over shoulders. Some of the wild coffee is sold on to traders, but much of it stays in the forest. …But just as we’re realising the value of the coffee genetics in the Ethiopian highlands, the wild coffee trees are under threat. photo by Michela Lenta photo by Michela Lenta photo by Paola Viesi BACK TO ALL

SHIO-KATSUO SHIO-KATSUO Extract from Part Five: The Sea Shio-Katsuo – Nishiizu, Southern Japan Yasuhisa Serizawa lives in Nishiizu, a fishing town on Japan’s south coast. He is the last surviving producer of one of Japan’s oldest processed foods, skip-jack tuna preserved whole, shio-katsuo. This is not a food for the faint-hearted and needs to be treated with great expertise and care. It’s a leathery, savoury and super-salty product. When I met him, Serizawa was holding an example of his craft, a half-metre-long tuna. Its silvery skin and white eyes were intact but its body was dry and coated in a fine dusting of salt. It was the most beautiful food I had ever set eyes on. Sprouting out of its mouth, through its gills and along its body, were golden bristles of rice stalks. The grass had been dried in the sun and softened with salt water so that the ends could be tied into large intricate knots. This artful threading of grass in and out of the animal’s desiccated body had been done with such skill that every scale on the tuna’s body remained pristine. Each fish takes Serizawa months to complete, and so he seemed as much an artist as a food producer. The reason the fish is given such an elegant outfit in its afterlife is that as well as being food, it’s also an offering to Shinto deities. At New Year, people in Nishiizu place the preserved fish in front of their homes and on public shrines. The woven rice grass represents a gift from the land to match the offering of the fish from the sea. ‘At the shrines we offer prayers to keep the fishermen safe,’ says Serizawa, ‘and we ask for good harvests in coming years.’ After the tributes have been paid, shio-katsuo becomes an ingredient; crumbled into a fine, savoury powder, it can transform the humblest of dishes. Fishermen bring Serizawa tuna, usually caught in September when the fish are in peak condition, full of fat and muscle from months of feeding. The guts and the gills are removed immediately to avoid any ‘off’ flavours, but because of the fish’s sacred status, the eyes are left untouched. The empty belly of the fish is then held open with bamboo skewers and salt is poured into the cavity and packed around the body, to slowly draw all of the moisture from the flesh. Two weeks later, the tuna is bathed in a special liquid prepared with juices saved from previous batches. This adds bacteria to the process and triggers fermentation, ‘which makes it taste a little funky’, says Serizawa. After the intense salting, pairs of fish are tied together and hung outdoors for several weeks under the shade of Serizawa’s factory roof. It’s then he’ll begin knotting and plaiting rice straws, threading each one in and out of the fish, a daily ritual that goes on for weeks. When shio-katsuo is disassembled from its ceremonial dressing, the flesh of the fish breaks into brown, yellow and silver flakes that glint. Added to rice and vegetable dishes, shio-katsuo adds big meaty flavours. Tiny pieces sprinkled onto a simple bowl of spinach can turn every mouthful into something unexpectedly complex. ‘One plus one becomes three,’ says Serizawa, describing the flavour transformation. And for more than one thousand years, just that sprinkle of shio-katsuo has helped turn ‘poor’ ingredients into noble ones. BACK TO ALL

This is the website of Dan Saladino, journalist, writer and broadcaster. We need to save the world’s most endangered foods. They represent history, identity, science, culture, creativity and craft. And our future. We all need to know these stories. Play Video Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tumblr Copy Link Link Copied Welcome to the website of Dan Saladino, food journalist, writer and broadcaster. Here you will find articles, films and audio linked to his books Eating to Extinction, The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them and From the Sea , as well as updates on stories Dan has covered, and the latest research on food, biodiversity and indigenous food systems. This is the personal website of Dan Saladino dedicated to Eating to Extinction . For BBC Radio 4's The Food Programme click here. Play Video Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tumblr Copy Link Link Copied EATING TO EXTINCTION ON FILM Eating to Extinction is a book full of stories of where our food comes from and the origins of the plants and animals we depend on today. It explores food diversity created by farmers and food producers over thousands of years, explains why that diversity is disappearing and argues that this matters to us all. This film is about that central idea in the book and is based on the chapter titled Memang Nerang . This is the name given by the Garo people of north-eastern India to the wild and now endangered ancestor of all the oranges grown around the world today. Memang Nerang means ‘Fruit of Ghosts’ because the fruit is used in a death ritual, the sour and bitter oranges collected from the forest to be placed around the body of a deceased member of the community. But this tiny citrus fruit features in every part of the Garo people’s lives, from beginning to end, and the story of this relationship between people and a sacred fruit inspired Nathan Cozzolino, Rob Fraebel and Scott Barry of Rose Los Angeles to make a film. That’s why film-maker Jason Taylor travelled with me to the Garo Hills to find Memang Nerang, to meet some of the Garo people and to discover their contribution to maintaining and preserving one of the world’s great biodiversity hotspots and one of its rarest foods. LATEST NEWS From the Sea My second book, 'From the Sea', is being published in the US in June. It’s part of the Picador Shorts series, 'Oceans, Rivers, and... Capturing the essence of a book Wild African honey, Andean tubers, Japanese salt-preserved fish and a unique Anatolian wheat are just four of the nearly forty stories of... How I discovered there was such a thing as an endangered food On my first day working on The Food Programme , back in 2007, Sheila Dillon asked me what my first edition was going to be about....

