This was a very interesting read! Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for the opportunity to read!

This book was a great resource for looking at the world in which we live and eat, in a different light.

Are we eating things that shorten our lifespan? Are we eating to nourish our bodies as they were meant to be fed,?

This is a powerful and wildly important read. I would love to see it taught in schools. It contains history we don't read about in history books, but should ... indigenous history, the history of seed savers in wartime (very impressive and emotional).

I appreciate the things the book taught me ... where food comes from, how the lack of diversity happened, and why that is dangerous. And how people have been warning others about it for years.

I do want to mention content warnings. As you may imagine, anytime someone writes about food, we hear about the killing of animals for food consumption. The author does visit slaughterhouses. I can only speak to my sensitivity around those kinds of topics. It is a very high sensitivity. This is my personal opinion ... I did NOT find the level of detail upsetting - we are aware that things happen but didn't delve into details. The situation and reality is upsetting, however, given how important this book is, I understand that it was for a purpose. For insight and hopefully change, for the better.

I encourage everyone to read this book. It will open your eyes, if you'll let it.

Eating To Extinction is a very detailed account of the world's oldest and rarest foods that are sadly being forgotten and obliterated. Throughout the book the reader is transported all over the world to learn about what people thousands of years ago ate, what has happened to it since, and how some people are trying to save it from extinction. There is a strong scientific undertone so I was really glad I was able to listen to the audiobook, as I think it would have taken me a long time to read the book in print. The narration was great, the narrator had a pleasant accent and spoke clearly and kept a neutral inflection to his voice providing a consistent listen. The topic is so interesting and I found it was easy to pick up from where I left off without much rewinding to remember where I was previously. The content is engaging, perhaps a bit boring for some but I liked it.

Sadly, the subject matter is depressing, but that is kind of the point of the book. There are foods that present day people will never taste or cook because they have been lost due to the industrialization of food and crops. Everything has been made cheaper for more, which sadly is now catching up to society as a whole. The author did a good job at organizing the information and chapters; the data given was curated and targeted to the proposed topic.

I found it encouraging that there are still people and cultures who are trying to preserve certain foods and the way they have always prepared them, I feel that as a whole I see many people where I live going back to the “roots” of how food used to be grown, prepared and preserved. I love that the author included this, as it gives the reader some hope that all is not lost. A line that stood out to me was “Science is changing, the world is waking up” and I loved that, I feel it is becoming more and more true.

Veteran BBC food journalist for “The Food Programme”, Dan Saladino, has written an eye-opening and inspiring book about food, the environment and the global loss of biodiversity. These stories of nearly extinct foods are the hidden stories of who we are — our past, present and future. It’s a call to arms for all of us who love food and care about the future of our planet. The audiobook is narrated by the author.

A huge thanks to @Netgalley and @macmillan.audio for the advanced audiobook.

This was an absolutely fascinating book on all of the different types of foods we no longer eat and that are going extinct and why that matters. I learned so much from this. It was presented in an easily absorbable way and really made me think about the state of our world. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

*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!

Quite a notable read/listen. The author discusses how the food industry has revolutionized food production, but at the expense the species and heterogeneity.

Quite a food-for-thought reaf. A bit dry at times, but hard to make this topic more entertaining.

This audio was hard to listen to. I'm not sure if the books is divided by unmarked sections or if there there aren't chapters marked but I felt like it was very much run on, where I wasn't sure what was being talked about. With this being a very scientific, yet social, subject, I wish it were better organized. I didn't make it too far into the book because of the monotone nature of the writing/narrating. I wish it was prefaced better.

This book made my simultaneously terrified and hungry. It was genuinely fascinating to learn about all of these regional food preparations and ingredients. I want to try them all! Particularly the citrus, apples, and potatoes. It was great to learn about these things that I consider staples and how much variety I'm missing out on. There was more about regional cuisine and food preparation techniques than I expected, but it was still very interesting.

