“Of the roughly six thousand different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just 3 of these – rice, wheat, and corn – provide 50 percent of all our calories.” The consolidation of our foods could result in “a lack of resiliency in the face of climate change, pests and parasites. … “Our food monoculture is a threat to our health – and to the planet.”
This is just a sample of the information you'll learn from Dan Saladino's new book, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them (Farrar, Strauss. Giroux, 2021). Saladino, a long-time food journalist for BBC, discusses how the decline in our food diversity is a man-made process, with the biggest loss of crop diversity coming after World War II when the world needed to ramp up food production. The use of genetics and agrochemicals led to the development of super productive plants, leading the world to rely on these super growers, and economically leaving few farmers to grow more diverse less productive plants.
The book is divided into ten parts: Wild, Cereal, Vegetable, Meat, From the Sea, fruit, Cheese, Alcohol, Stimulants, and Sweet. In each section, he documents at-risk foods and the people who continue to cultivate, forage and hunt them.
A good example of what Saladino talks about can be found in his chapter titled “Kayinga Banana.” The banana is a perfect example of crop monoculture. Bananas are widely grown in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In this chapter, he discusses how “Half of all the bananas grown in the world are globally traded and grown with the sole purpose of crossing the world in shipping containers…The international trade is based entirely around just one variety, the Cavendish, a low-price ubiquitous and super-specialized fruit.” It's considered an unrivaled superstar of monocultures because each banana is a clone. “The plant can't reproduce itself from seed (unlike wild bananas). Instead, some of the suckers the Cavendish grows underground are cut from the main stem and replanted (botanically speaking the plant is a giant herb and not a tree).”
Saladino then delves into the history of how the Cavendish became the predominant variety. He discusses the history of the Gros Michel, a.k.a. ‘Big Mike', a half-sibling of the Cavendsh, which in the nineteenth century seemed destined to become the predominate banana, unlike wild bananas that continued to adapt to fungal diseases, monoculture bananas slowly lost their ability to adapt to such changes. So, by the 1950s a Fusarium, known as race 1, devastated plantations of Gros Michel across the globe. So, the Cavendish took over as the number one banana. But history may soon repeat itself because the disease TR4, for which the Cavendish is susceptible is beginning to spread across plantations. Scientists are exploring editing the DNA of the Cavendish to make it less susceptible to TR4. Another alternative is to genetically diversify planting plantations with the more than 100 varieties of bananas that currently exist.
I don't know about you, but I'm suddenly craving a banana and am going to eat one while I still can!
Be sure to check out Eating to Extinction at your local branch of the Solano County Library!