When food disappears, more than flavor is lost – Iowa State Daily

Food can disappear without leaving an empty shelf behind. Sometimes, what vanishes is a particular variety of an apple, a crop grown by a handful of farmers or a traditional ingredient passed down through generations.

That is the focus of culinary historian Sarah Lohman’s book “Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods”, which explores foods and food traditions at risk of disappearing across the United States. According to Lohman’s website, the book examines ingredients including heirloom apples, Texas Longhorn cattle, California dates, wild rice and Navajo Churro sheep. 

For Lohman, preserving these foods is about more than keeping unusual ingredients on the menu. Food can carry pieces of a community’s history and culture, making the loss of an ingredient part of a much larger story.

Lohman’s book was inspired in part by Slow Food International’s “Ark of Taste”, a catalog of regional foods considered at risk of disappearing. 

In “Endangered Eating,” Lohman travels throughout the country to learn about foods facing different threats. Her journey includes harvesting wild rice in the Upper Midwest, learning about traditional Hawaiian sugar cane and visiting the Navajo Nation to take part in the traditional butchering of a Navajo Churro ram. 

Photo courtesy of Sarah Loham website

The foods featured in the book range widely, but they share a common thread: their survival depends on the people who continue to grow, raise, harvest and prepare them.

Lohman also includes recipes throughout the book, giving readers a way to interact with some of the foods themselves. She argues that purchasing and preparing these ingredients can be one way consumers support the producers and communities working to preserve them. 

The “Ark of Taste” takes a similar approach by documenting foods connected to local cultures and agricultural traditions. Rather than treating biodiversity as something found only in wild landscapes, the program highlights the diversity that exists on farms, in kitchens and on tables. 

For consumers, that can make something as ordinary as choosing what to eat feel a little different. A meal can preserve a tradition, support a producer or help keep an ingredient in circulation.

The question is not simply what foods Americans eat today. It is what foods they will still be able to eat generations from now.