Author Dan Saladino explains the well-meaning blunders made during the Green Revolution after WWII while quoting and echoing the lessons of biologists like Rachel Carson and E. O. Wilson. Take a tour through the history of food, isolated communities around the globe, and 'The Ark of Taste', an online compendium of less common foods that provide a glimmer of hope toward saving agricultural biodiversity and microbiome-sustaining dietary variety. Historical, linguistic, and literary connections spice up this fascinating read. A highly-recommended read for older teens and laymen interested in the future of food.

This book takes you on a round the world look at foods that are no longer available and explains to us clearly why that matters. Saladino takes very hard facts and puts them into a story that helps us understand the perils of our own making. This heavily historic and scientific topic could have easily gotten bogged down but Saladino write the details in a way that weaves all the hard data into an easy to follow storyline. He has also organized the chapters into logical groupings of foods and keeps one major food item the highlight of one chapter.

Saladino takes us back into history to explain why a particular food item was important and then connects that to why it matters to us now. Of course with all things humans have wrecked in this world, colonization, big corporations and climate change are clearly putting our food sources into peril as well. I was not aware of the homogenization of most of our world-wide (!) food production and how a lack of diversity puts the food supply into great danger with each new fungus or blight or disease.

Saladino narrates the book himself and does a good job. Not all authors make for good narrators but his voice and modulations were easy to listen too.

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for an early version of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I don't really know much about food production, distribution, or history beyond what I need to know to pick the best I can at the supermarket. I'm also aware that climate change and industry have changed the food available. What I didn't know was to what extent the homogenization of humanity's diet has expanded and the dire straights in which some of the basic elements of my (and most people's) diets are in.
Saladino does a brilliant job of very interestingly presenting the history of different foods along with how we got to where we're at with them and the dangers they face. It never feels like a lecture or a boring slough through facts and figures. It's a celebration of food as told by an individual passionate about the topic he's discussing. How great is he at presenting his information? I am now obsessed with saving an artisanal fish in Japan that's only made by the last man who knows how to make it and is sure to disappear when he's unable to continue. I don't even like fish!
I'm walking away from this for a greater appreciation for all the food I eat and hope to taste one day. I laughed, cried, and walked away with lots of information I plan to think on and discuss with anyone willing to listen. I also have a list of places I need to visit in hopes of supporting the local food and maybe helping these rare foods stick around for a while longer.

The fact that the book is narrated by the author is the cherry on top of how perfect I found this book. You can hear his passion, excitement, and anxiety over the topics he discussed over the course of the book and get pulled into it with him. He really does make you feel for the food that's in danger of being lost forever, be it over global warming, cultural changes, industrialization, or the plethora of incredible reasons why we're slowly losing the food diversity humanity has depended on for millennia.

Extremely happy (if slightly worried) thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the early listen!

This audiobook for EATING TO EXTINCTION is a natural next level book for readers/listeners of BRAIDING SWEETGRASS and THE HIDDEN LIFE OF TREES, as well as LAB GIRL and THE STORY OF MORE. While it is hard to heard about losing beloved diverse food sources and the natural gathering in ways that will soon be lost to us, and how it will have large eco effects, the good news is that there are stories of humans efforts to save diversity, there is some hope if we will pay attention and make better efforts.

Still, this is the type of audiobook that I like to listen to one chapter at a time. The book is dense and gives much to chew on, from many different food sources, fruits, grains, vegetables, meats, and even analyzing modern causes of the pandemic spread and other effects of world events. In fact, each chapter is fascinating in its own way, from efforts that scientists took to save important varieties of seedlings from being destroyed in a war, to hunter/gatherer techniques, to marine sanctuaries.

A note about the audio. My copy has a tiny sound to it, but I enjoyed the narrator's reading, once I got used to that sound. I am uncertain if it was the app I was using or the copy, but feel I must mention that part. Also, my copy did not have chapter names, which is needed, in case the listener gets lost (or falls asleep) and needs to back up, or is interested in jumping around. Since this was an advance copy in an advance listener app, this issue may be taken care of with the publication of the audio book. Otherwise, I found the product excellent, in this deeply researched and well-told non fiction offering.

