This TOME of a book is definitely one I’d recommend reading in hardcopy rather than e-book. It has many sections, that could probably be read in any order, and probably little by little over time to really have time to absorb it. Also, sticky notes - this is a book I would fill with tags and sticky notes!

I would also advise reading the epilogue first. Honestly, the epilogue draws everything together so nicely, but would also have made the whole book less confusing to me. Not confusing in content, but in purpose: with me, a layperson in the world of food and botany and agriculture, often wondering, but isn’t this a good thing? Or, is this sustainable? Is this realistic?

Eating to Extinction is as much a travelogue as it is about food and agriculture. It has added places to my travel bucket list, and the descriptions of people and places are as mouth-watering as is that of the food.

Saladino’s passion for these foods is tangible: he errs on the side of describing too much. There are parts about the preparation of certain foods, and the in-depth history, that are completely overwhelming. Again, a reason to have this book physically on your nightstand, to read bit by bit.

If you are worried about where our food comes from, and looking for inspiration to diversify your food choices, this is an excellent choice.

Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead.

I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings.

Anything requested and approved will be read and a decent quality review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

This book is interesting and sad all at the same time. It was fascinating to read about all of the places and foods related to them. It is sad to see how the improvements have actually made things worse. I did skim a few areas as some parts would have been easy to be bogged down in. Overall it is a good read.

I originally requested to download this book because my husband is in the hospitality industry and thought it could be useful for him for the flavour combinations and uniqueness discussed within the book. Instead it took my interest and I started reading it and became one of those people who told him about every fascinating bit I read. And fascinating is definitely the word I would use, the author has kept food as the main narrative throughout and there are some extremely interesting topics throughout. Well worth a read, especially if you are a non fiction fan.

I love the cover and the concept but I found the facts to be dry and overall the book to be slow moving. The book is valuable and holds a good message and a wonderful collection of facts and culture. It deserves to be read by those interested in foods, scarcity and globalism.

*received for free from netgalley for honest review* really enjoyed this book! can't wait to buy and reread it! learned so many fun facts from this book!

Well written, engaging, and informative. Another book that will make you think we have destroyed this world beyond repair, but still important to digest.

This book was fascinating and a definite must read! Given the nature of it, I was a bit worried it may get a bit monotonous at some points, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it engaging throughout. I enjoyed the author's writing style and the depth he went into. He discussed endangered foods, but also gave a fairly thorough history of them. As diseases spread and take out more and more of our homogenous food supply, this book is so relevant and important for everyone to read. Most produce and animal products are made from one to a few international varieties and while they are varieties that may produce increased yields, they are less resistant to disease. This is already causing huge issues in the food industry and the problems are only beginning if something doesn't change. I love that there are numerous people around the world seeking to change this and bring back varieties indigenous to their areas. This book provided the perfect balance of raising an alarm for a concerning issue while also bringing hope that many are working to help make changes and helping the reader understand that there is hope for the future if the appropriate changes are made.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This book was just so fascinating (and depressing) to me. The author takes us on a tour of a variety of endangered foods from around the world. The histories of each food. Stories of our ancestors, and of the people who are trying to keep these foods from going extinct. The book is divided into several chapters (meat, fruits, cheese, alcohol, etc), and the author has a very engaging voice throughout. If you are a foodie, you'll love this book. If you are a history buff, you'll love this book. Definitely my favorite non-fiction book I have read this year. 🙌🏻

**ARC Via NetGalley**

“Food stories are perhaps the most essential stories of all.”

🌟🌟🌟🌟/5

Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino is a love letter to food. Not cooking, but the actual grains, fruits, vegetables, proteins we eat and the beer and wine we drink.

Eating to Extinction is a study of how we are losing the biodiversity of our food. While our diets are seemingly more diverse, we can go to the grocery store and buy apples, artichokes, salmon, and Sauvignon Blanc essentially wherever you live in the world, the actual varieties of these food are actually only a fraction of what once was available.

Dan Saladino tells the story of 34 foods, ranging from Kavilca Wheat from Bükük Çatma to American Bison to Georgian Qvevri Wine and how these foods have become nearly extinct and the people trying to save them.

