DAN SALADINO

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

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

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

HADZA HONEY HADZA HONEY Extract from Part One: Wild Hadza Honey - Lake Eyasi, Tanzania In northern Tanzania, on the green and brown savannah near the shore of Lake Eyasi, I watched an incredible collaboration between human and bird, Sigwazi, a Hadza, and a honeyguide. Honeyguide birds respond to the twists and twirls of the Hadza’s whistles, special calls that are passed down from one generation of hunter to another as a way of summoning a helper in their hunt for honey, Hadza’s favourite food. As Sigwazi walked, he whistled… This wasn’t a melodious tune, more a series of angular ups and downs on a musical scale, each passage finished with a high-pitched twirl. To my ears there was no obvious musical pattern to follow but something in the bush was paying close attention to this whistle. Noticing movement above the trees, Sigwazi broke into a sprint, weaving through the scrub and around baobab trees as he continued the whistle. A wordless conversation was under way, an exchange between a human and a bird. Sigwazi looked towards the flutter of activity in the canopy, and there perched on a branch was an olive-grey bird the size of a starling. Barring a few flashes of white on its tail, the bird looked plain and unassuming, but after a few more whistles from the hunter, it revealed itself to be exceptional. ‘Ach-ech-ech-ech’ came its reply to Sigwazi’s whistle, signalling that a deal was on. The bird had agreed to lead the hunter to honey hidden among the branches of the giant baobabs. These trees are as wide as they are tall, living for up to a thousand years, fed by a root system so deep that they can access water in periods of extreme drought. Finding a bees’ nest concealed among the baobab’s tall branches can take a hunter-gatherer several hours as they need to inspect tree after tree; with the assistance of a honeyguide, it takes a fraction of that time. The bird’s scientific name captures its talent perfectly: Indicator indicator . Somehow, over hundreds of thousands of years, the two species, humans and honeyguides, found a way of sharing their different skills. The bird can find the bees’ nests but can’t get to the wax it wants to eat without being stung to death. Humans, meanwhile, struggle to find the nests, but armed with smoke can pacify the bees. Theirs is the most complex and productive of any partnership between humans and wild animals. Sigwazi watched as the bird he had attracted with his whistle hovered above one of the baobabs. This signalled there was honey; now it was time for Sigwazi to start climbing. He was short (five feet tall at most), wiry and slim. I figured his physique was the reason he was the member of the group chosen to climb the tree, but I came to realise it was more a question of bravery. Sigwazi was the one least concerned about disturbing a bees’ nest, being stung or, worse still, falling thirty feet to the ground. He handed his bow and arrow to a fellow hunter, stripped off his ripped T-shirt and frayed shorts and removed the string of red and yellow beads from around his neck. By now almost naked, he started to chop up fallen branches with an axe and sharpen them into thin sticks. Baobabs are so soft and sponge-like that hunters can drive these pegs into their trunks with ease to create a makeshift ladder up towards the canopy. Swinging back and forth, Sigwazi made his way up the baobab, forcing a new peg in above his head as he climbed, clinging on, balancing and hammering all at once. As he neared the top of the tree another hunter climbed up behind and handed him a bunch of smouldering leaves. With these, Sigwazi closed in on the nest and immediately launched into a mid-air dance punctuated with high-pitched yelps. Bees were swarming around the honey thief and stinging as he scooped his hand into the nest and pulled out chunks of honeycomb. These rained down on the other Hadza hunters as Sigwazi tossed them below. They cupped their hands to their mouths and started to feast, spitting out pieces of wax as they ate, leaving behind warm melting liquid that tasted both sweet and sour, bright and acidic like citrus. As I joined them I could feel writhing larvae inside my mouth and the crunch of dead bees. The honeyguide bird perched silently nearby, waiting for its share of the raid once the crowd of hunters had gone. Fewer than two hundred Hadza live fully as hunter-gatherers, making them the last people in Africa to practise no form of agriculture. Sigwazi disappearing up a giant Baobab tree to reach the bees' nest Honey was taken back to the camp and shared. BACK TO ALL

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

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....