BISON BISON Extract from Part Four: Meat Bison – Great Plains, USA The mass slaughter of bison that took place on the American Great Plains in the nineteenth century was the greatest destruction of any wild animal witnessed in modern history. Work is underway to bring bison back. I think this bison story is one of the most moving stories in the book, a reminder to rethink our relationship with animals and meat. Although there are thought to be half a million bison in the USA today, only a small proportion of these are pure bison. This is partly a consequence of the early conservationists crossing the wild animal with cattle, a practice that continued into the early twentieth century in an effort to rebuild bison herds more quickly. Now, with gene sequencing and selective culling, cattle genes are slowly being removed. Many projects in which bison are being reintroduced to the Great Plains are on Native American reservations. One is a partnership between Jennifer Barfield, Professor of Animal Reproduction at Colorado State University, and the Kiowa and Navajo tribes. Barfield has spent years increasing the numbers of genetically pure bison. Before the animals are transferred to the Great Plains, members of the tribes give them a blessing. Barfield had been focused on the job of making ‘bison babies’ (her words) but watching some of the ceremonies forced her to re-evaluate her work. During one, she was standing beside a pen where the bison were being held before their release onto the plains. ‘The animals knew something was happening,’ she says. ‘They were restless and moving their feet.’ When the ceremony began and the tribal leaders started to sing their buffalo song to the beat of a drum, all movement stopped and the animals fell silent. She’d spent a year with those animals and knew them really well. Usually when the bison heard unfamiliar sounds, their senses were heightened and they became agitated, but all Barfield could see here were bison eyes peering intently through the spaces of the fence. They were completely still, transfixed by the drums. At that moment she knew she was involved in something that went beyond science, genetics and conservation. ‘A different kind of connection was going on between these animals and the tribe,’ she says. Perhaps that was palpable. Outside hundreds of people had gathered to watch the bison be released out into the open, some hiking for miles to get there, ‘and when the animals burst out into the open and started to run across the ground, people started crying’. In my own search for bison, I found myself on a sand dune in the San Luis Valley of south-west Colorado, the wind howling around me and grains of sand prickling my face. With thirty square miles of sand dunes, some that tower 750 feet high, the valley is part Lawrence of Arabia and part spaghetti western, where trails in the distance disappear through mountain passes…Right up until the 1870s, before Ute Indian tribes were moved onto reservations, Native Americans lived among the bison in this area, shifting their settlements around south-western Colorado as herds migrated through the grasslands. Today, this place is home to one of the most ambitious projects aimed at bringing bison back to the Great Plains. This is Zapata Ranch, a 100,000-acre reserve which was bought in the 1980s by a Japanese-American architect Hisa Ota. His original plan had been to turn the ranch into a high-end resort, but when he started reading about the history of bison in the area, he became fixed on the idea of helping bison return. Ota started buying up bison from private collections and bringing them to the ranch. By the late 1990s, Zapata’s bison herd was in the hundreds. This is when he handed it all over to the Nature Conservancy Trust, which now runs the ranch and takes care of the bison. The landscape around the ranch consists of high plains desert, dry creek sand beds, running springs, vast meadow and, as Theodore Roosevelt had once described, the ‘shimmering, tremulous’ cottonwood trees with their green leaves set against the dust. My first glimpse of bison was three females drinking from one of the creeks that did have water. Each was as big as a horse, with horns that curled forwards in a C-shape. Winter was coming and their chocolate-brown winter coats were becoming shaggy. They looked powerful but there was something nonchalant about the way they lazily lapped up the water, lifting their heads up every now and then to give me a short stare. ‘They’re checking us out,’ said Kate Matheson, who is Zapata’s ranch manager, adding in reassurance, ‘Don’t worry, they’re not aggressive.’ Their nostrils were wide and their long triangular heads were covered in fluffy hair finished with the tuft of a goatee. Although they look heavy and cumbersome, bison can, for a short distance at least, hit speeds of more than thirty miles per hour and outpace most horses. Driven by powerful haunches which rise to a hump and then slope down along their back, they look like prehistoric cave paintings made flesh. As we drove further into the expanse of Zapata Ranch, we passed four male bison calves, each the size of a fully-grown Great Dane, teenagers with awkward-looking twisted horns. Born in the spring, their orange coats were now becoming thick and dark, ready for the winter when temperatures here can drop to as low as –40°C. Nearby was a group of adult males. They would soon be moving off to spend their time in bachelor herds but for now they were still mixing with females, sniffing the air to check if any were ‘cycling’ and ready to breed. These bulky, tank-like animals weigh around 2,000 pounds. Further on, we stopped the jeep, and a thousand bison surrounded us. I watched spellbound as they looked up and stared, and then, ever so slowly, got back to the business of eating grass. The plan at Zapata is conservation through consumption. Each autumn an audacious exercise in herding takes place as a network of fences is erected around the ranch. Wranglers (modern-day cowboys and cowgirls) then use motorbikes and a small plane to round up bison. Seven of the animals keep Zapata’s log cabin restaurant stocked with bison meat for an entire year. The rest of the cull is sold to chefs across the state, raising money for the conservation project and helping to spread awareness of the bison. The meat is tender and a little coarser and gamier than beef, chewier (in a good way). BACK TO ALL

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Biography of Dan Saladino ABOUT Although I was born in Britain, my earliest and most profound food memories all come from Sicily where I spent all my childhood summers with my Sicilian nonna, aunts and cousins. It was here that I discovered how food always comes with a story and how it connects people, not just to each other but to a place. Perhaps it was no surprise then, that when I first started working on BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme in 2007 and was asked to make my first programme, my mind went immediately to Sicily, where I knew the orange harvest was beginning. It was also here in Sicily that I first discovered, at a meal to celebrate some of Sicily’s rare orange varieties, that there were such things as endangered foods. The Slow Food man sitting next to me told me that the various oranges used to create the meal were on the Ark of Taste, an online sort of Noah’s ark for food. Set up by Slow Food in Italy, the Ark was steadily filling up with foods from across the globe and the stories I found on it – about unique foods, the cultures which created them and the people trying to save them – were spell-binding to me. Ever since, I have sought out stories of endangered foods and when it was suggested to me that I should write a book, it’s these stories that I wanted to tell. Each story stood alone as telling its own tale about the part of the world it came from – it spoke of history, politics, culture, community and flavour. But as I started to write, something started to become clear to me: the diverse foods I was writing about, whether an Albanian mountain cheese, a Georgian qvevri wine, an Orkney variety of barley or a piece of fermented Faorese sheep, were all at risk because of one thing. The homogenisation of food taking place across the world was edging foods that had been created over thousands of years – foods which contained important genetics, disease-resistance, nutrition and flavour – towards extinction. In my book Eating to Extinction, I argue that we need these endangered foods – for our future food security, the good of the planet and the good of our own health. These are precious resources that were a long time in the making. We can’t afford to lose them. GET IN TOUCH My father, Liborio ‘Bobo’ Saladino, was born in south-western Sicily in a small town called Ribera. This is where I spent the summers of my childhood. Ribera was my introduction to farming, to crops and to harvests, and it shaped my thinking about food. On the outskirts of the town, a towering, brightly painted sign proclaims: Ribera: Città delle arance – ‘city of oranges’. For me, arriving in Ribera as a child was like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy first realises she’s not in Kansas any more. Coming from the black-and-white food world of 1970s Britain I was dazzled by the MGM Technicolor of Sicilian food. It’s no surprise then that I found the kernel of the idea that eventually became Eating to Extinction in Sicily.

