★2022年溫萊特獎(Wainwright Prize)獲獎作品
★紐約時報、英國衛報專文評論，柯克斯書評星級點評
【在漸趨單一化的飲食風潮下，尋找世界的稀有食物】
Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them
二戰後的歐美各地，為能迅速提供每天生活所需的糧食，在全球化的推波助瀾下，自動和機械化的糧食生產模式被發明，而在生物科技的改良下，人們能透過更方便的通路與低廉的價格取得食物，但食品的產業與消費鍊也逐漸被集中於大型跨國企業，賺取極高獲利的同時，食材的選擇也集中於單一品種。
當我們習慣性地從超商或連鎖超市購買每天要吃的牛奶、乳酪、香蕉和肉品，即便來自不同品牌，但其實食物的種類更加窄小。幾乎全球豬肉交易市場的豬都是同一個品種，美國95%的牛奶來自單一牛種，荷斯登；而香蕉的種類多達1500多種，但被實用且大量種植的卻只有卡文迪許種(Cavendish)。
看似多元實則被限縮的選擇，只要一次戰爭或天災，一次氣候變遷或蟲害，就能導致糧食危機，造成無法挽回的後果。身為大麥出口大國的烏克蘭戰爭爆發後，歐洲各國立即面臨大麥、小麥原料價格飆漲的危機；黃葉病菌讓卡文迪許種的香蕉感染導致嚴重歉收，一度重創全球蕉農，只能透過品種改良試圖阻止災害。
為了扭轉瀕危的餐盤風景，人類需要稀有食物。這些食物並不是指高級餐廳裡的昂貴食材，而是早已存在世界各地、為當地居民熟悉、種植且保存至今的食物。義大利裔的作者Dan Saladino為BBC飲食記者，小時候與祖父在西西里的里貝拉看過好幾次血橙豐收時節的熱鬧景色，但當他2011年回去採訪時，當地農家卻說這是他們最後一次採收，因為血橙的銷售敵不過來自西班牙的甜橙，幾百年的文化傳統與記憶，因為飲食和消費的選擇改變於一夕間消失，讓他十分震驚，也對食物多樣性的議題展開研究。
他和非政府組織Ark of Taste合作，也是激發他寫下這本書的原因，為尋找世界各地的稀有食物，他踏上一段令人振奮且充滿能量的食物探索之旅。從土耳其安納托利亞高原到非洲坦尚尼亞，從阿爾巴尼亞高山到韓國連山，尋訪34種稀有食物，深入當地，看人民如何耕種、採集、狩獵與烹煮這些珍貴食材，與如何永續地推廣和保存。透過作者第一線的紀錄與訪談，不僅展現食物多元化的重要，也呈現各地逐漸興起保留稀有食物的意識與努力。
Ark of Taste目前已記錄5312種珍稀食物，來自130個國家，這份清單持續增加。Dan Saladino也說，讀者可以從自己的社區或鄰近地方的農作物開始，購買並食用這些產品，都是成為守護文化傳統、地方歷史記憶與推動食物多樣性的助力。
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
“What Saladino finds in his adventures are people with soul-deep relationships to their food. This is not the decadence or the preciousness we might associate with a word like ‘foodie,’ but a form of reverence . . . Enchanting.” ―Molly Young, The New York Times
Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction is the prominent broadcaster’s pathbreaking tour of the world’s vanishing foods and his argument for why they matter now more than ever.
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―provide 50 percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still: 95 percent of milk consumed in the United States comes from a single breed of cow, while one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer.
In Eating to Extinction, the distinguished BBC food journalist Dan Saladino travels the world to experience and document our most at-risk foods before it’s too late. From an Indigenous American chef refining precolonial recipes to farmers tending Geechee red peas on the Sea Islands of Georgia, the individuals profiled in Eating to Extinction are essential guides to treasured foods the rest of us have forgotten or didn’t know existed. Take honey―not the familiar product sold in plastic bottles, but the wild honey gathered by the Hadza people of East Africa, whose diet consists of eight hundred different plants and animals and who communicate with birds to locate bees’ nests. Or consider murnong―once the staple food of Aboriginal Australians, this small root vegetable with the sweet taste of coconut is undergoing a revival after nearly
