Of Ghost Foods and Culinary Extinction

The earliest humans favored juicy, meaty mammoth at mealtimes.
Ancient Romans loved their favorite herb, silphium, so much that
they sprinkled it on everything from lamb to melon. In the 19th
century United States, passenger pigeon pie was a cherished comfort
food, long before chicken pot pie became commonplace. And, for
dessert, Americans a century ago might have enjoyed a superlatively
buttery Ansault pear, reckoned to be the greatest pear ever grown.
What did these foods beloved by previous generations taste like?
Well, apart from some written descriptions, we’ll never know:
they’re all extinct. Join us this episode as culinary geographer
Lenore Newman takes us on a tour of lost foods—and the lessons they
can teach us as we fight to save our current favorite foods from
disappearing forever. “Shooting wild pigeons in Iowa,” illustration
from the 2 July 1867 edition of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated
Newspaper (vol. XXV, no. 625, p. 8), from “Large-scale live capture
of Passenger Pigeons Ectopistes migratorius for sporting purposes:
Overlooked illustrated documentation,” by Julian Hume. “This
project started because of a bird,” Lenore Newman told Gastropod.
“And that bird was Martha.” Newman’s project is a new book titled
Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food; Martha was
a passenger pigeon and the last living member of her species—an
“endling,” as such lonely creatures are evocatively called. Her
death, on September 1st, 1914, represented the first time that
humanity watched a species disappear, in full awareness of the
concept of extinction and our role in causing this particular one.
“There was no denying it was us,” said Newman: somehow, together,
we had eaten so many pigeons that we had wiped the most abundant
bird in North America off the face of the planet. But the passenger
pigeon wasn’t our first culinary extinction. This episode, Newman
takes us on a tour through the foods we have eaten to their end,
such as the Pleistocene megafauna, which early humans destroyed as
our numbers spread around the world, and the leek-flavored silphium
that was so valuable its last stalks were hoarded, alongside gold
and jewels, by Roman emperors. In each case, we sift through the
evidence that points to human appetite as the leading cause of
extinction, and unpack the response of a bewildered, bereft
humanity. Gold coin from Cyrene, from between 308-250 BC; the tails
side depicts silphium. The Romans clung to the belief that their
beloved silphium could perhaps spontaneous reappear someday; the
idea that that something could be gone forever was simply, at the
time, inconceivable. The concept of extinction—along with its
mirror, evolution—wasn’t formulated until the end of the eighteenth
century, and it finally gave humans a framework within which to
understand their actions. But, as Newman describes, the pace of
culinary extinctions has only increased since then, with thousands
and thousands of varieties of plants and breeds of animals
vanishing in the early 20th century. Why have we allowed so many of
the foods we love to vanish? What impact has their loss had—and
what lessons can it teach us for the future? Listen in this episode
as Newman helps us tackle these morbid questions, leaving us with
some hope, as well as a whole new perspective on chicken.Episode
NotesLenore Newman‘s Lost Feast Lenore Newman holds a Canada
Research Chair in Food Security and Environment at the University
of the Fraser Valley, where she is currently an associate professor
of geography and the environment. Her most recent book is Lost
Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food; prior to that,
she authored Speaking in Cod Tongues: A Canadian Culinary Journey.
The Ansault pear, painted by Deborah G. Passmore on 10/13/1897,
from the collection of the USDA National Agricultural Library in
Beltsville, Maryland. The post Of Ghost Foods and Culinary
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