STICHELTON STICHELTON Extract from Part Seven: Cheese Stichelton – Nottinghamshire, England At six o’clock one morning, I stepped into a warm, white-walled dairy on the edge of Sherwood Forest to watch England’s ‘King of Cheeses’ being made, a Stilton in all but name. Joe Schneider works to an old recipe for the blue-veined cheese, but because he uses unpasteurised milk, he’s not allowed to call it Stilton. Rules passed in the 1990s mean the famous cheese can now only be made with pasteurised milk. To avoid prosecution, Schneider called his cheese Stichelton, Old English for the town that gave Stilton its name. From the large windows of the Stichelton dairy, I could see the cows returning to their field. A layer of yellow cream glinted across the surface of the morning’s milk as it settled in a long, rectangular stainless steel vat. This was the first step in the twenty-four-hour ‘make’ (farmhouse Cheddar can take as little as six hours). People have tried to speed up Stilton recipes, but it can’t be done; making Stichelton is a long and physical process. Just a minuscule (Schneider says ‘homeopathic’) amount of starter culture is added, to encourage the acidity to develop gradually, ensuring each step of the make (something of a slow-motion high-wire act) can be taken ever so gently. This is not a consistent cheese. Most often it is outstanding, but sometimes Schneider will make a Stichelton which is incomparable, up there among the world’s best. To create the blue veins that run through the cheese, Schneider adds spores of the fungus Penicillium roqueforti at the start of the make. Later, when the cheeses are maturing, holes are pierced into the centre, letting air in and activating the mould. This causes further breakdown of fats and proteins, adding sharper, more piquant flavours, making the texture softer and creamier and giving parts of the ivory coloured cheese its distinctive indigo blue veins. Before it became possible to manufacture Penicillium roqueforti, Stilton makers were said to have used old pieces of leather which they left hanging outside their dairies until they became coated in a delicate layer of mould. They then draped these through the vats to inoculate their milk. Five hours into that day’s make, the milk had coagulated, and the whey drained away. Schneider now had to move the warm curds from the vat and onto a long cooling table. Most Stilton makers now do this mechanically, but Schneider insists that it has to be done by hand, one ladle at a time. In a single motion he took a scoop from the vat on his right and swung it across to the cooling table on his left. For an hour, I watched him bend, turn and twist, heaving the curds from one side to the other. The room was silent except for the trance-like slip-slapping sound of moist curds falling onto the table. ‘Do it any other way and you’ll damage the curds and change the texture of the cheese,’ he said. I felt I was witnessing the last fragile link in a chain that had been forged centuries before, one that connected humans, animals, pasture and microbes; a beautiful and natural synchronicity. Science had changed that, casting nature as the enemy and giving the laboratory the status of saviour. In this dairy, I could still feel the sense of wonder for that other lost world. ‘To think,’ I said, as I watched the firm curds pile up, ‘a few hours ago it was milk.’ ‘And just two days ago,’ Schneider said, ‘it was grass'. Joe Schneider at work making Stichelton Stichelton cheese BACK TO ALL

Resources corresponding to the events at Food Diversity Day 2023. fooddiversityday.com FOOD DIVERSITY DAY: RESOURCES Food, biodiversity and endangered foods Slow Food’s Ark of Taste An online catalogue of the world’s most endangered foods, more than 5000 from 150 countries. https://www.fondazioneslowfood.com/en/what-we-do/the-ark-of-taste/ Slow Food UK’s Ark of Taste https://www.slowfood.org.uk/ff-info/forgotten-foods/ Global Crop Diversity Trust An international organisation dedicated to conserving and making crop diversity available for use globally, forever and for the benefit of everyone. https://www.croptrust.org The Foods of England Project Using the British Library's collection, from cookbooks going back to the 1300s and from newspapers and other records, this project by Glyn Hughes brings together the original receipts (recipes) for over 3000 forgotten dishes. http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/about.htm Food Museum Located in East Anglia, ‘Britain’s Breadbasket’, the museum’s mission is to connect people with where our food comes from and the impact of our choices: past, present and future https://foodmuseum.org.uk/about/ Bread, Baking and the Diversity of Grains UK Grain Lab An annual meeting of farmers, millers, plant breeders, bakers, cooks, scientists and academics providing an opportunity to learn from each other and talk about the future of food. https://www.ukgrainlab.com Real Bread Campaign An organisation finding and sharing ways to make bread better for us, better for our communities and better for the planet. https://www.sustainweb.org/realbread/ Britain and Ireland Community Grains Association Promoting locally based non-commodity grain cultivation and use to millers, bakers and consumers in our respective local areas and across Ireland and