BEAR ROOT BEAR ROOT Extract from Part One: Wild Bear Root - Colorado, USA In south-western Colorado I met Karlos Baca, a former chef turned teacher and a man on the front line of a food war, teaching indigenous people to survive the American food system by decolonising their diets. He took me to find a plant which had been part of Native American life for thousands of years, an ingredient for cooking with but also a medicine. From the Ute community centre, we drove into the forest of the La Plata Mountain in the southernmost Rockies. We climbed past tall oak trees and silver-trunked aspens thick with leaves turning autumnal orange and red. Above the tree line were miles of valleys and mountain peaks stretching far into the distance, rising and falling across 13,000 feet. Deep in the forest and away from the path, Baca led us to a thick, green plant, with parsley-like leaves and small, snowflake-like flowers. He dug his hands into the earth and gently brushed away the soil to reveal a tangle of roots with a chocolate-brown surface. ‘This one’s young, maybe three years old,’ he said, ‘too young to be disturbed,’ and he patted it back into place. Instead, he passed me a piece of leaf to eat. It tasted of crisp celery and fresh carrot with the added heat of pepper and the numbing sensation of a chest rub. The osha plant can take a decade to mature, at which point indigenous people will harvest only some of its roots, allowing the plant to carry on growing, unharmed. Its leaves can be added to soups or cooked with meat but, as with murnong, the real treasure lies beneath the soil. For thousands of years, the plant’s dark brown, twig-like roots have been used not only as a spice to flavour food but also as a potent medicine. There are stories of animals much larger than humans digging up this plant, chewing its roots and rubbing it into their fur. Which is why it goes by the name ‘bear root’. Legends shared by Native Americans of bears interacting with the root were first put to the test in the late 1970s. A young Harvard student, Shawn Sigstedt (now a professor of biology at Colorado University), had gone to live with a Navajo community in Arizona to study traditional medicine. There, he came across bear root, or osha as they called it. Navajo healers told him how, long ago, hunters learned of the plant’s powers by watching bears wake from hibernation and seek out the plant, dig up the roots and chew them up into a paste which they then rubbed over their bodies with their paws. Intrigued by the story, Sigstedt took his research to a zoo in Colorado Springs and started to feed pieces of osha to two captive black bears. Their reaction to the root astonished him; the animals did exactly as the Navajo described. But as well as chewing the plant and rubbing the puréed root with their paws, they shook their heads and sprayed the osha from their mouths, creating what Sigstedt described as an aerosol effect. Sigstedt spent years studying bear behaviour and analysing the root which had antibacterial, antiviral and antifungal properties. It also contained painkilling chemicals and a powerful insecticide. What Stigstedt had been told by the Navajo in the 1970s weren’t legends, they were scientifically accurate observations. Even a sniff of the tiniest flake of bear root has a distinctly medicinal smell. It packs a menthol punch which leaves you with a sharp, cleansing sensation. Osha is a powerful plant, and it is also a highly regional one, found mostly around the southern end of the Rocky Mountains in the forests of south-western Colorado (it is also called Colorado cough root). One theory is the plant lives in symbiosis with microbes found only in the high altitude of the Rockies and Mexico’s Sierra Nevada, which is why people have so far found it impossible to cultivate. And so indigenous people with access to bear root traded it far and wide, and each tribe who adopted it used it in a slightly different way. The Navajo, Zuni, Southern Ute and Lakota used osha to treat stomach pains and toothache; the Lakota smoked the root to relieve headaches; the Tarahumara of north-eastern Mexico, who are legendary long-distance runners, ate bear root to increase stamina and ease joint pain. Further south, Pueblo tribes used it in a concoction they sprinkled across their maize fields to keep pests away; Comanche elders in Oklahoma tied pieces of the root around their ankles to repel snakes, and if they were bitten, they would chew the root into a pulp to treat the wound. The Chiricahua and Mescelero Apache, meanwhile, added the root to stews to spice up the flavour of meat. To some indigenous people, bear root was a sacred plant and the places where it grew were often kept secret. Even mentioning its name was sometimes forbidden in the presence of outsiders. But they couldn’t keep it secret forever… Becoming a lucrative wild medicinal plant has helped it become a species at risk. ‘In the mountains it’s foraged on an industrial scale,’ Baca told me. ‘The Forest Service caught one guy with hundreds of pounds of root in the trunk of his car.’ Indigenous knowledge of wild plants such as bear root is something Baca is teaching fellow Native Americans. Knowing these ingredients provides a gateway to traditional ways of cooking and much healthier diets; it can also help dispel some myths. There are a few foods Americans think of as traditional native staples, the most famous being frybread, dough pancakes that puff up as they’re cooked in corn oil on hot skillets. It’s still cooked in homes on reservations in Arizona and New Mexico where it has a strong association with Navajo culture and is sold as an indigenous street food, often described as an ‘American Indian food’. But ‘Navajo frybread’ was never a traditional food – it was created 150 years ago out of desperation. Karlos Baca cooking with students Karlos Baca urban foraging for prickly pear BACK TO ALL

SKERPIKJOT SKERPIKJOT Extract from Part Four: Meat Skerpikjot – Faroe Islands On the Faroe Islands, in the north Atlantic, there’s a centuries old approach to farming which reminds us that it’s possible to have a more harmonious relationship with the animals we eat than is found in much of the world’s intensive farm systems. The Faroese practice of fermenting mutton (sheep which have lived longer lives) results in a preserved meat designed to be eaten sparingly through the winter. Without this food, surviving on these remote islands would have been impossible. ‘When we go inside, don’t panic. You’ll see mould all over the place and something that’ll make you want to run away rather than eat.’ The wind was blowing in this barren landscape, but luckily (I thought) I had been promised lunch. Stepping through the creaking doorway of the wooden shed, I glimpsed my meal in the half-light, hanging by a hook from a rafter. As my companion, Gunnar Nattestad, put it, ‘It looks like part of a dead animal I found in the road.’ The hunk of meat was coated in a thick layer of mould, with patches of creamy yellow, chalky white and an ominous dark brown. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll wash it a little before we eat.’ Nattestad is a farmer, shopkeeper, carpenter and butcher, his string of professions reflecting the inescapable self-reliance needed for life on the Faroes, an archipelago of eighteen islands in the north Atlantic. To the north is Iceland, further east is Denmark (of which the Faroe Islands are an autonomous outpost) and two hundred miles to the south are the Scottish isles. The 50,000 people who live on the Faroes are easily outnumbered by some 80,000 sheep. I was looking at a piece of one of these animals. From the shape of it, I recognised it as a leg, but its colour and texture made it look more like a mass of old parchment or decayed leather. There was a strange beauty to it, like a fallen rotting tree that had grown patches of moss on its bark. Two forces had exerted their influence on the carcass; one was time, the other was fermentation. The sheep had been slaughtered the year before, in September. It was now May and in those nine months, bathed in air salted by the sea, the meat had become dense and solid to the touch. This strange object meant survival to generations in a land where few crops could grow… Crucial to the process of preserving the meat I was looking at was the wooden shed itself, called a hjallur (pronounced chatler). This ingeniously designed rectangular building has long horizontal beams from which food can be hung, protected by the building’s sides which are made of vertical wooden laths with a thumb-sized gap between each one. Unlike every other building on the Faroes, the hjallur is designed to let in the brutal Atlantic winds. ‘The winds are exceedingly uncertain and violent,’ wrote one visitor to the Faroes in the 1840s, ‘storms ... overturn houses and ... move blocks of stone, making it necessary for the traveller to throw himself on the ground in order not to be carried away.’ And there was something particular about the Faroese winds, the visitor added, ‘sea mists of the Faroe Islands contain salt particles in considerable quantities . . . salt crusts cover the face after a trip in a boat’. The hjallur is designed to turn this assault from the sea into a means of preservation. Trees, and most other vegetation, stand no chance of prospering on the exposed landscape of the Faroes. With no trees, and therefore no firewood, it wasn’t possible to preserve sheep with smoke, or by boiling seawater to create salt. Instead, the islanders built their drying huts and fermented their sheep meat with the help of salt blown in from the sea. ‘Skerpikjøt wasn’t invented,’ Gunnar Nattestad told me. ‘It was given to us by the islands. They make this meat.’ Skerpikjot on the Faroe Islands Skerpikjøt was an essential survival food in the Faroe Islands 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

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.

