lost feast culinary extinction and the future of food

The Romans clung to the belief that their beloved silphium could perhaps spontaneous reappear someday the idea that that something could be gone forever was simply, at the time, inconceivable. Gold coin from Cyrene, from between 308-250 BC the tails side depicts silphium. In each case, we sift through the evidence that points to human appetite as the leading cause of extinction, and unpack the response of a bewildered, bereft humanity. This episode, Newman takes us on a tour through the foods we have eaten to their end, such as the Pleistocene megafauna, which early humans destroyed as our numbers spread around the world, and the leek-flavored silphium that was so valuable its last stalks were hoarded, alongside gold and jewels, by Roman emperors. But the passenger pigeon wasn’t our first culinary extinction. “There was no denying it was us,” said Newman: somehow, together, we had eaten so many pigeons that we had wiped the most abundant bird in North America off the face of the planet. Her death, on September 1st, 1914, represented the first time that humanity watched a species disappear, in full awareness of the concept of extinction and our role in causing this particular one. “And that bird was Martha.” Newman’s project is a new book titled Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food Martha was a passenger pigeon and the last living member of her species-an “endling,” as such lonely creatures are evocatively called.

“This project started because of a bird,” Lenore Newman told Gastropod.

8), from “Large-scale live capture of Passenger Pigeons Ectopistes migratorius for sporting purposes: Overlooked illustrated documentation,” by Julian Hume. “Shooting wild pigeons in Iowa,” illustration from the 2 July 1867 edition of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (vol. Join us this episode as culinary geographer Lenore Newman takes us on a tour of lost foods-and the lessons they can teach us as we fight to save our current favorite foods from disappearing forever. What did these foods beloved by previous generations taste like? Well, apart from some written descriptions, we’ll never know: they’re all extinct. And, for dessert, Americans a century ago might have enjoyed a superlatively buttery Ansault pear, reckoned to be the greatest pear ever grown.

In the 19th century United States, passenger pigeon pie was a cherished comfort food, long before chicken pot pie became commonplace. Ancient Romans loved their favorite herb, silphium, so much that they sprinkled it on everything from lamb to melon. The earliest humans favored juicy, meaty mammoth at mealtimes.

Lost feast culinary extinction and the future of food