Eating to Extinction is a celebration in the form of eclectic case studies ... Most of all, Saladino wishes to showcase the treasures we risk losing ... Saladino proves that one path to a reader’s sustained attention is through her stomach. Dwelling on local and individual stories is also a way to counterbalance the ghoulish pessimism that can overtake a person when she confronts more than 350 pages’ worth of evidence about our unfolding ecological crisis. The book is explicitly and passionately pedagogical, but it opts for the carrot over the stick. Look at all these earthly marvels! Saladino cries ... What Saladino finds in his adventures are people with soul-deep relationships to their food. This is not the decadence or the preciousness we might associate with a word like 'foodie,' but a form of reverence. And yet his book is also a form of dark tourism, with doom hovering over each edible miracle. That Saladino is able to simultaneously channel the euphoria of sipping pear cider that smells of 'damp autumnal forest' or tasting an inky qizha cake in the West Bank while underscoring the precariousness of these foods makes for a book that is both disturbing and enchanting.

At a time when many of us are staying closer to home, it is exhilarating to join the author on a pilgrimage to some of the last strongholds of traditional food culture. The book is an immensely readable compendium of food history, cultural lore, agricultural science, and travelogue. There are new flavors to imagine and places to visit on every page ... Saladino is not suggesting that we should go back to the diets of the past. But he does say we can learn from our forebears that food is more than just a commodity. It is ultimately a connection to the earth. Eating to Extinction is a plea to become more mindful of this inestimable gift.

Saladino’s method is digressive, and all the better for it ... The effect, as in so many chapters, is to ground the local instance in a rich and wide-ranging context ... Eating to Extinction operates on parallel time scales, as a polemic on the urgent need for action on agricultural diversity, and as a deeply researched, if accessible, history of food and drink production ... [Saladino's] prose: brisk, unornamented, yet rich in the sort of visual and anthropomorphic metaphor that helps to shed light on sometimes complex botanical and phytomorphological material ... The larger argument: vivid, but with the reportorial discipline of the radio journalist. Its satisfactions come from Saladino’s ear for a human story and the breadth of the landscapes, and ecosystems, it covers ... The effect of this is to give the reader more than just the vicarious pleasure of travelogue. Compared to the dry, statistic-heavy utilitarianism of many books on the modern global food system, Saladino’s study is immersive, evocative on a planetary scale, and appropriately so if we are to consider how best to protect the planet’s resources.

Saladino has an 18-year-old backpacker’s willingness to light out for remote destinations far from the usual food-writer feeding troughs ... Eating keeps us alive, of course, but one theme of Saladino’s deeply humanist book is how many of the things we consume can’t survive without us ... Saladino’s eye for detail is photographic when he is describing places and things; it is less so when it comes to his human subjects. He introduces us to dozens of people — behind every idiosyncratic food product lies an even more idiosyncratic producer — but they rarely spring to life in the sorts of small, vivid character sketches Susan Orlean or John McPhee might have given us ... He leaves no doubt, though, that the diversity he set out to record very much includes distinctive people like Sally Barnes, who runs the last smokehouse in Ireland that preserves only wild Atlantic salmon.

... impressively researched ... whether you hunger to try the delicacies Saladino describes or not, he makes one thing abundantly clear: These ancient culinary traditions kept people alive during hard times, and they’ve become an integral part of a region’s history and culture ... Saladino brings his subjects to life, even breaking bread with them as he seeks out these rare and important foods. His evocative descriptions make a culinary case for preserving them.

The book’s overarching theme is the rapid decline in the diversity of human foods over the past century ... In an ever-changing world, diversity is an insurance policy. The pressures of climate change and rapidly spreading diseases make that insurance all the more important ... Mr Saladino offers many wonderful vignettes of indigenous food cultures. The most enchanting involves the symbiosis between the Hadza (pictured) and a feathered collaborator, which evolved over thousands of years.

However utterly despairing these tales read, Saladino profiles those who are finding ways to regenerate these foods against implacable odds ... A deeply saddening, too-familiar story containing yet a kernel of hope.

Saladino traverses the globe to find out what scientists, conservationists and food experts are doing to dial back the increasing sameness in our diets. His journalistic skills are key as he interviews a wide range of people, from food corporation executives and government officials to botanists and farmers ... Fascinating and extremely well written, Eating to Extinction combines comprehensive history with science, culture and geography. At 464 pages, it’s a lengthy tome that undoubtedly could have been much longer, as it just scratches the surface regarding the number of foodstuffs affected by diminishing biodiversity. Saladino raises a serious issue that needs to be addressed with global urgency and cooperation.

Through a narrative that weaves science and history with stories spanning every corner of the globe, Saladino makes an urgent call to protect the world’s rare foods ... Saladino covers so much ground that it is hard to touch on even a fraction of the foods he explores ... Packed full of knowledge about a host of ingredients that you probably didn’t even know existed, Eating to Extinction captures the urgency (and cost) of heading towards a future that is less nutritionally diverse.

An illuminating survey ... The result is an agricultural investigation that’s fascinating in its discoveries while sorrowful in documenting what has been lost.

Fascinating descriptions of Indigenous and mostly disappearing foods, plus an alarming message ... Saladino chronicles his travels around the world, describing dozens of vanishing edibles and pausing regularly to deliver the history of the major foods and food production. Readers will be intrigued and educated by his interviews with experts who warn of our disastrous dependence on a shrinking number of standardized foods ... A delightful exploration of traditional foods as well as a grim warning that we are farming on borrowed time.