2024 the best looking food in the world review

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This audiobook is read by the author.

Dan Saladino's Eating to Extinction is the prominent broadcaster’s pathbreaking tour of the world’s vanishing foods and his argument for why they matter now more than ever

Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of the roughly 6,000 different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these - rice, wheat, and corn - now provide 50 percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still:

The source of much of the world’s food - seeds - is mostly in the control of just four corporations. Ninety-five percent of milk consumed in the United States comes from a single breed of cow. Half of all the world’s cheese is made with bacteria or enzymes made by one company. And one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer.

If it strikes you that everything is starting to taste the same wherever you are in the world, you’re by no means alone. This matters: When we lose diversity and foods become endangered, we not only risk the loss of traditional foodways, but also of flavors, smells, and textures that may never be experienced again. And the consolidation of our food has other steep costs, including a lack of resilience in the face of climate change, pests, and parasites. Our food monoculture is a threat to our health - and to the planet.

In Eating to Extinction, the distinguished BBC food journalist Dan Saladino travels the world to experience and document our most at-risk foods before it’s too late. He tells the fascinating stories of the people who continue to cultivate, forage, hunt, cook, and consume what the rest of us have forgotten or didn’t even know existed. Take honey - not the familiar product sold in plastic bottles, but the wild honey gathered by the Hadza people of East Africa, whose diet consists of 800 different plants and animals and who communicate with birds in order to locate bees’ nests. Or consider murnong - once the staple food of Aboriginal Australians, this small root vegetable with the sweet taste of coconut is undergoing a revival after nearly being driven to extinction. And in Sierra Leone, there are just a few surviving stenophylla trees, a plant species now considered crucial to the future of coffee.

From an Indigenous American chef refining precolonial recipes to farmers tending Geechee red peas on the Sea Islands of Georgia, the individuals profiled in Eating to Extinction are essential guides to treasured foods that have endured in the face of rampant sameness and standardization. They also provide a roadmap to a food system that is healthier, more robust, and, above all, richer in flavor and meaning.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Reviewer: LMF
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Recommended
Review: Excellent information that people should read

Reviewer: RF
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Beautiful journey of history meeting our future
Review: The journey created in this book is a worldwide escape into the crevices of hope, love, passion, and history. The finding of knowledge, as great as it is, belies the fear that the monotony of our agricultural system will undermine the need to diversify our diets. As our world prevents the diversification of the bodies and minds of humans, our future (and the world and its plants and animals) might be much scarier than our past.Will anyone rise up to say health and humanity is more important than standardization and profit?What a beautiful and important book and I am sorry for the overused but totally applicable expression.

Reviewer: Tom/Susan
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Great book
Review: Very interesting and informative

Reviewer: MizPaka
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Fantastic and important book!
Review: This is an extraordinary book that is beautifully written and thoughtfully presented, giving readers a broad perspective on what industrialization and globalization have done to the fundamental human need to eat food. The author skillfully describes not only the crops that are becoming extinct in their natural habitats but also the farmers and activists who are trying to save those crops from disappearing. The author does the same with foods that may no longer be available because so few artisans are left to make foods that are unique to specific cultures.I’ve been encouraging everyone I meet to read this book. We all need to appreciate the tremendous effort it takes to grow and make food that is nutritious and better for the environment. Our children’s well-being depends on a resurgent interest in feeding them real food, not the processed foods that sell so well all over the world.This is a fantastic book! Even children can listen to parents as they read aloud the author’s depiction of landscapes and the people and animals that populate them. It can spark the children’s imagination, as it did mine.

Reviewer: A. Patriot
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: An urgent book
Review: While some say this is more of a text book with the level of detail provided but I found it well written and well researched. Yes it’s not a novel but it is not a difficult read at all. And it is a must read to understand the vulnerability we have created and how we must fix this now. This is the Doug Tallamy of the agricultural world.

Reviewer: David King
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A fantastic book to raise questions to human being to re-evaluate “development”
Review: We might be too ignorant about what we thought we knew — the book raise the questions to re-evaluate the “development” human beings are proud of.

Reviewer: Too Too Much
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Insightful, important, and exciting!
Review: I was interested in this topic before reading the book -- I see firsthand the issues of disappearing biodiversity in rural Mexico. But Saladino showed me a much deeper side to the problem. And by illustrating both the problem and the possible solutions with so many amazing examples, he's changed my behavior. What a *great* book! And what an *important* book.

Reviewer: pamporos
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: what the world needs NOW!
Review: We must look at how the lack of diversity in all aspects is ruining this earth and all of us inhabiting it. I must say, this author is much more entertaining than I expected. Wonderful information - the history, what needs to be done now, and an introduction to some of the heroic souls saving us from our own ignorance! Highly recommended.

Reviewer: carlos
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Me parece que se muestra de manera clara y amena la importancia de la diversidad genética que han domesticado, conservado y mejorado, a este de las grandes empresas capitalistas, las mujeres y hombres campesinos del mundo. Es un libro de lectura obligatoria ahora que enfrentamos el reto del cambio climático y la pérdida de biodiversidad.

Reviewer: Vlad Thelad
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Although the situation is dire, this is not another apocalyptic book. The homogenization of humankind’s diet makes as vulnerable in so many ways, which are clearly explained throughout Saladino’s book. However, what makes this a fascinating read are the characters engaged in saving diversity and their stories beautifully documented by the author. This is at once a pedagogical book, enlightening us through facts on the history and perils of how and what we consume, and an activist’s manifesto proposing a way forward, without preaching undertones or lecturing airs. It is also a fascinating compilation and exploration of food, from grains, plants, and sea and land creatures, to wine coffee, and chocolate, all rooted in their local environments, showcasing the vastness of geographical and cultural diversity. A highly recommendable read.

Reviewer: Emanuela
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Veloce e perfettamente nei tempi libro stupendo

Reviewer: AMYL
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Compulsive mix of science history and anthropology for foodies

Reviewer: Joseph W. Paterson
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Some very good stories on the subject of food that need to be better understood and discussed more often.