Books and Arts -- Book ReviewRare foods -- Refined tastesEating to Extinction. By Dan Saladino.The French eat foie gras, the Icelandic devour hakarl (fermented fish with an aroma of urine), Americans give thanks by baking tinned pumpkin in a pie.The range of human foods is not just a source of epicurean joy but a reflection of ecological and anthropological variety -- the consequence of tens of thousands of years of parallel yet independent cultural evolution.And yet, as choice has proliferated in other ways, diets have been squeezed and standardised.Even Parisians eventually let Starbucks onto their boulevards.Dan Saladino, a food journalist at the BBC, reminds readers of what stands to be lost.In “Eating to Extinction” he travels far and wide to find “the world’s rarest foods”.These include the murnong, “a radish-like root with a crisp bite and the taste of sweet coconut”; for millennia it was a primary food for Australia’s Aboriginals, before almost vanishing.The unpasteurised version of English Stilton, meanwhile, was salvaged from hygiene rules by an American enthusiast who renamed it Stichelton.
