Welcome to Litsy!

This is a sad book. So many foods, fruits, vegetables and animals have disappeared from our ecology. I never wanted to eat passenger pigeon, but to imagine there was once hundred of types of apples, pears, carrots and tomatoes that we will never taste. I'm not a big foodie, but I weep for the lost variety in our diets. 4 🥕🥕🥕🥕

It began with butter, a surreal amount of butter, glistening with tiny pinpricks of fat.

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

As the subtitle indicates, this book is about culinary extinction and the future of food. Humans consume: plants, animals, natural resources. We consume without thought. Without thought that what and how and how much we consume has consequences. Consequences that are catching up to us. Extinctions have and will continue to occur at an alarming rate. It‘s not too late to turn it around. Ultimately, this book is hopeful. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I enjoy Mary Roach-style nonfiction—witty, knowledgeable & personal, with tidbits tucked into footnotes—just like this book about humanity‘s relationships with the foods we love most. Megafauna, silphium, passenger pigeons, pears that could be spread on bread like butter, delicious species of fish—these & other foods have been eaten out of existence. Sobering, yet the tone of this book is of upbeat intellectual curiosity. #canadianauthor

I‘ve read several interesting books lately about the future of our food. In the suggested reading at the back of the tagged book, I saw that I‘d already read 6 out of the 30 on the author‘s list, but I‘m happy to have more recommendations. Are any of you as keen as I am on this topic?

After seeing the image above on Facebook, I thought about one of the “extinction dinners” described in the tagged book. The author‘s friend prepared a turducken, “a culinary spectacle consisting of a deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck, then the combination is stuffed into a deboned turkey. It is a nested set of animals tightly packed to create an imposing knot of meat.”

He grows miracle berries (Synsepalum dulcificum), an African fruit that chemically alters the function of our taste buds for a short time so that one‘s brain registers sour tastes as sweet.

“Lonicera caerulea, the haskap or blue honeysuckle, is a large berry native to the cool temperate regions of North America, including the boreal forests of Canada.”
(We used to call them honey berries in Edmonton, but now they are generally called haskaps. I didn‘t have any photos on my phone, but I pulled out this jar of my sister‘s preserves from my fridge. Haskaps are delightful!)

The most powerful members of medieval society were buried beneath the church floor, giving us the phrase “stinking rich.”

The grocery stores of my childhood were barren places. The lettuce, all of the lettuce, was iceberg. There was one sort of cucumber, the green one that terrifies cats. Oranges were all the same, as were bananas.*

*This is still true of bananas.

Carl Linnaeus described flowers as numerous women in bed with the same man, a view that was received about as well as one might expect by polite society.

To imagine an aurochs, first imagine the meanest bull, then double it in size, give it a lush brown coat & double the length of its horns & give them an extra curve. Edit out the fatty nature of modern cattle & replace that fat with rippling muscle. Cattle on steroids.
(Internet illustration above gives size comparison)

Egyptians decorated their tombs with images of honeycomb & bees, and Ramses III offered a tribute of 21,000 jars of honey to Hapi, the God of the Nile. They left pots in tombs as meals for the afterlife. Some of the pots, protected in the hot & dry Egyptian desert, are still edible.

My sweetie had lumbar fusion surgery 3 days ago. She was discharged yesterday and we are back in hospital today. A book provides distraction from the stress.

An odd effect of life on an island is that large species tend to grow smaller and some small species grow much larger. The Hawaiian tree snail, for example, is as large as a rabbit. It is threatened by habitat loss and by invasion.

It‘s a first for me: catching up on Gastropod podcast episodes and I already happen to be reading the book of an author they are interviewing. Usually it‘s the other way around: I pick up a book after hearing Cynthia and Nicola talk about it.