All about Food Diversity Day, including schedule of events and how to book. fooddiversityday.com FOOD DIVERSITY DAY Help celebrate and save food diversity. Watch the short film to find out why it matters. Play Video Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tumblr Copy Link Link Copied Inspired by Eating to Extinction , on January 13th 2023 Dan Saladino was joined by seed expert Alys Fowler, Professor Tim Spector, chefs Thomasina Miers, Mitch Tonks and Michael Caines, baker Wing Mong Cheung and many others for a series of live and online events to celebrate Britain's rare and endangered foods and start work on a food diversity manifesto. Find out what happened and catch up on the sessions below. You can also explore further resources for each of the sessions here . SCHEDULE OF TALKS, PRESENTATIONS AND DISCUSSIONS Welcome to Food Diversity Day! In this opening session , we heard about the big ideas behind Food Diversity Day, and learned more about the stories and themes to be explored across the ten different sessions. We also heard the latest thinking on why food diversity matters for our own health as well as that of the planet, and the value of food for community and identity. Polly Russell (food historian) talked to Dan Saladino (Eating to Extinction) , Tim Benton (Chatham House), Tim Spector (Food For Life) and Melissa Thompson (Motherland: A Jamaican Cookbook) to answer the question, “Why does food diversity matter?” WATCH NOW Bread, Baking and the Diversity of Grains Wheat is the globe’s third largest commodity. Almost all the varieties being grown today are dependent on pesticides and artificial fertilisers and bred for yield and ease of harvesting, milling and high-speed baking in vast integrated systems. Nutritional value, taste, baking quality, soil health and CO2 emissions are not usually part of the equation. Can a new understanding of grain diversity change all that? There’s growing evidence that it can. Three people in the wheat and bread business cast light on a changing wheat world. Sheila Dillon with Kim Bell (UK Grain Lab), Wing Mon Cheung (Cereal Bakery), Fintan Keenan (Quartz Mølle, Denmark). WATCH NOW Seeds: A Guide to Creating Diversity Protecting food diversity isn’t just about preserving what was important in the past, it’s also about ensuring new diversity is being created in our future crops, vegetables and fruits. We need to make sure varieties are being developed and planted so they can evolve and adapt to future needs. The good news is this is a mission we can all participate in. In this session, Alys Fowler and guests explained how more of us can exchange, save and plant seeds, and create the diversity of the future. Alys Fowler (horticulturalist), Sinead Fortune (Gaia Foundation), Madeline McKeever (Brown Envelope Seeds) and Guy Watson (Riverford). WATCH NOW Soil, Pasture & Animal breeds: Why Diversity Matters in Meat and Dairy As Dan Saladino describes in Eating to Extinction , global meat and dairy production is based on a small gene pool of highly productive animal breeds. But around the world models exist in which diversity is still at the heart of the farming system. In this session we heard how diverse breeds raised on diverse pastures can produce food with benefits to soil, biodiversity and nutrition. Jimmy Woodrow (Pasture For Life), Frederik Leroy (Vrije University, Brussels), Elizabeth Cooke (PlantLife), Sam Beaumont (Gowbarrow Hall Farm, Cumbria), and Leila Simon (Tamarisk Farm, Dorset). WATCH NOW A Chef’s Guide to the Ark of Taste: Can Restaurants Save Endangered Foods? Chefs are very influential tellers of food stories. Through their restaurants and cookbooks, and on television and radio they are able to shape tastes, set trends and raise our awareness on a whole host of issues. But can this influence be used to promote greater food and farming diversity? Watch a conversation between six leading chefs who are using their menus to save endangered foods. Shane Holland (Slow Food UK), with chefs Michael Caines (Lympstone Manor, Devon), Akwasi Mensa (Tatale, London), Luke Holder (Lime Wood, Hampshire) and Neil Forbes (Café St Honore, Edinburgh). WATCH NOW Can Diversity Help Save the Oceans? Our relationship with fish and seafood is problematic. The so-called ‘big five’ species, salmon, tuna, cod, haddock and prawns, make up 80 per cent of what we eat from the ocean. But why is this the case and what are the consequences for the marine environment? If it’s possible to add more fish diversity to our diets, which species should we focus on? Watch a marine ecologist, fisherman, retailer