Also in Food & Health

Renewing America's Food Traditions

Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods

Edited by Gary Nabhan

Foreword by Deborah Madison

Reviews

Courier-Journal.com

In Search of Great Food
Rescuing America's disappearing foods
By Marty Rosen
Special to The Courier-Journal
December 20, 2008

A century ago, there were some 15,000 named varieties of apples growing in the orchards of America. Today, you'd be hard-pressed to find one-tenth as many -- and of the 1,500 remaining varieties, some are represented by just a handful of furtive trees.

There aren't many statistics to be found in Gary Paul Nabhan's recent book, "Renewing America's Food Traditions -- Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods" (Chelsea Green, $35). Nabhan is more interested in telling stories and sharing recipes than in crunching numbers.

He tells stories about folks like a Louisiana slave known only as Antoine who propagated the once widely cultivated Centennial pecan, which won a "best of show" award at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, fell out of favor before World War I and now is impossible to find in commercial nurseries.

He tells stories about the yellow hickory king dent corn of Western Kentucky and the Bronx seedless grape. He writes about the fainting goats of Tennessee and the flying squirrels of the Carolinas. He offers recipes for Mexican wedding cookies made from the pinyon nuts of Nevada and for burritos made from the acorns of the endangered Engelmann's oak trees of California.

Whether he's telling stories or quoting statistics, Nabhan's message is the same: Over the last century our agricultural and culinary practices have caused the extinction or near extinction of thousands of edible wild and cultivated crops and populations of livestock that once enriched the American table. These days, he says, "Fewer than 30 plants provide 90 percent of the world's nutrition."

Meanwhile, more than 1,000 foods once prominent on the American table (and listed in an appendix to the book) are on the verge of disappearing.

The way to save them, argues Nabhan, is to put them back on the menu.

To that end, in 2004 he joined with a group of like-minded organizations, including the Seed Savers Exchange, the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy and Slow Foods U.S.A., to start the RAFT (Renewing America's Food Traditions) initiative, with the goal of rescuing foodstuffs that are outstanding but at risk.

In the book, Nabhan divides the country into 13 regions (we live in "Cornbread Nation"). He tells the stories of some 90 foodstuffs, offering a few photos, a recipe and recommendations for further detailed readings for each one. The result is a smart, surprising and ultimately invigorating introduction to the culinary and social history of the United States.

Alas, Nabhan doesn't offer instructions on how to acquire those items that are commercially available (and many of them are available, whether as seeds for the gardener, stock for the farmer or ingredients for the cook). But he does offer viable common ways for all of us to help save these foods by getting them back on the table.

And for readers searching for sources of endangered foods, Nabhan points to the "US Ark of Taste" project, which catalogs descriptions and sources for a couple of hundred at-risk foods. Go to www.slowfoodusa.org and click the "Programs" link to find the "Ark of Taste."

Valley News

By Warren Johnston
December 5, 2008

Starting in the early 1970s, exotic foods from around the globe began showing up in the United States, and many American cooks rejoiced. In the decades since, many old American foods and preparations have been forgotten. This book has come out of the collaborative called Renewing America's Food Traditions that was founded in 2004 by chef and food organizations to play a positive role in the conservation, restoration and celebration of food traditions unique to the North American continent.

The book reflects the organization's efforts. It identifies and brings recognition to the American foods most at risk of extinction and cultural loss, the introduction says.

After starting the project, the collaborative founders realized that North America is broken into culinary regions that cross not only state lines but also national borders. These “ecogastronomic” regions are called “food nations.” Many of these food nations existed -- Salmon Nation (Alaska and the Northwest) and Cornbread Nation (the South) are two -- before the project began. The playful names are a good way to think about regions in terms of the relationships of food, place and culture, according to the book's editor, Gary Paul Nabham. For example, along the East Coast from Delaware to New Brunswick is the Clambake Nation, and the Upper Valley is in the Maple Syrup Nation.

The foods on the endangered list for Maple Syrup Nation are the Java Chicken, the Cayuga Duck, the Oldmixon Free (Clearstone) Peach, Seneca Hominy Flint Corn and the Buckeye Chicken. The book gives a history of the food, a list of further readings and ironically, a recipe.