lost feast culinary extinction and the future of food

'About this title' may belong to another edition of this title.īook Description Hardcover. Even as we enjoy a time in which food is cheaper, more diverse and more available than ever before, the spectre of extinction threatens to radically challenge how we eat. Slowly the table becomes less interesting, less captivating, and as each species disappears, the accompanying cultural knowledge vanishes with it. The raspberries for the waffles, the sage on the Thanksgiving turkey, the poi or the pisang goreng. Now imagine that the dishes start to disappear one by one. A feast is a bit like a book, but a tasty book we read through eating. There is also a huge body of culinary knowledge, the accumulated knowledge of growing, harvesting, processing and preparing foods handed down and improved upon over generations. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of species of plants and animals, a sort of culinary menagerie. There are two things in that feast, aside from a great deal of hidden labour. Imagine a meal with many dishes and more food than can possibly be eaten at once. It can be any feast: a Las Vegas buffet, a family holiday dinner, a South Pacific pit BBQ, or an Indonesian rijsttafel, the classic meal of many small dishes, served for special occasions.

To understand these culinary extinction threats, imagine a feast.

'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. You will never look at what’s on your plate in quite the same way again. Part culinary romp, part environmental wake-up call, Lost Feast makes a critical contribution to our understanding of food security today. Whether it’s chasing down the luscious butter of local Icelandic cattle or looking at the impacts of modern industrialized agriculture on the range of food varieties we can put in our shopping carts, Newman’s bright, intelligent gaze finds insight and humor at every turn.īracketing the chapters that look at the history of our relationship to specific foods, Lenore enlists her ecologist friend and fellow cook, Dan, in a series of “extinction dinners” designed to recreate meals of the past or to illustrate how we might be eating in the future. In Lost Feast, food expert Lenore Newman sets out to look at the history of the foods we have loved to death and what that means for the culinary paths we choose for the future. In fact, we have often eaten them into extinction, whether it is the megafauna of the Paleolithic world or the passenger pigeon of the last century. When we humans love foods, we love them a lot. A rollicking exploration of the history and future of our favorite foods

Lost feast culinary extinction and the future of food