Listen to exclusive audio tracks from Dan Saladino, including interviews with some of the experts and food heroes he met while researching "Eating to Extinction", and eight surprising facts AUDIO Listen to exclusive audio tracks: interviews with some of the experts and food heroes Dan met while researching Eating to Extinction , and eight surprising food facts! INTERVIEWS AND STORIES James Woodburn, photo by Alan Macfarlane Why do Hadza hunter-gatherers live in an egalitarian society? Dan talks to the anthropologist James Woodburn who first encountered the Hadza in 1957. 00:00 / 06:54 Hadza hunter and meat Bruce Pascoe, photo by Lyn Harwood The life-giving delicious daisy close to the brink of extinction Chef Ben Shewry and the aboriginal writer Bruce Pascoe tell Dan the story of the murnong. 00:00 / 16:42 Illustration of murnong by Becky Ripley 8 SURPRISING FOOD FACTS Introduction: diversity 00:00 / 01:22 Seeds 00:00 / 02:07 Coffee 00:00 / 01:33 Chocolate 00:00 / 01:24 Apple 00:00 / 01:18 Potato 00:00 / 01:19 Strange maize 00:00 / 01:33 Cheese 00:00 / 01:02

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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

PERRY PERRY Extract from Part Eight: Alcohol Perry Pear - Three Counties, England If lambic beer is the burgundy of Belgium, then perry is the champagne of England, but it’s another drink that has teetered on the brink of extinction, kept alive by the knowledge and stubbornness of just a handful of people. The story of perry is as much about ancient landscapes, tenacious trees and rare fruit as it is about recipes and craft. If we lose this drink, we will not only lose a source of pleasure but also more of the world’s biodiversity. Just a tiny number of producers are carrying on the tradition of perry making today. One of the best is Tom Oliver. When I visited him, it was late September and autumn had arrived. Oliver had invited me to spend a day with him collecting fruit and (if we found enough) making perry. My timing was good; after years of holding back, one of the rarest perry pear trees in England, a Coppy, had decided to bear fruit. ‘This single tree is so rare it should be considered a living monument,’ he said. ‘For people in the know... it’s as important as Stonehenge or the pyramids.’ To find it, we drove to an abandoned orchard, the location of which Oliver keeps a secret. In this rural part of Herefordshire, all farmers once kept an orchard or, at the very least, a cluster of apple trees and maybe even a perry pear tree or two, to make their own cider and perry. Most of these orchards had been grubbed up by the 1970s as perry went out of fashion and cider became more industrialised. And so, for years, in his spare time Oliver has explored the county, wandering through fields, knocking on farmers’ doors and checking out abandoned orchards, just in case something special had been left behind. In 2010, he made his ‘once-in-a-lifetime discovery’ in the abandoned orchard we were now standing in… From a distance, I could see the last remaining Coppy in all its monstrous proportions – sixty feet in height and width. As we got closer, I noticed a red-and-yellow- coloured carpet of perry pears spread out on the ground around it. From the branches above there hung thousands of small, red, conker-sized fruit. ‘Imagine the weight of all that,’ Oliver said, looking up at the clusters of pears still on the 250-year-old tree. ‘The only thing capable of killing this tree is itself. One year it’ll produce a crop so big it’ll fall.’ We started picking fruit off the ground. The fact that they had fallen from the branches above was proof enough the fruit was ripe for perry making. It smelt sweet and intoxicating under the canopy, a mix of burnt sugar and heady ethanol. ‘That’s bletting,’ said Oliver, explaining how the sugars in the pears were already breaking down. Bletting is good, rotting is bad, he added, and we were just in time. We gathered the fruit to the steady beat of more ripening pears thudding to the ground from above, birdsong looping around us. It was a dewy morning and the fruit was glistening. An artist would have struggled to capture all the colours and shades. After filling five buckets, my back was aching. ‘Don’t worry,’ Oliver said, ‘it’ll be worth it.' [Later that day] I helped to crush and press the Coppy pears we had collected in the morning along with sacks of other varieties that grew on Oliver’s farm. By the end of the afternoon, we had filled two barrels. When I returned a year later, we sat down to drink a little of what we had made. ‘Lovely slab of pear in the middle,’ Oliver said as we sipped, ‘like soft velvety wine.’ And at the end of the glass he smiled and said, smacking his lips, ‘That’s it. Chewy.’ Tom Oliver, one of England’s best perry makers I helped Tom make perry – enough to fill two barrels We called the drink ‘Writer’s Perry’. It was delicious. BACK TO ALL