This book is fascinating, I had never heard of many of these foods and now want to travel the world to taste them all (skerpikjøt might be a stretch though). The research and effort put into Eating to Extinction is remarkable. Due to world-wide industrialization the same destruction and loss is happening to many of our foods, this causes the book to feel repetitive at times but learning the stories of the people trying to save these foods keeps the book interesting.

The reason I gave the book 4🌟 is that I found it a bit depressing, these are huge global shifts we are talking about, how can we as individuals make an impact? The epilogue does provide a bit of hope but I was still left feeling a bit insignificant.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an advanced copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

These days, the phrase “You are what you eat” is quite a popular expression. It was entered the English lexicon through the publication of Victor Lindahr’s 1942 book You Are What You Eat: How to Win and Keep Health with Diet. But long before that in 1826, the French lawyer and politician Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote in his The Physiology of Taste , "Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es." [Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are]. Brillat-Savarin who is now widely regarded as an early gastronome did not mean his phrase literally but rather gave a hint that the food one eats often has effects on one’s state of mind and health. On a rather similar note, Dan Saladino also brings us into some reflections about the foods and drinks we consume in this modern life.

As a journalist and presenter on BBC Radio 4’s “The Food Programme”, Dan Saladino has many opportunities to travel and observe many staples and drinks that people create traditionally around the world. Partly travelogues and partly essay collection, this book present a harsh reality of our food industry in the 21st century that lost its diversity in just a few centuries that passed after the Industrial Revolution. The food diversity that has been lost was caused partly by monocultures, due to the demand of modern consumption that commoditises foods, leaving little room for varieties with less endurance for global consumption. In one way, our global supply chain system allows us to taste foods and beverages originated from other parts of the world, but at the same time, it also homogenises our interaction with foods with increasing standards.

As someone trained in linguistics, I was taught by my lecturer that language extinction is a normal phenomenon, especially when there’s cultural assimilation that leads to the gradual abandonment of native languages in favour of a more common lingua franca. Think of how English is widely spoken in the twenty-first century and its position as an international language of communication. Reading Dan Saladino’s arguments that stand against food homogenisation, one question appeared in my mind: How is food homogenisation compared to the cultural assimilation that caused language extinction? In some regards, food homogenisation could also be viewed partly as cultural assimilation since foods signify one’s culture and heritage, with a history that could be traced to time immemorial. And this could also be seen as a popular view that favours one culture over another. But beyond its cultural attribution, foods also influence our health and states of mind as Brillat-Savarin told us two centuries ago.

Dan Saladino begins his introduction to the world rarest foods by taking us into some foods consumed by the world’s remaining hunter-gatherers. This is by no means an invitation to revoke our modern food production system that has been influenced a lot by the Green Revolution introduced by agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug in the 1950s. Rather, Dan Saladino is keen to show the many pearls of wisdom that exist in hunter-gatherer societies with regards to how they interact with nature and how they cultivate their foods. One striking example is the interaction between the Hadza people who live near Lake Eyasi in Tanzania with a wild bird species called the greater honeyguide (strangely, its binomial name is Indicator indicator). Hadza men whistle, strike trees and sometimes shout in a distinctive chatter that attracts the honeyguide to lead the Hadza hunters to locate a bee nest. The Hadza men will return with the liquid honey to their home, while the honeyguide consumes beeswax that was left at the tree. There are many such stories collected from all parts of the world by Dan Saladino in a range of topics that touch upon subjects of cereal, vegetable, meat, fish, fruit, cheese, alcohol, stimulants, and sweets.

It’s a book that surely needs to be read by gastronome, climate activists, people from all walks of life, to get the gist of how our interaction with foods has changed a lot in a really short period of human existence. There is a wisdom in the Slow Food movement, founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy in 1986 which strives to preserve traditional and regional cuisine and encourage farming and livestock characteristics that fit with the local ecosystem. Many landrace varieties have disappeared and been replaced by monocultures. The landrace breed that is often evolved over a long period of time to adapt to its natural surrounding has slowly lost its place with the introduction of commodities to fulfil the global market needs. Along with Mark Bittman’s Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal , this is the kind of book that might convince people to source their foods locally and to start looking for more diverse and organic options to sustain our food security in the foreseeable future.

I'm just as a surprised as you are that a book about food didn't excite me as much as I assumed it would. I think this stems from two things (and really maybe they are the same thing):
1. the topics felt a bit repetitive despite focusing on different food
2.the style of writing was hard for me to pay attention to for long periods of time.

