When I first saw the subtitle of Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food, I thought, yes, there are some foods that ought to go extinct. They are disgusting or ugly or simply unappetizing.
Yes, I missed the author's point. That is, until I read this amazingly interesting book - and understood not that certain foods ought go extinct - but that certain food obsessions can (inadvertently) cause the extinction of animals, plants, and, yes, foods. Lenore Newman, author of the book, interweaves the history of our relationship with foods (who knew that passenger pigeons' famous extinction had to do with food?) with what she calls "extinction dinners" - all in order to entice us into a certain kind of environmental knowledge. The knowledge: that our food obsessions are not only shaped by the marketing campaigns of others (yes, I knew about the rise of Pomm and its impact on pomegranates), but by the not-so-virtuous, actually verging on vicious, circles of fads driving certain foods to extinction. Predecessors of cows, for example. What Newman calls "the twilight of the mammoths" as a food-related extinction. I had no idea. (Ok, the phrase is not hers. It comes from a P.S. Martin and H.W. Greene book of the same title.)
Have I said extinction enough yet? We have to move, the author hints, beyond the things popular culture connects with extinction - dinosaurs and mammoths, for example - or even those we know are declining in numbers (e.g., bees). We must ask why - and we must look beyond the obvious.
What I find particularly fascinating about this book is that it is not hatred or violence (per se) that drives things into extinction. It is love.
Had you ever heard of "pear madness"? (Not me. I knew about tulip mania kind of vaguely, but pear madness?) Did you know about the risk of losing bluefish? (I did, but not phrased quite this way, in quite this exquisitely painful a way.) The relevance of pollination to - everything - and more.
Do you expect to run into names like Franz Boas in food-related books? Do you know what "cultivar loss" means? The book calls forward as many questions as you can imagine potentially extinct phenomena.
For an enticing interview with Lenore Newman, click here. Or here where you can hear her on one of my favorite CBC shows: Quirks and Quarks. (Yes, Lenore Newman is Canadian.) Frankly, she sounds kind, smart, and Canadian. Plus, Lenore Newman can write - and she writes well. This is not always the case for fascinating books. It is here.
As a post script: this book has the most interesting "suggested readings" I have encountered in ages.
And, in case you did not guess it, the answer to the question in this blog entry's title is yes. Culinary extinction is a thing. And, we can be the perpetrators. We ought not be - perhaps.
