Complex Numbers

Forgotten Food

From The Guardian, a British publication, we have an undisguised ad for a book about American food.

    ‘On the brink of extinction’: a food historian’s hunt for ingredients vanishing from US plates  
In her new book, Endangered Eating, Sarah Lohman chronicles disappearing foods – and why they need protecting

I don't know... I feel like some foods are better off disappearing, such as everyone's favorite horror story: gelatin molds.

The American buff goose. Amish deer tongue lettuce. The Nancy Hall sweet potato. The mulefoot hog. When food historian Sarah Lohman stumbled on these fantastical-sounding ingredients in a database of vanishing foods called the Ark of Taste, she set off on a journey across the United States to discover more ingredients and traditions that had been abandoned in the annals of history.

Mind you, I think that keeping the knowledge around for the sake of history is a worthy project.

Lohman spoke to the Guardian about the cultural and political importance of these near-forgotten foods.

Like I said, it's a book promotion, and it's largely in interview form.

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.

I've been hearing references to Slow Food for a long time. It's almost always followed by the word "movement." Every time I hear it, every damn time, it sounds like constipation.

One major question we need to consider is: who should have access to these foods and at what price? I found people profiting off Indigenous foods, and other people profiting off Black American foodways, who weren’t of that culture and weren’t doing much to provide money or support the original caretakers of these plants.

Now, I don't generally accept the idea of food as cultural appropriation. One of the few benefits of living in our society is the ability to get food (and more importantly, beverage) from all over, and combine it in new and improved ways. But the sort of thing she's talking about there, yeah, I can see how that's appropriation, and inappropriate.

There's more to the article, of course, but I found it interesting enough to share, even if I can't be arsed to actually buy the book it's promoting.