When We Love Our Food So Much That It Goes Extinct
We humans love food to death ... literally.
From mammoths to passenger pigeons, we have driven our favorite meals to extinction through overhunting and habitat destruction. And globally, our tendency to overharvest just a narrow range of crops has limited the variety of foods we eat.
"When it comes to fruits and vegetables, we have access to only a fraction of the diversity that existed a century ago," says Lenore Newman in her forthcoming book, Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food (out Oct. 8.) She is the Canada research chair in Food Security and Environment at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia.
In her book, Newman explores how human activity has limited our food options and still threatens what we are able to put on our plate.
"I think the important lesson that I took away from writing this book was realizing that things can — and do — go extinct even if we really love them," Newman told NPR. Silphium, a critical plant to Roman and Egyptian culinary society, is one of many examples