and chef in conversation on these important topics (because of technical issues some panel members joined this towards the end). Bryce Stewart (York University), Mitch Tonks (Brixham), Sanjay Kumar (chef), Caroline Bennett (Sole of Discretion), and Chris Bean (fisherman). WATCH NOW The Lentil Underground: the Power of Pulses For more than 10,000 years pulses (beans, lentils, and peas) have been among the world’s most important foods. However, in the last century, in many food cultures, they fell into decline as farming animals and meat eating became more widespread. On a planet with a growing population, a dependence on fossil fuels and depleted soils, pulses are increasingly being seen as foods that can help us meet future challenges. They’re also delicious. In this session you can find out how people in different parts of the world are reviving lost legumes and returning a diversity of pulses back to our plates. Josiah Meldrum and Nick Saltmarsh (Hodmedods) with pulse revivalists from Sweden, Germany and Doc Bill Thomas from Sapelo Island, USA on the story of the Geechee Red pea. WATCH NOW Can Cities Save Food Diversity? Today, 56% of the world’s population – that’s 4.4 billion inhabitants – live in cities. This trend towards urban living is expected to continue, with the population of cities more than doubling its current size by 2050, at which point nearly 7 of 10 people will live in a city. Does this necessarily mean a further decline of diversity in the way we farm and produce food? In this session, you'll hear stories from around the world in which cities are driving the transition towards greater food diversity, from an international network of farmers markets to innovations in the public procurement of food for schools and hospitals. Richard McCarthy (World Farmers Markets Coalition), Thomasina Miers (chef and writer), Carolyn Steel (author Hungry City & Sitopia ), Dora Taylor (Farmerama) and Jannie Vestergaard (Copenhagen). WATCH NOW The Last of Their Kind: Endangered British Cheeses and How to Save Them There are just a handful of farms left in the UK making traditional regional cheeses, such as Red Leicester, Lancashire and Wensleydale. in this session cheesemonger Andy Swinscoe from the Courtyard Dairy and cheese writer Patrick McGugian are joined by the cheesemakers themselves, to explore why territorial cheeses matter, the differences between farm and factory cheeses, and the importance of traditional cheesemaking. The cheesemakers on this panel, plus their cheeses, are: Graham Kirkham: Kirkham’s Lancashire Jo Clarke: Sparkenhoe, Red Leicester Sally Hattan: Stonebeck, Wensleydale. A Food Diversity Day Cheese Selection box is available to go along with the talk. Purchase via Courtyard Dairy . WATCH NOW Bottling Biodiversity For millennia, drinks have reflected a sense of place: the grape varieties used by winemakers, the types of barley and hops brewed to make beer and the plants and grains used for distillation and making spirits. Hear from some of the leading experts in wine, beer, cider and mescal on saving traditions, flavours and precious ingredients. Pete Brown (Miracle Brew), with Marc Millon (wine writer), Sarah Abbott (Old Vine Conference), Chava Peribán (Agave Road Trip), Gabe Cook (cider and perry expert), John Letts (grower of grains). WATCH NOW Closing session: A Food Diversity Manifesto What have we learnt from Food Diversity Day and what can we all do to make a difference? Polly, Dan, Tim Benton and Tim Spector regrouped to discuss the potential for a food diversity manifesto. Polly Russell, Dan Saladino, Tim Benton and Tim Spector. WATCH NOW TASTE & DISCOVER FOOD DIVERSITY The Ark of Taste is an international catalogue of endangered heritage foods maintained by the global Slow Food movement. Use their free search tool to learn about rare foods local to you and see if you can find them. These restaurants and iconic public spaces put on special food diversity menus in January 2023: British Library (London) from 9 January The Magazine at the Serpentine (London) 13 – 31 January BFI Riverfront, Waterloo (London) 13 – 27 January Benugo Barbican (London) 13 – 27 January Ashmolean Rooftop Restaurant (Oxford) 13 – 15 January Savill Garden Kitchen (Windsor Great Park) 13 – 15 January Wakehurst - Kew Gardens (Sussex) from 9 January PRESS CONTACT Please contact fran@franbaileypr.com for any media related enquiries. FOUNDING PARTNERS With special thanks to our founding partners: Hodmedods, The Gaia Foundation, Luke Holder of HH&Co at Lime Wood, Benugo, Graysons Restaurants and Pasture for Life.

