Endangered Eating by Sarah Lohman
When McDonald’s erected its golden arches near Rome’s Spanish Steps in 1994, the locals revolted against the globalized food monoculture by launching Slow Food International. The highly organized movement seeks to preserve endangered foodstuffs and recipes, whether plant or animal based, and encourage chefs, make heirloom seeds available to farmers, and generate public awareness. They helped inspire food writer Sarah Lohman to travel the U.S. to research Endangered Eating.
The author went coast to coast—and beyond, to the mountains of Hawaii where she learned about the island’s brilliantly colored heirloom sugarcane. On the mainland, she realizes that Coachella means more than a music festival. The valley is home to dates grown nowhere else. Her journey into the Navajo Nation taught her many things about people as well as the unique sheep grazing on their land.
While an estimated 95 percent of produce once grown in the U.S. has disappeared, every now and then, a variety thought to be extinct is rediscovered. Witness the Carolina African Runner Peanut, probably the first legume of its kind in North America and abandoned by farmers in the 1930s for larger, easier to harvest varieties. Researchers on the trail of endangered food discovered 40 of the Runners in a cold storage seed bank. Twenty were planted. They sprouted, producing a “denser, sweeter, smaller” peanut with intense flavor. Thank you McDonald’s for triggering the slow food pushback.
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