"A Food Historian’s Hunt For Ingredients Vanishing From US Plates"

"In her new book, Endangered Eating, Sarah Lohman chronicles disappearing foods – and why they need protecting".

"The American buff goose. Amish deer tongue lettuce. The Nancy Hall sweet potato. The mulefoot hog. When food historian Sarah Lohman stumbled on these fantastical-sounding ingredients in a database of vanishing foods called the Ark of Taste, she set off on a journey across the United States to discover more ingredients and traditions that had been abandoned in the annals of history.

The endeavor was the latest installment of a storied career that has included cooking 19th-century recipes at a living history museum and chronicling American cuisine in her book Eight Flavors, which documents how foods like black pepper and sriracha have helped reshape what Americans eat.

Her journey across the United States resulted in her latest book, Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods, which came out in October. To report the book, she clambered up ladders in Coachella valley to examine rare dates dangling from palm trees. She butchered and prepared a Navajo-churro sheep with local people living on Indigenous land in the south-west. She flew to South Carolina to visit a farm where a food historian was growing a type of peanut previously thought to be extinct."

Emily Cataneo reports for the Guardian November 5, 2023.

Source: Guardian, 11/07/2023