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

SIEVERS APPLE SIEVERS APPLE Extract from Part Six: Fruit Sievers Apple - Tian Shan, Kazakhstan Eat an apple and wherever you are in the world, whatever its shape, size, colour or taste, its origin can be traced back to the Tian Shan, the mountains that separate China and Central Asia. As the birthplace of the apple, the biodiversity of the Tian Shan holds the past, present and future of one of our most popular fruits. Oxford plant scientist Barrie Juniper was one of the first Western scientists to visit the forests after the collapse of the Soviet Union and over the next fifteen years he documented as many wild apples as he could. He was the first scientist to confirm that all domesticated apples originate from the Tian Shan, that it was the gene pool for all the world’s apples. On a sunny autumn morning, I met Juniper at his orchard in Wytham, a picture-book Oxfordshire village with an abbey, thatched cottages and a 600-year-old pub. Completely hidden behind tall walls was a secret garden of one hundred apple trees, some fifteen feet tall, others more like thick untamed bushes. As we moved from tree to tree, picking fruit, Juniper introduced each one: the Newton Wonder, a chance seedling that had been discovered growing alongside a Derbyshire pub in the 1870s that went on to become a popular cooking apple; thin, conical apples named Lady’s Fingers; and Brownlee’s Russet, an apple from the 1840s with an intense acid flesh that tasted of fruit drops, all hidden beneath a scaly, rough skin. ‘Wonderful apple,’ said Juniper, rubbing one clean against his jacket. ‘The perfect balance of sweet and sour and with a skin so thick it kept until Christmas.’ We ate apples that tasted of pineapple (Ananas Reinette) and bit into small russeted varieties that are mentioned in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2 . ‘“There’s a dish of leather-coats for you,”’ Juniper quoted as he picked out one of the apples. ‘Ugly and rough it might be, but in the sixteenth century this apple was sold from every barrow in London.’ While some varieties became popular because of a chance discovery of a single tree, others were the creation of skilled nurserymen, masters in the art of cross-pollination. By the end of the nineteenth century, people in Britain could eat or drink from a different kind of dessert, cooking or cider apple every day for more than four years and never have the same one twice. The apples in Juniper’s walled orchard capture a big part of the fruit’s great appeal: its diversity and seasonality. In the 1920s, the nurseryman and fruit expert Edward Bunyard wrote The Anatomy of Dessert , providing an eater’s guide to the tastiest varieties, from the strawberry flavour of a Worcester Pearmain to the ‘melting, almost marrow flesh, abundant juice and fragrant aroma’ of the James Grieve. And then there was the Blenheim Orange, an eighteenth-century apple grown from the pip of a discarded apple core that had grown next to the drystone wall of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. Luckily, the tree and its fruit were discovered by a tailor named George Kempster (which is why the variety is also called the ‘Kempster’). This apple, said Bunyard, has ‘a nutty warm aroma ... and in this noble fruit [there’s] a mellow austerity as of a great Port in its prime’. Bunyard’s descriptions provide a glimpse into a wealth of diversity that no longer exists. By the 1970s, apple eaters in different parts of the world had the nagging feeling something was missing. ‘Apples, apples everywhere and hardly one to eat,’ declared a newspaper article that went on to say, ‘The big red and yellow plastic spheres, waiting in the market for the unsuspecting, are so suspiciously, so blatantly, thick skinned and shiny, it is easy to pass on by. What we must live on is the memory of what good apples taste like.’ Barrie Juniper in his walled orchard, 2018 BACK TO ALL

Extracts from Dan Saladino's book "Eating to Extinction", and 15 amazing facts he discovered on his journey EXPLORE THE BOOK Click on a location to find short extracts from the book and photographs Dan took on his research travels. Then scroll down to find 15 amazing facts he discovered on his journey! 1 2 3 6 4 5 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 15 16 13 1 Lake Eyasi, Tanzania 3 Colorado, USA 5 Büyük Çatma, Anatolia 7 Andes, Bolivia 9 Great Plains, USA 11 Tian Shan, Kazakhstan 13 Accursed Mountains, Albania 15 Harenna, Ethiopia 2 Southern Australia 4 Garo Hills, India 6 Oaxaca, Mexico 8 Faroe Islands 10 Nishiizu, Southern Japan 12 Nottinghamshire, England 14 Three Counties, England 16 Cumanacoa, Venezuela 15 AMAZING FACTS For most of human history, our food was extraordinarily diverse The world’s largest seed vault is on the Arctic island of Svalbard, deemed to be the most secure place on the planet for storing more than one million seeds, varieties of more than 1,000 different crops. The collection is a living record of thousands of years of farming history and the diversity we have lost and are losing from our fields and our diets. It includes 170,000 individual samples of rice, 39,000 samples of maize, 21,000 samples of potato and 35,000 samples of millet – each potentially with unique flavours and other valuable properties, including disease or drought resistance, we can’t afford to lose. The food skills that make us human are being lost The Hadza have lived in the Great Rift Valley, East Africa for at least 40,000 years. Fewer than 300 still live as hunter-gatherers, providing the closest