As many of us ponder holiday feasts, Lenore Newman offers some context. In these excerpts from “Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food,” Newman looks at some of the history of food extinction and why it matters. And for those who associate Christmas with a partridge in a pear tree …

Many of the unique foods that help to make the world a diverse and interesting place are in danger. The forces of globalization, industrialization and ecological collapse threaten the wealth of culinary products that make our cultures distinct. Some of these foods are becoming rare, some are becoming much more expensive and some face outright extinction. Some have already become extinct.

To understand these threats, imagine a feast.

It can be any feast: a Las Vegas buffet, a family holiday dinner, a South Pacific pit BBQ, or an Indonesian rijsttafel, the classic meal of many small dishes, served for special occasions. Imagine a meal with many dishes and more food than can possibly be eaten at once. There are two things in that feast, aside from a great deal of hidden labour.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of species of plants and animals, a sort of culinary menagerie. There is also a huge body of culinary knowledge, the accumulated knowledge of growing, harvesting, processing and preparing foods handed down and improved upon over generations. A feast is a bit like a book, but a tasty book we read through eating.

Now imagine that the dishes start to disappear one by one. The raspberries for the waffles, the sage on the Thanksgiving turkey, the poi or the pisang goreng. Gone. Slowly the table becomes less interesting, less captivating, and as each species disappears, the accompanying cultural knowledge vanishes with it.

This is the paradox of the lost feast. Even as we enjoy a time in which food is cheaper, more diverse and more available than ever before, the spectre of extinction threatens to radically challenge how we eat. In fact, it is already happening.

I am not the first writer to ponder the question of culinary loss. Imagine Rome, where scholar and civil servant Pliny the Elder wrote his “Naturalis Historia,” much of it in the bath, between 77 and 79 CE. He dictated notes to one servant while another read him passages from his extensive library.

As imperial administrator for the Emperor Vespasian, Pliny’s days were full. He wrote late into the night and had himself carried from place to place so that he could jot down a few words while commuting, sparing a few moments to berate his nephew Pliny the Younger for not making enough of his time. As Pliny the Elder worked to catalogue the trees and plants of the empire, he gave special attention to silphium, one of the most valued herbs of the ancient world.

But Pliny, whose gift of description resonates throughout his writing, was reduced to cribbing his description of silphium from the “Historia Plantarum,” written by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, who had lived four centuries earlier. For Pliny the Elder, despite his wealth and power, likely never tasted silphium, a plant described as so useful that it was considered to be a gift from Apollo himself.

At this point, we need to ask ourselves a question. How did one of the most important trading goods in the Roman world, one of the most valued of foods and medicines, simply disappear? Pliny the Elder asked this question as he bathed and wrote by lamplight. He was the first scholar we know of to question the disappearance of a culinary species. How could something that tasted so good simply be gone?

Extinction is a part of the natural world. For each million species on earth, about one species goes extinct per year. As there are about 10,000 known edible species on earth, in a balanced ecosystem, we would expect one culinary species to go extinct each century. However, they experience a special stressor: predation by humans. Historically, culinary species have suffered an extinction rate roughly five times as high as the background rate.

Each of these lost species can teach us an important lesson about today’s global food system. And each also shines light on an ecological vulnerability threatening our planet’s plant and animal life. Our ecosystems are not in balance, and the loss of food species is almost certain to grow.

Cuisine is a language. Languages have two central properties, and the language of food is no different. Primarily, a language allows us to communicate, permitting us to pass on what we have learned to future generations and to other groups of humans, no matter how remote.

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Through language, we can trade important messages about food. Where to find it, how to prepare it and where in the forest we might want to be on guard for hungry leopards while we forage. However, each language is also a unique way of looking at the world, a point of view influenced by place and time. Each language contains concepts that do not translate easily, and if a language is lost, those ways of seeing the world are lost, too.

The French idea of terroir is a good example of this. The term translates very roughly as “the taste of the landscape” and suggests the character of a food is intrinsically local. Terroir is shaped by climate, soil, growing techniques and processing traditions, creating foods linked to a specific land and people. Cuisines have terroir, bringing together ecology and culture to tell a story of what it is to be human.

In Canada, for example, we occasionally cook with snow, using the sap of the sugar maples found only in eastern North America. Oaxaca, Mexico, is famous for its seven moles, Singapore for its chicken rice. The Scottish have their magical whiskeys imbued with brooding peatlands, smelling of wind, long train rides, cozy pubs and winter nights spent reading gothic novels. Some foods are so local that they tell the story of a single valley, river or mountain range.

There are thousands of lost pears, and most of them are not remembered or missed.

However, the Ansault is a cultivar (the term for a culinary variety) that presents us with a puzzle. Raised in an impyard in the nurseries of M. André Leroy in Angers, France, the Ansault was a marvel. When the misshapen tree fruited for the first time in 1863, the flesh of its fruit was perfect. Knowing a winner when he saw it, André propagated the tree in 1865, and the American Pomological Society listed the variety in 1877, once it was proven the trees could be propagated. The name was shortened in 1883.

In “The Pears of New York,” written in 1917, U.P. Hendrick wrote, “the flesh is notable, and is described by the word buttery, so common in pear parlance, rather better than any other pear. The rich sweet flavor, and distinct but delicate perfume contribute to make the fruits of highest quality.”

The pear itself wasn’t perfect. It was medium to large and oblate, yellow in colour when ripe and covered with russet. The flesh, however, was magical. It was white, juicy, tender and aromatic, and its arrival was met with excitement when it ripened in early autumn. At the University of Tennessee’s Agricultural Experimental Station in 1890, they praised the fine juicy flesh and noted the tree was irregular but extremely vigorous.

Upon first encountering the pear, Henry Williams of the American Pomological Association remarked that it was “one of the most delicious pears from abroad in many years.” One would expect such a wonder to be popular today, found in gardens and orchards, prized by chefs and widely available in stores. Alas, it is not. The Ansault vanished.

What happened to the Ansault? It is listed as extinct or missing in pear catalogs, when it is listed at all. We have several excellent paintings of the pear and a collection of rave reviews. That’s it.

The Ansault did have a flaw — Hendrick noted the trees, so irregular and misshapen, were not suitable for orchard use. But in an earlier era, farmers would have worked on the trees, preserving the buttery flesh and excellent taste while breeding in hardier stock. This did not happen. By the late nineteenth century, the world was shifting to commercial orchards, particularly in California, where pears were grown in the central valley in a new way.

Railways brought nursery stock in bulk, and Bartlett, Bosc and Anjou pears blanketed the newly irrigated landscape. Great canneries captured the excess harvest, changing the way that America ate fruit. An icon of this era is Del Monte’s fruit cocktail of pears, peaches and cherries, introduced in 1938. The sweet preparation stripped some of the glamour from fruit but could be released from its can at a moment’s notice, whatever the season.

People stopped planting the Ansault, and nurseries stopped propagating it. Remnant trees died in forgotten orchards or were cut down as cities expanded into farm country. Pear trees are not as long-lived as their cousin the apple, so it is unlikely at this point that an Ansault tree will ever be discovered in some forgotten orchard corner. This is a shame. I’d like to spread an Ansault pear onto toast with a knife and see what all the fuss was all about.

Lenore Newman is the Canada Research Chair in Food Security and Environment at the University of Fraser Valley. Excerpted from “Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food” by Lenore Newman. ©Lenore Newman. Published by ECW Press Ltd. www.ecwpress.com

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