Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino

For Millennia, people have harvested and cultivated various plants for foods. In recent years, food sources have been concentrated in a small number of plants and animals. This poses a number of issues. These plants were originally adapted for certain climates. Growing them in other locations can be challenging.  Since they are the same plants, they are susceptible to the same pests, leaving to potential widespread devastation. 

This looks at some of the missing foods. Some crops that we see as singular actually have a wide degree of variety. We can usually look to the area where the crop was eventually cultivated to find the variety. In the process, we can also find versions with special nutritional value, hardinest to extreme climates and even unique tastes. Alas, many of these unique species are fading away. Fields of diverse crops are plowed over for common varieties that can be more easily sold in world markets. We don't know which ones have genes that are critical for our future. It is a race against time to find these species before they disappear.