Why should anyone care about having 25 varieties of wheat when a single one can be optimised? For the same reason that fund managers seek to diversify their assets. In an ever-changing world, diversity is an insurance policy
And yet, as choice has proliferated in other ways, diets have been squeezed and standardised. Even Parisians eventually let Starbucks onto their boulevards. Dan Saladino, a food journalist at the, reminds readers of what stands to be lost. In “Eating to Extinction” he travels far and wide to find “the world’s rarest foods”.
Even within each of those food groups there is homogenisation. Decades of selective breeding and the pressures of global food markets mean that farms everywhere grow the same varieties of cereals and raise the same breeds of livestock. The unhappy fate of the Large White pig is a case in point. Picture the quintessential farmed swine—pink, long-bodied, almost cartoonlike—and you will probably be imagining a Large White. Originating in England in the 19th century, the Large White quickly put on weight and could be kept inside or out. From England, it was exported to Europe, Australia, Argentina, Canada, Russia, America and China. Today, it fills the world’s biggest industrial pig farms.
Such stories remind readers of the stakes, but the real delicacies in Mr Saladino’s book are its tales of people who have tried to resist the shrinkage of diets, sometimes heroically. Nikolai Vavilov, for example, founded the world’s first seed bank, in Leningrad . He and his disciples gathered more than 150,000 seed samples before he was sent to a prison camp under Stalin. In 1943 Vavilov “was claimed by the very thing he had spent his life working to prevent: starvation”.
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