I haven't finished this one yet, but I've had it since the end of December, so I thought I'd better pop on here and give some feedback.

So far, this book has given me a ton of great information on extinct and endangered foods, the importance of preserving food diversity, and how big corporations are slowly (or not so slowly) killing it (food diversity).

It's actually a very interesting read, and I've enjoyed learning the information. However, it's a bit dry. It's not necessarily the narrator. He does an okay job of narrating and keeping things upbeat and moving. It's just the material that's dry. I think, at least to a certain extent, that's to be expected.

Unless you're a food scientist, historian, or something else, I suppose it's a bit hard to keep this topic "hot and hopping", but it's a bit drier than I thought it would be to be honest. That's why it's taken me so long to read it. Normally I can devour an audiobook in just a few days, but I've been listening to this one a little at a time since December 28, and I can't do much in one sitting.

Still, once I get it finished, I know that I'm going to be glad that I did. So I will be finishing it up because - as I said - it's interesting information to have. I just wish there had been a way to present it in a more interesting manner.

I was sent a copy of Eating to Extinction to review. I thought this was going to be a very interesting book but I think that it was too much content for me to actively pay attention to the audiobook. I found myself losing interest and missing key pieces of the content which makes you not get all you should out of a non-fiction book. I think if I were to read this book rather than listen to it on audiobook I would enjoy it a lot more but as an audiobook, I was not a fan.

I received a copy of this audiobook from NetGalley. All thoughts are my own.

This was a fascinating book that I think more people should read. I kept trying to see how each food that was going extinct could affect me. I don’t eat many of the foods/drinks that were talked about but I know that one extinction can be a chain reaction.

Learning about the history of some of the endangered goods was eye opening. I will buy a copy of this book so I can reference it later today on.

I have been listening to Eating to Extinction by Dan Saladino (read by Saladino himself) for a while. I listen to it when I'm walking and I've found myself circling blocks and repeating loops in order to consume more of it. Sometimes I circle chapters and loop back on passages to hear parts of it more than once.

This is not a light or easy read, but it is an extremely fascinating one. Saladino walks the reader through a sometimes overwhelming amount of information about the food we eat, its origins, sustainability and threats to or by its existence in the world.

"Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. 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—now provide fifty 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."

Some of my favourite parts include details of how some of most common foods came to be what they are now, stories of people who have committed their lives to protecting and working to establish a future for historical foods, and the ideas and suggestions that are provided when the reader inevitably asks themselves "but what can *I* do?!?"

"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."

Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them will be out on February 1st and it would be an interesting read for anyone who is curious about the current and future states of the food we eat and the world we live in. Thank you to NetGalley, MacMillan Audio and Farrar, Straus and Geroux Books for the opportunity to listen to this advanced copy.

If ever there was a rallying cry for people to fight against the homogenization of food around the world, this is it. Saladino shares stories from all over the globe about an incredibly wide array of foods that teeter on the edge of extinction. Every kind of food from vegetables, to beverages, to animals and their byproducts, is effected by reduction of number species, and if changes aren’t made the consequences could be catastrophic.

Despite the grim nature of the subject all hope is not lost. The foods mentioned all have champions, people working to save the biodiversity we’ve lost with globalization and are working to save traditional, diverse foods and production methods. There are many more endangered foods than those mentioned, but this can be inspiration for others to fight to save their own traditional foodways.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I particularly enjoyed this book. It was educational and engaging. As a member of Cherokee Nation seed harvesting, passing down that tradition is something indicative of my culture. It's nice to see others sharing that sentiment with books like this and programs like our seed bank; hopefully, more interest can be brought to preserving, harvesting, and passing down these heirlooms of agricultural history.

Ꮹ Ꮩ- WADO/thank you