All about the book 'Eating to Extinction' including editions, reviews, awards, and how to buy ABOUT THE BOOK A captivating and urgent exploration of some of the world's most endangered foods, Eating to Extinction is a thrilling journey through the history of humankind's relationship with food. It reveals a world at a crisis point, but it also gives reasons for hope. FIND THE BOOK SELECTED REVIEWS "A genuine masterpiece and a call to arms. Everyone who loves food and cooking should read this" — Gill Meller "I love this book, not only is it a treasure trove of knowledge, stories and ideas, it's a call to us all to save foods, flavours and our diversity. It's important and timely. I wish the whole world could read it." — Raymond Blanc "For anyone interested in Darwin, world power, and life itself, read on." — Cerys Matthews "Dan Saladino writes about global food culture as urgently and compellingly as he broadcasts on The Food Programme. He makes a brilliant case that the diversity of our food culture is inextricably linked to the biodiversity of our environment, and therefore the future of our food IS the future of our planet." — Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall "A rallying cry to us all to protect the world's diversity before it's too late. But this is also a book filled with optimism; it captures the energy of a global movement of people dedicating their lives to saving the plants, the animals, the flavours and the food knowledge we must preserve." — Alice Waters "A real attention-grabber, an exceptionally wide-ranging, informative clarion call... As much an inspiring guide to the pioneering individuals, indigenous groups, scientists, and food producers who are championing the world's rich food heritage, as a warning about what threatens it." — Joanna Blythman, BBC Good Food Magazine "A fascinating journey across the fast disappearing diversity of our foods, which we ignore at our peril – a brilliant read." —Tim Spector "I've long admired Dan Saladino's journalism for its broad scope and passion. The same qualities animate his first book Eating to Extinction, an inspiring account of endangered foods and food cultures across the planet. Everyone who cares about what they eat will want to know its stories." —Harold McGee "How lucky we are that Dan Saladino has been able to tell these stories… This is the most important book about food that I have read for a long time… It is beautifully written and without hyperbole." —Stephen Harris "This is an enthralling tour of some of the world’s most endangered foods." —Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller, Editor’s Choice "This is a poignant and urgent read, it gets to the heart of storytelling because its threads the one thing that connects us all, our relationships to food. It is a timely reminder, too, that if we honour these connections we might have time to still save our rich heritage of diverse foods. Dip into this book immediately, just don't do it on an empty stomach." —Alys Fowler "Essential reading for those with a profound interest in the culture, history and anthropology of what, how and why we eat. It's completely absorbing, enlightening and a necessary addition to every bookshelf." —Richard Corrigan "Eating to Extinction is a celebration in the form of eclectic case studies . . . What Saladino finds in his adventures are people with soul-deep relationships to their food. This is not the decadence or the preciousness we might associate with a word like 'foodie,' but a form of reverence . . . Enchanting." —Molly Young, The New York Times "Eating to Extinction tells the stories of dozens of . . . endangered tastes and makes a reasoned case for saving them in which nostalgia and sentimentality play very little part . . . Saladino has an 18-year-old backpacker’s willingness to light out for remote destinations far from the usual food-writer feeding troughs . . . [A] deeply humanist book . . . Saladino’s eye for detail is photographic when he is describing places and things." —Pete Wells, The New York Times Book Review "[An] impressively researched book . . . Saladino brings his subjects to life, even breaking bread with them as he seeks out these rare and important foods. His evocative descriptions make a culinary case for preserving them." —Hannah Wallace, The Washington Post "Fascinating . . . A delightful exploration of traditional foods as well as a grim warning that we are farming on borrowed time." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “This is a big book with a simple message: that we all need to pay more attention to what we are (and are no longer) eating. Behind everything we eat there are people, places, and stories. When we lose diversity in our food, we threaten also the culture and history of the land and the people who produce it. As the world becomes increasingly homogenous, preserving these things—keeping hold of diversity—matters. Dan Saladino manages to highlight the urgency of this matter while also inspiring us to believe that turning the tide is still possible.” —Yotam Ottolenghi "This inspiring and urgent book is one of the few food books that has ever given me goosebumps. Eating to Extinction is a love letter to the huge diversity of foods enjoyed by human beings. A story full of both loss and hope." —Bee Wilson, author of The Wall Street Journal's "Table Talk" column “Saladino delivers profound truths about our food system while taking the reader on a fabulous journey of taste, texture and provenance.” —Paul Greenberg, bestselling author of the James Beard award-winner Four Fish. "This is a work of staggering importance. If we relinquish control of the food supply to industrial technology, we lose not only our cultural heritage and good taste, but the ability to feed ourselves in a sustainable, local and meaningful way. Dan Saladino sounds a call to action, not a swan song of bygone foodways, and it should be required reading on the lists of everyone concerned about food." —Ken Albala, professor of history at the University of the Pacific "Eating to Extinction is an exhaustively researched and fascinating account of endangered food and drink. As a study of biodiversity and cultural creativity its message is alarming yet hopeful." —Paul Freedman, professor at Yale University and author of Ten Restaurants that Changed America "[An] excellent and valuable book." ―Colin Tudge, Literary Review "Packed with breathtaking