So what is an endangered food, exactly?
I was drawn into this whole project because endangered foods are not something we usually think about. Usually, the term is applied to species: manatees, or pandas. People don’t say, “Save the Long Island cheese pumpkin,” which is a beautiful native Long Island pumpkin that is also on the Ark of Taste list [which is run by the NGO Slow Food International].
But endangered foods are the focus of Slow Food International’s work. They catalogue thousands of international and hundreds of national foods that are considered delicious, distinctive and worthy of protection. In some cases, those foods are not endangered, just hyperlocal, and they want to protect that food because it’s important culturally in some way. In other cases, there’s a threat to the foods they’ve catalogued: there are few of them left or there’s a reason they’re not grown anymore. One theme in my book is that there’s a very diverse list of reasons why these foods are on the brink of extinction. Some are stable, meaning they’re not imminently going extinct – but stable doesn’t necessarily mean safe.
What might land a food on the endangered list?
It depends. For Coachella valley dates, the biggest reason is that farming is a difficult industry. The second- and third-generation inheritors of a family farm don’t necessarily want to keep going, so those plants can be lost. For Hawaiian legacy sugar cane, development played a huge role. Hawaiian resorts have a huge effect on native and agricultural plants, as people’s homes are being bought up and their backyards bulldozed. The endangerment of the Navajo-churro sheep and other Indigenous foods are the results of colonization and cultural genocide. This happens when Indigenous people are moved off their land and then [their foods are] purposely replaced with foods that are important to European Americans, such as white flour, pork and coffee. That’s the government coming in and saying: “That’s not the right way to live. Empty space is unused space. You need to plant a tree on it. You can’t move around with your herds.”
It can also be something simple. The Carolina runner peanut is a little tiny peanut that’s delicious but hard to pick by hand, and was discarded for a larger peanut that fits machinery better. There are so many reasons. You can see how they create a broad picture of American history and all the ways we’ve chosen to shape our landscape over time. It’s time to walk some of that back to make sure we can maintain that culinary history.