living link we have to the diets of our ancestors. Their favourite food is honey and to find it they communicate with a bird, the honeyguide. The birds recognise the sounds of the Hadza’s whistles and lead the humans to trees containing bees’ nests. The Hadza smoke the bees out and take the honey and in return, the birds get to eat the wax without being stung to death. It’s the most complex and productive partnership between two different species and is thought to reach back a million years or more to our ancestors’ first use of fire. Wild honey is one of the foods that fuelled human evolution. It’s no coincidence the human-bird partnership is being lost as sugar and sweet fizzy drinks arrive in Hadzaland. Plants once dismissed as weeds are now understood to be a precious food resource In the south of England, near Gatwick Airport, is another seed vault, housed underground inside a building so secure it’s been made to withstand explosions, radiation and flooding. This is home to seeds of the wild relatives of the foods we eat. Explorers from more than a hundred countries are busy searching in jungles, across savannah and within forests for endangered ‘crop wild relatives’, sending seed samples to be stored at the Millennium Seed Bank. Until recently, these wild plants were regarded mostly as weeds; now we realise we need them to breed the crops of the future as they could contain the genetic tool-kits required to protect against disease and climate change. A sign outside the vault, which contains 2.4 million seeds, says, ‘You are standing in the most biodiverse place on the planet’. Cheese is the ultimate expression of place Humans have been making cheese for at least 7,000 years and once there were as many different cheeses as there were places. Cheese, in whatever form it has taken, has traditionally captured the essence of an environment: the grass, the microbes (bacteria and fungi), the local breeds of animal and their milk. But cheese is becoming more and more uniform and its ancient link with the land is being broken. Much of the cheese we eat today, wherever we are in the world, is made from milk processed by a small number of companies, sourced from the same breed of cattle, using bacteria and enzymes created in a handful of labs. We are at risk of losing the diversity created by thousands of years of cheese-making. In a place of conflict and turmoil chocolate provides a source of hope In my search for endangered foods around the world, I travelled to Venezuela, a country that was in crisis; the economy had collapsed, a crime-wave was underway, and people were going hungry. In the capital Caracas I met former chef Maria Fernanda di Giacobbe who was teaching people to survive difficult times by making chocolate. Her idea was to restore Venezuela’s rare and prized cacao, criollo, once used to make the most revered chocolate in the world, drunk by Aztecs in Mexico and later by Europeans (including Pepys in 17th century London). Criollo farming fell into decline when Venezuela’s rush for oil took off and the prestigious seeds became endangered. Now di Giacobbe is helping farmers grow criollo and teaching Venezuelans how to turn criollo beans into chocolate, so creating jobs, hope for the future and some of the best bars of chocolate in the world. Increasingly, we're all eating exactly the same foods Of the 6,000 plant species humans have eaten over time, the world now mostly grows and consumes just nine, of which just three – rice, wheat and maize – provide 50 per cent of all calories. Add potato, barley, palm oil, soy and sugar (beet and cane) and you have 75 per cent of all the calories that fuel our species. The diversity within these crops is also disappearing as we rely on a smaller and smaller number of high yielding varieties. Our survival depends on knowing where our food comes from Knowing where a food plant originated can lead us to where the greatest genetic diversity of that crop exists. Genetic diversity, we’re realising, is the secret to future food security and resilience, and preserving it is important for our survival. At the International Potato Center in Lima, for instance, 4,600 different Andean tubers are being safeguarded. This rich diversity in the potato’s ‘centre of origin’ is where we have the greatest chance of finding the genetic traits needed in future to protect against climate change and disease (such as the blight that caused the Irish potato famine). Even more potato diversity exists in the thousands of remote communities across the Andes in Peru and Bolivia where landrace (locally adapted) varieties are still being grown and are continuing to adapt. We are at risk of losing foods before we understand how important they are In Oaxaca, southern Mexico, growing in a high-altitude village called Totontepec, is one of the world’s strangest and most mysterious food crops. This rare type of maize, called Oloton, has roots above ground as well as below and oozes a gooey microbial mucus. Few other crops grow in the mountainous village and the Mixe people who tend them have no access to fertiliser, but this corn seems to flourish. In 2018, scientists discovered that the mysterious mucus is the plant’s way of feeding itself – it contains microbes that pull nitrogen directly from the surrounding air. In short, it’s a self-feeding plant. In a world awash with artificial fertilisers (which emit greenhouse gases and contribute to climate change), this crop, nurtured by indigenous people over thousands of years, could be an important part of all of our food futures. It is possible to drink