Dan Saladino's Eating to Extinction — The Foods We're Losing

The premise

Dan Saladino is the producer of the BBC Radio 4 Food Programme. Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them (FSG, 2021) is the book version of decades of his radio work.

The premise: of the 6,000 plant species humans have eaten across history, fewer than 200 are now cultivated at meaningful scale. Of those 200, just 9 provide 75% of global plant-based calories — rice, wheat, corn, soy, barley, sorghum, sugar cane, potato, cassava. Within each of those, varietal diversity has collapsed: 95% of the apple varieties grown in the US in 1900 are no longer commercially available.

What's at stake

Three things, intertwined:

Resilience. A food system that depends on 9 crops is fragile to pathogens, climate change, and pest evolution. The Irish potato famine is the historical model.
Flavor. Industrial varieties are bred for shelf life and transport, not flavor or nutritional density. The supermarket tomato is the canonical example.
Knowledge. Each lost variety is the loss of a specific food culture and a specific set of growing practices.

Some of the foods Saladino profiles

Bere barley — a Scottish landrace, near extinction, being revived.
Murnong — an Indigenous Australian tuber that fed Aboriginal communities for tens of thousands of years; nearly wiped out by European pastoralism.
Geechee red pea — a Gullah heirloom legume.
Olotón maize — a Mexican corn variety that fixes its own nitrogen through specialized aerial roots; potential implications for sustainable agriculture.
Skerpikjøt — Faroese wind-cured mutton.
Single-origin coffee varieties from Ethiopia that are at risk from climate change.
Memmingen pear — one of dozens of European pear varieties that exist now only in conservation orchards.

What to do with the book

Saladino is not asking you to grow Bere barley. He's asking you to support, in small ways, the farmers and seed banks keeping these varieties alive: the Slow Food Ark of Taste, regional seed savers, heirloom-variety produce when you can find it.

The bigger ask is structural: agricultural policy that subsidizes diversity, not just yield.

The Saladino project

Dan Saladino spent over a decade reporting on endangered foods for
the BBC's The Food Programme before publishing Eating to
Extinction (2021). The book documents specific food cultivars,
livestock breeds, and dishes that are at risk of disappearing —
often within a single generation.

The book is structured around 35 foods, each from a different
region: from the Bere barley of Orkney to the Sierra Leone red rice
to the Yali pig of Vermont. Each chapter is a small history of a
specific food and the people who maintain its cultivation.

The Slow Food and Ark of Taste connection

The intellectual lineage of Saladino's book runs through Slow Food
(founded in Italy by Carlo Petrini in 1986) and its Ark of Taste
project, which catalogues food products at risk of disappearing.
Saladino draws on the Ark of Taste extensively; many of his
chapters profile foods that are formally on the Ark register.

The argument behind the Ark: industrial agriculture has driven
extreme consolidation in cultivated varieties. Roughly 75 percent
of the world's food today comes from just 12 plant and 5 animal
species. The diversity that existed a century ago — thousands of
apple varieties, hundreds of cattle breeds, regional grain
varieties — has been systematically replaced by a few high-yield
industrial varieties.

The result: the global food system is fragile. A single pathogen
that affects the Cavendish banana (which is nearly the entire
banana export market) could collapse banana availability
overnight. The same fragility applies to wheat (a few varieties
dominate global supply) and corn.

What the book gets right

Saladino is a careful reporter. The chapters are well-researched;
the people he profiles are real and named; the food traditions he
documents are observable in their home regions.

The book also avoids the easy "save the heirloom" sentimentality.
Saladino acknowledges that some foods may not survive and that the
loss is real. The argument is not nostalgic; it is practical —
diversity is a hedge against fragility.

What to do with the argument

For home cooks: source from farmers markets when possible; ask
about cultivar names; cook with heirloom grains and beans rather
than commodity versions. The Anson Mills heirloom grain operation,
the Rancho Gordo bean operation, and the various small-farm CSA
networks are the practical entry points.

For food readers: keep the Ark of Taste catalog as a reference.
The Slow Food Foundation maintains it online.