facts... Saladino moves seamlessly from the political...to the personal... Let's hope that Eating to Extinction can change the world." ―Antonia Windsor, Mail on Sunday "Eating to Extinction operates on a parallel time scales, as a polemic on the urgent need for action on agricultural diversity, and as a deeply researched, if accessible, history of food and drink production... Its satisfactions come from Saladino's ear for a human story and the breadth of the landscapes, and ecosystems, it covers... Saladino's study is immersive, evocative on a planetary scale, and appropriately so if we are to consider how best to protect the planet's resources." ― Niki Segnit, Times Literary Supplement "Packed full of knowledge about a host of ingredients that you probably didn't even know existed, Eating to Extinction captures the urgency (and cost) of heading towards a future that is less nutritionally diverse." ―Gege Li, New Scientist "Saladino offers many wonderful vignettes of indigenous food cultures." ―Economist Guild of Food Writers Winner: Food Book of the Year 2022 and First Book of the Year 2022 Corriere della Sera Cook Awards 2021 Winner: Food Book of the Year The New Yorker Featured in "Best Books of 2022" Bloomberg One of 52 'recommended new books of 2022' the Art of Eating Shortlisted for 2023 Prize André Simon Memorial Fund Annual Food and Drink Book Award Winner: Special Commendation Award 2021 James Cropper Wainwright Prize Winner: Conservation Book of the Year 2022 The Times One of '18 Best Food Books 2021' Slow Food in the UK Dan Saladino: Person of the Year 2022 Book Tube Prize Finalist, 2023 Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards 2021 Winner Stanford Food and Drink Travel Book of the Year Shortlisted The Observer One of '20 best food books of 2021' Wired magazine One of 12 'Best Books of 2022'

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

OLOTON MAIZE OLOTON MAIZE Extract from Part Two: Cereal Oloton Maize - Oaxaca, Mexico Oloton maize has been planted and tended by the Mixe people over thousands of years. It’s at risk of extinction before we even fully understand its complexity. The extraordinary potential of this very rare variety of maize is a reminder of why we need to save precious genetic resources. It also shows us how food diversity only exists because of the communities who value them. In the early 1980s, an American plant scientist called Howard-Yana Shapiro climbed thousands of metres to reach remote villages in the eastern highlands of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The area is home to the Mixe people. No one knew when or how the Mixe had settled in the rugged mountains, and there is little archaeology to explain their history. The soldier and explorer Hernán Cortés, who had conquered the Aztecs, was thwarted by the Mixe. ‘Their land is so rocky that it cannot be crossed even on foot,’ he wrote in 1525, ‘for I have twice sent people to conquer them, who were unable to do so because of the roughness of the terrain, and because the warriors are very fierce and well-armed.’ By the 1980s, just a few Mixe villages were still left in isolation, and when Shapiro reached the top of his climb and walked into one, he was confronted with the strangest plant he had ever seen. The plant was a type of maize known as Olotón, but it grew nearly twenty feet high and had a bizarre, captivating root system. Most plants grow with their roots underground, but this plant also had them sprouting from high up its thick stalks, reaching out into the open air. From these bright orange, aerial roots, shaped like fingers, there dripped a glistening gel. The maize was oozing mucus. Also remarkable was that any maize could grow so high up the mountain and in such poor soil. The Mixe village was so remote that no chemical fertiliser could ever have made it there. The local farmers weren’t even growing the maize in a milpa (from the Aztec term for ‘maize field’). In this traditional system beans are grown alongside the cereal to fix nitrogen into the soil. Somehow, these alien-looking plants were feeding themselves. At least, that was the hunch Shapiro left with; that the strange mucus dripping from roots growing above ground was providing the plant with all the nitrogen it needed. The theory seemed unlikely. It broke all the rules. If it was true then this could be a game changer. Fertiliser costs farmers around the world billions of dollars a year and has great environmental costs, from the energy used to make it, to the greenhouse gases it releases, and the rivers and oceans it pollutes. The problem was that forty years ago, Shapiro had no means of testing his hunch. Other scientists also made the climb up the ‘scorched hill’, but still no one could figure out the glistening mucus. Meanwhile, at the University of Wisconsin a microbiologist named Eric Triplett, who hadn’t seen the maize, or even known of the Mixe village, published a scientific paper in 1996 which set out a radical hypothesis: the ‘holy grail’ of cereals – maize that can take nitrogen from the air and feed itself – was biologically possible and could evolve. Such a discovery, he added, ‘would be of enormous economic value’ and would ‘improve human health’ as it would decrease the amount of nitrate in our water and in our food. For years, Triplett’s theory remained just that, a theory. He did, however, have some advice for any plant explorers setting off in search of this holy grail. Echoing Vavilov a century earlier, if something this extraordinary did exist, he said, it would be found close to the origins of maize, in its centre of diversity where its gene pool was greatest: southern Mexico. BACK TO ALL