Dan Saladino Auteur and food journalist BBC
Dan Saladino is a renowned food journalist who has worked at the BBC for twenty-five years. For more than a decade he has travelled the world, recording stories of foods at risk of extinction, from cheese made in the foothills of a remote Balkan mountain range to unique varieties of rice growing in southern China. He has written a book on the subject, called “Eating to Extinction”, and anyone reading the text on the cover could easily become despondent:
‘Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat.’
The numbers are stark. Of the roughly six thousand different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these – rice, wheat and corn – provide 50% of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still: 95% of the milk consumed in the United States comes from a single breed of cow, while one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer.’
Saladino shows that if we lose the wide variety of our foods we lose not just traditional eating habits but smells, tastes and textures. Once they are gone, we will never again be able to experience them. But more is at stake than merely the loss of gastronomic cultures, tastes and smells. Our food monoculture is a threat both to the resilience of our food systems and to human health and the future of the planet.
But there is hope! We spoke about it with Dan in the kitchen of his home in Cheltenham.