diversity... but it's getting harder and harder to do More than 1,500 grape varieties have been recorded, many of which are indigenous, ancient and highly adapted to their local environments. But it’s estimated that about 80 per cent of all vineyards now grow just ten or so ‘international’ varieties – the likes of Chardonnay, Merlot and Syrah, which started to dominate winemaking in the 1960s. In Georgia, in the Caucuses, thought to be the birthplace of wine, farmers are working to restore the 500 indigenous grape varieties that were almost lost during the Soviet era when the regime dictated only five grape varieties could be grown. There, the qvervi, a large clay vessel which is buried underground (the predecessor of the barrel) is still used to ferment grapes and make wine the original way. We can save the diversity disappearing from our oceans Sailors used to provide tales of seas so full of fish it was hard to navigate boats through the shoals. In the last century, we’ve emptied the oceans of such abundance. But we now have the know-how to help replenish the seas – by creating Marine Protection Areas. The success of these ocean sanctuaries has been repeated again and again across the globe, including in Cabo Pulmo on the west coast of Mexico, which had been all but emptied of fish during the 1980s and was revived after local fishing communities decided to stop fishing and create a protected zone. Within a decade, the biomass of fish increased by nearly 500 per cent, close to what it would have been like if it had never been fished in the first place. Food power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands The source of much of the world’s food – seeds – is mostly in the control of just four corporations; half of all the world’s cheeses are produced with bacteria or enzymes manufactured by a single company; one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer; most global pork production is based around the genetics of a single breed of pig; and just two companies control the genetics of most of the world’s commercial chickens. The 'centres of origin' of our food are at risk - and that matters to us all Eat an apple and wherever you are in the world, whatever its shape, size, colour or taste, its origin can be traced back to the Tian Shan, the snow-tipped ‘heavenly mountains’ that separate China and Central Asia. The wild trees that cover its slopes here are a living gene bank. As the birthplace of the apple, the biodiverse Tian Shan holds the past, present and future of one of our most popular fruits. But vast sections of the wild forest have disappeared (cleared for industry, housing and agriculture). With the loss of each wild apple tree, the fruit’s living gene bank is being depleted. Losing diversity risks unleashing more zoonotic diseases We’re not just relying on a few varieties of a small number of plants for our food, we’re also banking on just a few breeds for most of our meat. The 80 billion animals slaughtered each year are increasingly from a small selection of genetically uniform, faster growing and bigger animals; just three breeding lines dominate global poultry production; and most pork is based around the genetics of a single pig, the Large White. In dairy, more than 95 per cent of America’s dairy herd is based around one breed of ‘super cow’, the Holstein (and most of these animals can be linked back to a handful of males). Creating larger and larger industrial units filled with thousands of genetically identical animals is a perfect environment for zoonotic diseases to evolve and spread. The future of coffee depends on exploring diversity Most of the coffee we drink today comes from a handful of plants shipped out of Yemen in the 17th century. Coffea arabica (which grew and still grows wild in Ethiopia) was the first coffee to be cultivated and is now the most widely grown and consumed. But we’re at risk of losing it. Because of its history and narrow genetic base, a cultivated Arabica plant today has a fraction of the gene variation of one found in the wild. In the face of climate change, water shortages and a disease that’s wiping out coffee crops across the world, Arabica might not have a big enough toolkit to adapt fast enough, or even at all. Luckily, other species of coffee do exist (so far, 120 have been discovered and named), but we are in a race against time to find them before they go extinct. One is stenophylla, an endangered coffee which used to grow widely in Sierra Leone, with a flavour said to be as good if not better than Arabica. Change must happen... and it can happen Every minute of every day, a million dollars is spent on agricultural subsidies around the world, whether that’s for planting more soy in the Cerrado, more monocultures of maize in North America, fields of homogeneous wheat in Europe, or sending out more boats to already overfished waters. This is public money, our money, and it is supporting a system that isn’t resilient, healthy or sustainable. The world’s current food system is contributing to climate change, deforestation and waste. A more diverse food system could help solve many of the problems we face. There are inspirational people around the world (farmers, chefs, cheese- and wine-makers, seed savers) already fighting for change, preserving their foods, their cooking cultures and protecting diversity for us all. If we all start to learn about the foods being lost and add greater diversity to our food choices we too can start to make changes to the food system. It’s not about recapturing the past but about shaping a better future.