Britain. http://www.bicga.org.uk/ Washington State University Bread Lab Researchers working outside the commodity system on wheat and other grains to develop better tasting, healthier, affordable bread. https://breadlab.wsu.edu/ The Last of Their Kind: Endangered British Cheeses and How to Save Them Specialist Cheesemakers Association An alliance of cheesemakers, retailers, wholesalers and others involved with artisan cheese, which was established to encourage excellence in cheesemaking. https://www.specialistcheesemakers.co.uk/ Patrick McGuigan One of the UK’s leading cheese writers and communicators, who has interviewed the world's best cheesemakers, affineurs and cheesemongers. https://www.patrickmcguigan.com/ Courtyard Dairy A cheese shop but also a great online resource for finding out more about cheese. https://www.thecourtyarddairy.co.uk/blog/cheese-musings-and-tips/ British Cheese Awards Founded by Juliet Harbutt in 1994, the awards celebrate cheese makers from across the UK and Ireland. http://www.britishcheeseawards.com World Cheese Awards Bringing together cheesemakers, retailers, buyers and food commentators worldwide to judge over 4,000 cheeses from over 40 countries. https://gff.co.uk/awards/world-cheese-awards/ Milk Trekker Cheesemaker Trevor Warmedahl documents global traditions of cheese, dairying, and pastoralism as he travels the world. https://milktrekker.substack.com/ Soil, Pasture & Animal breeds: Why Diversity Matters in Meat and Dairy Domestic Animal Diversity Information System Maintained and developed by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, DAD-IS is a database of global livestock diversity. https://www.fao.org/dad-is/en/ Rare Breeds Survival Trust An organisation established in 1974 to monitor, save and promote our UK native livestock breeds. https://www.rbst.org.uk/ UK Breeds at Risk The UK government’s record of the smallest and most fragile livestock populations. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-breeds-at-risk-from-exotic-animal-disease-outbreaks/uk-breeds-at-risk-list-bar Pasture For Life Promoting produce raised exclusively on pasture, and making the case for the wider environmental and animal welfare benefits that pastured livestock systems represent. https://www.pastureforlife.org/about-us/our-mission/ Livestock Conservancy Trust A non-profit organization working to protect more than 180 breeds of livestock and poultry from extinction, including cattle, chickens, pigs and sheep. Since its inception in 1977, The Livestock Conservancy has not lost a breed on its Conservation Priority List to extinction. https://livestockconservancy.org A Chef’s Guide to the Ark of Taste: Can Restaurants Save Endangered Foods? Slow Food Cooks’ Alliance A world-wide network of cooks from restaurants, bistros, canteens and street kitchens who support small producers and custodians of biodiversity, by using products from Presidia projects and the Ark of Taste, as well as local fruits, vegetables and cheeses, in their kitchens. https://www.slowfood.com/tag/alliance-between-chefs-and-small-scale-producers/ Slow Food Cooks Alliance (UK) A network of chefs committed to cooking and promoting endangered foods from the Slow Food Ark of Taste and other communities of local producers. https://www.slowfood.org.uk/chef_alliance_info/chef-alliance/ Slow Food Cooks’ Alliance (US) A network uniting cooks across the United States to support local producers, influence policy and awaken eaters to the rich food cultures and biodiversity of our planet. https://slowfoodusa.org/cooks-alliance/ Relais & Chateaux Food for Change A collaboration between Relais & Châteaux and Slow Food which supports producers of endangered foods and regenerative farming with the aim of restoring ecosystems. https://www.relaischateaux.com/gb/p/food-for-change Can Diversity Help Save the Oceans? Marine Stewardship Council An organisation working with fisheries, scientists and industry to make sure our oceans are fished sustainably and that it’s easy to find and buy certified sustainable seafood. https://www.msc.org The Sea Around Us A source of fisheries and fisheries-related data with ecological and policy relevance, including Exclusive Economic Zones, High Seas, or Large Marine Ecosystems. https://www.seaaroundus.org Blue Marine Foundation A charity dedicated to restoring the ocean to health by addressing overfishing, one of the world’s biggest environmental problems. https://www.bluemarinefoundation.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMInLDbmYih_AIVRrTtCh3CdABlEAAYASAAEgIrQvD_BwE The State of the World’s Fisheries and Aquaculture A biennial flagship report of the FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Division that analyses the status of global stocks as well as trends in fisheries and aquaculture at a global and regional level. https://www.fao.org/publications/sofia/2022/en/ The Lentil Underground: the Power of Pulses UN World Pulses Day An initiative to heighten public awareness of the nutritional, environmental and culinary benefits of eating pulses. https://www.un.org/en/observances/world-pulses-day Harvard School of Public Health A guide to various pulses and the latest science on their health benefits. