Tag: Gaia/Nature Reading Challenge

Eating to extinction

I have just finished reading Eating to Extinction, by Dan Saladino. It’s an ambitious, immersive and important book. Saladino has made a tour of the world’s vanishing foods – its animals, vegetables, crops, and shown us why retaining diversity in the food chain matters so much.

This engaging and readable book takes us with Dan Saladino as he visits Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania in quest of wild honeys – they’re the very last people to be constantly on the move, with no settled place to call home – they have lived successfully with no possessions, no money and no leaders. In Australia, he’s shown murnong, a radish like root once prized by the aboriginal people, and all but obliterated by introduced over-grazing sheep. Bere is an ancient barley adapted to the harsh conditions in Orkneyn Orkney. There are Swabian lentil growers; apple growers in Kazakhstan; Skerpikjøt, the wind-dried mutton of the Faroes …. and so many more. Each adventure, to areas where local custom and traditional ways of life remain strong is full of interest, and leaves me with a desire to try the foods and drink he sampled. It also leaves me with a determination to do what I can to support the remaining foods being saved by passionate and committed producers.

Disease can rampage through a single variety at horrifying speed, and if that variety is all we have, the consequences are obvious. Too many of our foodstuffs are in too few hands. The cultures that are injected into our cheeses worldwide to make them what they are are in the hands of some 5 suppliers. The cattle we breed are – worldwide – largely a single breed. Seeds in every continent are in the hands of just four corporations,. Thousands upon thousands of local varieties, bred over the centuries to suit local conditions have been lost forever. So many of the foods we rely on – animal and vegetable – once developed to suit particular soils and climate have been wiped out or, if lucky, painstakingly recovered from a vanishingly small stock pile by some single-minded enthusiast. Now, most foods are grown as a one-size-fits-all.

Whereas foodstuffs used to be so different and varied from one country and region to the next, now the entire world derives 50 % of its calorie-intake from just three foods: wheat, corn and rice. The fast-food burger is becoming a world-wide phenomenon. Saladino shows us that besides this being so dangerous – an epidemic could wipe away a foodstuff completely – it’s also impoverishing our diets, and the rich variety of local foods. He discusses globalisation, the crippling effects of war and climate change. The good news is: with a lot of hard work and good will, it’s not quite too late to stop the rot.

The most important book I’ll read this year. And one of the most interesting.

For Gumtrees and Galaxies: Gaia Nature Reading Challenge

Thoroughly British Rainforests

I have just been reading a book about rainforests. In Britain. Not the exotic tropical rainforests seen on television through which, drenched in sweat, you hack your way, attacked by insects and snakes as you wield your machete: but the gentler British version, temperate rainforest. These increasingly rare woods now occupy under 1% of the earth’s surface. No wonder they’re a best-kept secret.

Guy Shrubsole‘s The Lost Rainforests of Britain is an engaging and thoroughly absorbing account of a National Treasure of which most of us in Britain are completely unaware. Our temperate rainforests are spectacular woodlands with ancient, often stunted gnarled trees, draped and and bearded with mosses and lichens, and once marched across the British Isles from Dartmoor in the south to the north of Scotland – most particularly on the more sodden western seaboard. These days this unique habitat is increasingly under threat, and tiny pockets of such forest are now hard to find, and increasingly isolated and encroached upon.

Guy Shrubsole is the evangelist who seeks to protect and save them. To tell the story of this once widespread forest, he discusses geology, farming history, climate, Celtic Druids, the Romantic poets, JRR Tolkein – even Arthur Conan Doyle. He maps the eco-system in detail and calls for immediate political and public support: Shrubsole is a campaigner as well as a writer. This book may sound worthy, and therefore possibly dull. But it’s very readable, elegiac, amusing, entrancing and shocking by turn. It may turn out to be 2023’s Must Read.

None of these images is from a temperate rainforest: I haven’t – yet – visited one. But the picture shows somewhere I have been: the so-called Lud’s Church, a ferny gorge near Gradbach in Staffordshire, where the cool damp microclimate qualifies it as the very tiniest of rainforests.

I read this for the 2023 Gaia/Nature Reading Challenge

It fired my imagination, and reminded me that I may already have explored such a dim, green and shady place, crowded with trees clothed in soft green mosses, and draped with tangles of lichen, evocative of a spirit life with wraiths, witches and goblins. It wasn’t here in England, but in southern France, where even in the foothills of the Pyrenees it’s hot and often dry. I’ll post about that next …