The book is structured into different types of food: wild (honey, bear root, etc), cereal, vegetables, meat, seafood, fruit, cheese, alcohol, stimulants, and sweets. That's a lot of information to cramp into a book!!! I enjoyed the way it was broken down and truth be told a lot of this food I have never even heard of (probably because it's going extinct).

My main issue was that a lot of the times the history of the food was very similar. It prevailed at some point in time, was used by the region's people, a "better" alternate was introduced that was easier to grow, people found that it was more susceptible to diseases/ required pesticides/ lacked nutrients, someone out there preserved a couple of seeds, and someone else has since been growing the food and trying to restore the historical way of eating. The first time you read this structure you say to yourself <i>wow that is crazy that really just a couple of seeds can make all the difference</i> or <i>what am i even eating, how many foods have i lost that really have all the nutrients i need</i>.

After a while of this same story, it feels too repetitive and you get bored. As you know history has a way of repeating itself, and although I found the categorization of different food originally a helpful way of breaking up the story maybe it would have been easier to digest (pun fully intended) if the story of foods that shared similar histories were grouped instead. That way I could focus more on what the food actually is and the value of it instead of following the same story outline.

While reading this I ended up kind of finding it a bore. It felt hard for me to pay attention and fully understand what I need to grasp from each chapter. For this reason I would suggest you take this in small chunks, maybe only focus on one story a day. Due to the looming deadline of providing feedback, I rushed through this a bit and didn't have such a pleasant reading experience.

Overall, I think this would be one I would like to revisit in print. I definitely think this is a topic not discussed often and as I focus more on women's health it is interesting to hear how creative we have to be with our diets in order to get all the nutrients we need - when in reality some of these ancient and rare foods would supplement our bodies. I would also be lying if at times I were not salivating at the descriptions of the food. I got a little sad by the fact that I might never be able to give those foods a try, unless they are saved and shared amongst everyone (which is my hope).

I am a self-proclaimed foodie. I love reading about the history of different food, watching cooking shows, and testing out new recipes on my poor unsuspecting roommate. This book interested me because it discusses biodiversity and the decline of diversity in our own diets. It's interesting to think about how a majority of our seeds come from four major corporations and the changes it is having on our environment and health. This remind me of why I continue to push my mother to buy heirloom seeds for her garden whenever I can. The range of foods discussed is quite wide, ranging from honey to roots. It's filled with stories and information that will pique the interest of any food lover.

Thank you to the author, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and Netgalley for providing me with an eARC of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

It analyses how because of the continuous change of diet some types of food ended being rare close to extinction and why it's important to preserve them. The book is talking about more types of food from cereals to fish, fruit and cheese and even alcohol and all from around the world. I would recommend this book to any foodie lover and not only.

A really intriguing book, which will be interesting not only for the loving food, but for anyone who is interested in biodiversity. The book really gives a broad look, explains the significance of different cultures, foods, gives historical remarks, and explains how the industry affects the environment. I recommend!

This book is full of very interesting stories on various foods from around the world, and highlights the importance of preserveving that diversity. A super great look into a wide range of foods and adds some really creative insights otherwise not thought of.

This was a really fascinating read. I'm sure there are many ways this could be structured. While I'm sure some readers would want a deeper dive into one topic or another, I appreciated the varied exploration of different foods, and the different parts of the world they covered. I especially appreciated the narratives woven throughout, and the history included for context. Sometimes insertions of personal travels can overtake nonfiction texts like this, but the food remained at the center of each narrative. I definitely think this is a great read for anyone interested in food history.

Great book. I learned a lot about biodiversity through this book. It's very comprehensive but a lot of the sections feel very disjointed and end abruptly.

Interesting read that covers a ton of foods in all categories from vegetables, to alcohol, meat and cheese. It was an interesting insight into food production and the havoc that is being wreaked on our planet's natural ecosystem. I really enjoyed the vast amount of food that was featured.

This book is full of very interesting stories on various foods from around the world, and highlights the importance of preserveving that diversity.
A must read for foodies who want to learn about rare vegetables, and for people with an interest in science who want to read about beer-making.

Thank you netgalley for providing an ARC in exchange for a review