OCA OCA Extract from Part Three: Vegetable Oca – Andes, Bolivia The world-changing tuber, the potato, was domesticated in the Andes 7,000 years ago. This is the centre of diversity for the potato, its birthplace if you like, and that of many other tubers too, including oca. No population anywhere in the world has as many diverse tubers as the people of the Andes. There are 4,000 Andean varieties of potato alone, which are grown in rotation with beans and corn. This diversity was created in many tiny settlements across the Andes, where each tuber adapted to a particular altitude, microclimate and soil. Preserved tubers became an essential food of the Andes. To see oca being preserved, I headed high up in the Andes to one of the historic Incan outposts, a small village 4,000 metres up the Apolobamba mountain range. Ayllu Agua Blanca is home to one hundred families who, for several months of the year, live surrounded by frost and fog. Dried khaya, oca, is their daily bread here. I followed a group of Quechua women from the village up a mountain path towards their fields. The altitude made it a struggle for me to keep up as they marched ahead. They were dressed in the traditional cholita outfit: heavy, multi-layered petticoats, blue skirts, dark brown bowler hats (the borsalino ) and beautiful woven red and yellow shawls. It didn’t look like an outfit designed for climbing mountains or for farming tubers, but they made it look effortless. The villagers plant tubers in fields and terraces spread around the valley. This might seem impractical, what with all the climbing and walking involved in getting from one plot to another. But this way they can spread risk; if frost or disease hits one field, they can fall back on another at a different altitude and soil. They also plant different crops each year, including oca, papalisa tubers, beans and quinoa. Across the community this adds up to a collection of hundreds of different varieties. ‘Rotation is important,’ one of the women said. ‘The soil needs to rest.’ At one of the fields, they harvested sacks of oca which they then carried on their backs to the Pelechuco River, a forty-minute hike. The riverbank looked as if it had been bombed; several metre-wide holes pitted the earth, each one dug so close to the other you needed to tiptoe along their narrow ridges to avoid falling in. Each of the pits was filled with water, hay and handfuls of muna (Andean mint). The sack of oca was lowered in and weighed down by stones where it would be left for at least a month. Over the loud rush of the Pelechuco, one of the women, Vasillia, lifted out some of the rocks, reached her arm into the cold water of the pit and pulled up one of the older sacks. Pinching a tuber that was losing its skin, she shook her head. ‘Not yet,’ she said, ‘another week.’ It needed to be soft and feel like a sponge. By then, the sourness of the acid would have leached away. From here, the oca that are ready are taken further up the mountain and spread out across the ground like chuño on the altiplano. For around a week, the oca goes through the cycle of freezing and thawing. ‘When they start to look as if they are rotten, we press them,’ Vasillia explained. And so, on the freezing mountainside, they walk barefoot to force out the last of the moisture. When they are dry, flat and dark in colour, the tubers are taken to the village. Inside a small kitchen, the women took pieces of dried oca – like charred pieces of blackened wood – and ground them down to make a dough. A strong, sweet smell of farmyard (a legacy of the fermented hay placed inside the pits) hung in the air as salt, herbs and sugar were added to the dough which was then moulded into mini-burger-sized pieces. Fried in corn oil, they became hard chewy discs that tasted part treacle, part liquorice and part barnyard. On the day I left the Apolobamba, the village held an atapi , a communal meal that brought all of the surrounding villages together. Some had walked for miles so they could swap news and share food. Spread over blankets were the various tubers the communities had brought with them; fifty or sixty types of oca, chuño, tunta and native potatoes of different shapes, sizes and colours. Each tuber was adapted to its village, some higher up the mountain, some lower, making the feast a celebration of diversity. At the potato market Cooked slices of preserved oca Tuber diversity grown in the surrounding villages Villagers gather with the tubers they have grown BACK TO ALL

