The Importance of a Biodiverse Diet
Most of us consume most things without thinking about the ingredients or about how our consumption of those ingredients can change, in both good and bad ways, the communities the ingredients come from. This was a point driven home to me by Dan Saladino’s award-winning book, Eating to Extinction.
“An individual human diet even a few thousand years ago was far richer in diversity than the one most of us eat today. In the Jutland peninsula of western Denmark in 1950, peat diggers discovered the intact body of a man who had been executed (or possibly sacrificed) 2,500 years ago. Inside the man’s stomach was a porridge made with barley, flax and the seeds of 40 different plants. … I am not calling for a return to some kind of halcyon past. But I do think we should consider what the past can teach us about how to inhabit the world now and in the future. Our current food system is contributing to the destruction of the planet: one million plant and animal species are now threatened with extinction; we clear swathes of forests to plant immense monocultures and then burn through millions of barrels of oil a day to make fertilisers to feed them. We are farming on borrowed time.”
To read the rest of Dan Saladino’s foreword to Eating to Extinction, click here.
Our lack of curiosity about the ingredients of the foods we eat has created monocultures. Bananas are the easy example: There used to be more than a thousand varieties of bananas. But we (and by “we,” I mean both you and I) really only eat one. And because we eat that one ubiquitous banana, the Cavendish, that’s what is now grown in most commercial plantations in the world. It’s almost half of all banana production.
There’s a disease infecting the roots of a large portion of those Cavendish trees – something like 40% of them. That’s what happens with monocultures – they easily pass diseases from one plant to the next. It’s going to lead to a blight, which will lead to a banana shortage. And when that happens? You and I will just substitute blueberries in our cereal. But the communities where these bananas are grown? That rely on the income from their banana sales? Where something like 60% of their daily caloric intake comes from bananas? What will they do?
If I could have brought an assortment of bananas from Mexico for you, I would have. It’s an amazing side-by-side tasting experience. But carrying agriculture from Mexico into the USA is … frowned upon. So instead I offer you three other tastings of biodiversity from Mexico. My hope is to inspire you to think about something you consume – maybe olive oil, chocolate, or agave spirits, or maybe something else altogether. But to think about something you eat, and how that something might be protected if you were to consume different versions of that something, made with different varieties of the key ingredients.
I grew up hearing “you are what you eat.” The more I look at this topic, I realize that, while true, the bigger truth is that we are what I eat. That my consumption plays a role in determining what everybody else gets to consume. How everybody else lives. What will be left when I’ve left.
And I think, what I leave behind and the impact I make with my consumption can lean toward a better trajectory when I eat more diversity. And, not for nothing, it’s more delicious, too.