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/legumes-pulses/ BBC Food A guide to buying and cooking pulses https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/pulse Can Cities Save Food Diversity? World Farmers Market Coalition An organisation set up in 2022 to cultivate a world community of farmers markets and share best practices and innovation, defend endangered markets and promote food diversity. https://worldfarmersmarketscoalition.org Sustain An alliance of organisations and communities working together for a better system of food, farming and fishing, and cultivating the movement for change. https://www.sustainweb.org/climatechange/public_sector_procurement/ Milan Urban Food Policy Pact An international protocol aimed at tackling food-related issues at the urban level, to be adopted by as many world cities as possible. https://www.milanurbanfoodpolicypact.org/the-milan-pact/ International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems What Makes Urban Food Policy Happen? Insights from five case studies. https://www.ipes-food.org/_img/upload/files/Cities_full.pdf Seeds: A Guide to Creating Diversity Gaia Foundation An international foundation dedicated to reviving and protecting cultural and biological diversity in order to restore resilience for ecosystems and local communities. https://www.gaiafoundation.org The Heritage Seed Library A charity which maintains the national collection of heritage vegetables for the UK, conserving vegetable varieties not widely available and sharing those seeds for members to grow and enjoy. https://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/what-we-do/the-heritage-seed-library Svalbard Global Seed Vault A vault constructed deep under the Arctic Circle safeguarding duplicates of 1.2 million seed samples from almost every country in the world. In backing up gene bank collections it is securing the foundations of our future food supply. https://www.croptrust.org/work/svalbard-global-seed-vault/ National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation (United States) The home of one of the world’s largest plant and animal gene banks, helping to shape the future of agriculture in the United States. The plant division alone contains more than 10,000 plant species. https://www.ars.usda.gov/plains-area/fort-collins-co/center-for-agricultural-resources-research/paagrpru/ Irish Seed Savers This organisation, founded in 1991, raises public awareness about the fragility of Irish agricultural biodiversity and maintains a public seed bank with over 600 non-commercially available varieties of heirloom and heritage seeds, including rare vegetables, fruit, grains and potatoes. http://www.irishseedsavers.ie Millennium Seed Bank, Wakehurst A globally important collection of wild plant species sourced by a seed conversation network covering over 80 countries. https://www.kew.org/science/collections-and-resources/collections/seed-collection Seedbank (Australia) A seed collection of thousands of plant species found in Australia including many which are rare and threatened in the wild. https://www.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/science/australian-plantbank-1/our-collections-at-plantbank/plant-journeys/the-seedbank Navdanya (India) A network of seed savers and community seed banks, founded by Dr. Vandana Shiva, which is working across more than 20 states. It contains under-used crops such as millets, pulses, and pseudo-cereals and over 4,000 rice varieties. https://www.navdanya.org/living-seed/navdanya-seed-banks Bottling Biodiversity CAMRA Founded by four real ale enthusiasts back in 1971, the Campaign for Real Ale represents beer drinkers and pub-goers across the UK https://camra.org.uk Welsh Perry & Cider Society (WPCS) A not-for-profit organisation that has cultivated an ever-growing crop of traditional cider and perry producers https://www.welshcider.co.uk Old Vines Conference Galvanising a global movement to nurture and value great old vines, and their wines. https://www.oldvines.org SACRED A not-for-profit corporation helping improve lives in the rural Mexican communities where heritage agave spirits are made https://www.sacred.mx/aboutsacred BACK TO EVENT SCHEDULE

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How to contact Dan Saladino in relation to speaking opportunities and publishing CONTACT Dan has given talks around the world about Eating to Extinction , food and biodiversity, endangered foods, agriculture and resilience and global food history. Previous appearances include COP27, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Hay Festival, MAD Academy (Denmark), The Fermentation Association (USA), European Food Summit (Slovenia), Dutch Design Week, FarmEd, Food on The Edge (Ireland), Slow Food Terra Madre (Turin), 5x15 talks, The How To Academy, WOMAD, GRASP Festival (Denmark), De Balie (Amsterdam), Oxford Real Farming Conference, Syracuse University (Florence), ABC (Australia), NBC (USA), Loose Ends (BBC Radio 4), BBC Arabic, BBC World Service, Newshour, International Agrobiodiversity Congress. Dan welcomes invitations from organisations keen to learn more about the importance of food diversity and preserving it for the future, either to small groups or large gatherings. To discuss availability, please get in touch using the form below. For foreign rights enquiries, please contact queries@janklow.co.uk . First Name Last Name Email Message Thank you for your message! Send