CRIOLLO CACAO CRIOLLO CACAO Extract from Part Ten: Sweet Criollo Cacao – Cumanacoa, Venezuela In the spring of 2017, I travelled to Venezuela on a near-empty plane (most other people were attempting to make the journey in the opposite direction). There were protests on the streets, little food in the supermarkets and the city was being described as one of the world’s murder hotspots. The economic crisis was pushing the country to near collapse. I was here to meet with an inspirational chef and chocolate-maker, Maria Fernanda Di Giacobbe, who believed Venezuela’s rare and prized cacao, criollo provided one answer to the crisis. It was time, she believed, to remember how important cacao had been – and could be again. She had grown up in a family of cooks and trained as a chef, but when the economic crisis hit, she had been forced to close her restaurants. This was when she started to make chocolate. For all of its cacao history, Venezuela exported the best cacao beans in the world for others – mostly Europeans – to turn into bars and confectionery and so reap most of the economic benefits. Di Giacobbe began experimenting, designing a DIY chocolate operation with borrowed equipment and the fridge from her home. In search of the best cacao, she took to the road and travelled thousands of miles, seeking out the few farmers left growing the highest-quality native criollo, learning how they fermented and dried their seeds to achieve the best flavours. She sold the bars she made in small quantities, mostly in Caracas, but she managed to smuggle some out of the country wrapped inside clothes in suitcases. This way the world started to learn about her work and the rare chocolate she was making. But instead of just focusing on her own business, Di Giacobbe started to encourage other Venezuelans to join in her mission. Her little factory became a training centre where women from across the country could learn how to make chocolate: roast beans, winnow them into broken ‘nibs’, grind them down, ‘conch’ them into a smooth paste and temper them into shiny bars of chocolate. Plenty were interested; many had lost jobs and, too often, so had their husbands. Revitalised by their new skills, the women fanned out to other communities, teaching more women what they’d learned. Word spread, and by the time I met Di Giacobbe in 2017, 8,000 chocolate makers, most working from home, had joined the network. That year she was given the prestigious Basque Culinary World Prize, awarded to chefs making a wider social impact through food. ‘She is affecting every aspect of cacao and chocolate in Venezuela,’ said one of the judges, the food writer Harold McGee. ‘By helping farmers tend their trees, improve the way they process the beans, Di Giacobbe has given communities a chance to benefit from the chocolate.’ The movement was a radical one, not only because it was launched during a crisis, but also because the transformation of cacao into chocolate has usually rested in the hands of large corporations. Di Giacobbe’s work has continued through the worst of the economic crisis and the years of food shortages. When finding sugar, a basic ingredient for the bars, became a challenge (with even Coca-Cola’s factories in Venezuela struggling to get enough of it) Di Giacobbe’s network of chocolate makers created an alternative supply chain, sharing what they had. Sitting inside the theatre in Caracas, a new band of recruits were listening to this story, absorbing every detail of how they too could start making chocolate in their communities, setting up their own businesses, taking criollo cacao from bean to bar. This was a rare chance to regain some independence and help bring more of Venezuela’s cacao farms back into production. Making a chocolate bar might not at first seem like a life-changing act, but hearing Di Giacobbe describe it, it definitely is. ‘Cacao gives us a chance to make a new country with a new economy, and to win back some dignity,’ she said. I spoke to one of the hundreds of Venezuelan women who had already followed Di Giacobbe’s vision and was making chocolate. ‘We can forget our problems for a little while and work,’ she told me. ‘Cacao is something real, we can touch, taste and smell it. This was not the case with oil.’ If Di Giacobbe does succeed in helping to change her country for the better through chocolate, it will be a case of history repeating itself. Venezuelan cacao has been a revolutionary food before. Maria Fernanda Di Giacobbe Drying cacao at a farm in Cumanacoa With Maria near Caracas BACK TO ALL