Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food

Lost Feast, Lenore Newman

We live in a somewhat contradictory world, culinarily speaking. On the one hand, those of us in one of the wealthier countries, or a wealthier city in any country, have an incredibly variety at our fingertips, more than could have been available just 20 years ago. An interest in food, and further immigration and cultural exchange, has led to me being able to pick up Icelandic yogurt, some dragonfruit, and a premade coconut curry at a standard grocery store in the suburban US. At the same time, however, globally our food choices have begun to disappear. Many traditional preparations have been lost, and the industrialization of food has caused local agriculture and fruit and vegetable cultivars, or landraces of livestock, to disappear, which author Lenore Newman refers to as a ‘disappearing library.’ The specialized cows who make Skyr, the Icelandic yogurt, only exist in Iceland and are grazed in small patches. Either we eat far less Skyr, or we need to crossbreed these cows with other breeds, industrialize the process and, in effect, make Skyr disappear. And the industrial process would prefer to see fewer and fewer breeds and greater conformity to make planting and harvesting easier—and that’s before even getting into seed patenting or GMOs, which Newman doesn’t really get into in this book.

Leonore Newman is a culinary historian, which means she travels the world researching different culture and eating lots of different food. It’s the type of job that makes me think my guidance counselors didn’t do a good enough job explaining career options to me when I was in school. Throughout this book she discovers the foods that have disappeared from our table, and the species we have caused to actually go extinct. The most famous of species we killed off are probably the passenger pigeon, which was once plentiful enough to make the skies go dark for days, and the dodo, but wild species we’ve hunted and gathered to extinction are far older than those. She discusses silphium, an herb that was greatly praised as a cooking ingredient and for medicinal purposes by the ancient Greece and Romans and at some point just disappeared. And even before that, our ancestors hunted most of the megafauna to extinction. There’s a clear link to be shown of human settlement and the extinction of mastodon and mammoth, aurochs, and moa. And today we see the same pattern, as species that cannot be domesticated and are only found in the wild face extinction from excessive hunting, excessive waste, and habitat loss. Whether they are expensive luxury items, such as white truffles, or the 80% of fisheries that are now overfished, we are continuing to race to use up our resources, without the excuses we had in the past. Now we know extinction is possible. Now we know we’re doing it. And now we have options.

And a lot of this is because of waste, then and now. Maybe not the first one. The Quaternary Extinctions that killed off the Stone Age megafauna was probably came close to a ‘natural’ extinction when a new predator came on the scene. Combined with a changing climate we killed off several species while we were trying to survive. We won’t know for sure, but it seems unlikely, given how hard a mammoth was to kill, that we were just clubbing them for fun. But it’s certainly a factor in the modern extinctions. Passenger pigeons were killed by the hundreds, strung up and sold for pennies, or just killed off for being a pest, and it’s no doubt that many of those pigeons did not need to be killed, and ended up rotting and thrown away. Today, not only is food waste a serious problem, but tons–literally tons—of sea creatures are killed and thrown back into the ocean as bycatch. They can’t legally be fished, but there is no way to completely prevent them from being caught and no regulatory agencies are watching the nets.

And in addition to those animals we have driven and are driving to extinction, we are smoothing out the genetic diversity of many of our domesticated species. This is bouncing back somewhat, as the Slow Food movement has taken off and small groups are forming to resurrect or save heritage breeds. And yet, in many ways our groceries shelves, which seem to have so much variety compared to 30 years, are almost bare. Consider this information Newman highlights:

If we compare the list of modern cultivars to the 1903 USDA master list of available seeds, we have lost 97 percent of the list cultivars of asparagus, all cultivars of broccoli available at the time, 93 percent of the listed carrots, nine out of ten corn cultivars, 95 percent of cucumbers and onions and radish cultivars….Five hundred varieties of lettuce shrank to thrity-six,… . We went from 500 varieties of cabbage to twenty-eight, and 86 percent of apple cultivars vanished, as did 87 percent of pears.

And why does this really matter, given all the ‘real’ problems in the world today? Well, more genetic diversity can help us make create new varieties and revive old foods, which I think is a good thing. But that’s not the most pressing issue today. The real answer is that genetic diversity can preserve food species. When a blight comes for a crop, old cultivars can help us respond. As the climate changes and our grazing periods and grazing options change, as we need to rethink which lands we can and should use for food, old landraces (the livestock version of a cultivar) that are more adapted to different diets and different climates will be essential. And as we need to rethink the amount of emissions we use by ripping down rainforests for industrial agriculture, and to keep produce fresh and ship it around the world, as we need to feed more people even as the climate changes and we need to use less land and less energy, new-old cultivars are going to become increasingly necessary. The spreading of a global monoculture and industrial revolution meant increasing yields but starting with crops grown in the U.S. or with Europe, not looking at local contexts, losing old ways of agriculture and old strains of crops. Rediscovering and encouraging and building markets for traditional crops, that are better adapted to the local soil or to cycles of drought and typhoon or able to resist local pests, will be essential. Looking to use these as the base to increase yields rather than thinking it can all be done from one clone will be important to rethink how we grow and use food. Despite the title of The Lost Feast, Newman refers throughout to the loss of food diversity as a lost and burning library, rich sources of knowledge disappearing.

The Lost Feast is a tragic tale. It’s strange to think of how completely and suddenly we have transformed the world, and how much has disappeared. One wonders if we can act quickly enough to save some of our current fish stocks, and what the future with a rapidly changing climate will bring. And it’s also a tale of adaptation. The book is wistful, and clear on how we depend on genetic diversity and natural systems, but it is not apocalyptic. Our diets have changed rapidly, from generation to generation, and we have learned to be quite creative in what we eat, adapting to whatever is handy and near by. Newman discusses the unique food of the Hawaiian islands, a blend of traditional food such as taro (itself an imported/invasive species) and canned meats brought over by colonists. She doesn’t discuss this in the book, but in Florida and Virginia ecologists are trying to use our tendency to overhunt for good, sharing recipes for lionfish and snakehead.  But it’s still hard not to feel the sense of loss. And wonder what in our cookbooks generations after us will read and wonder about and never, ever taste.