Of Ghost Foods and Culinary Extinction

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It was a wondrous story.

They tell the story of this black rain that fell in northern Libya and then all of a sudden silphium sprouted.

It's hard to really imagine what that could be.

Maybe the

silphium seeds were lying dormant in the desert and there was an unusually intense storm that caused a flush of the herb to appear, but it is this wondrous myth that it just all of a sudden was there and then it was gone.

So, okay, the story of the creation of the herb called silphium is a little fantastical, but silphium itself was apparently wondrous and then it disappeared.

And, well, maybe that's why I'd never even heard of it.

Yeah, I hadn't either.

But for the ancient Greeks and Romans, silphium was their number one most favorite herb.

Forget parsley or basil or mint, they were all about the silphium.

Until they ate it all, silphium went extinct, and it was all the ancients' fault.

That idea that we can eat so much of our favorite foods that they completely disappear, that's the idea we're exploring this episode.

It's a concept called culinary extinction.

What foods have we lost just by loving them too much?

What tastes did our ancestors enjoy that we can never even try?

What might we be in danger of losing today?

And can we curb our hunger before it's too late?

All that, plus a magical, fragrant pear that you could spread on bread like butter.

Don't get too excited, that one's gone too.

That's right, I'm the voice of doom, aka Nicola Twilli.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber, and this is Gastrobud, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

Our guide on this culinary tour, well, this culinary extinction tour, is Lenore Newman.

She recently wrote a book called Lost Feast, and she started us in the Pleistocene era about two million years ago.

Well, it was the age of mammals that happened after the extinction of the dinosaurs, and early humans chased the megafauna of the great grasslands and plains.

So they ate things like mammoth and bison and giant moose and giant beaver and camels.

Humans at the time were primarily herbivores.

About 80%, maybe even more of our ancestors' diets would have come from plants and roots and berries.

But that ratio wasn't about preference.

We were just opportunists.

We did want to eat all those huge animals that Lenore described, but they were massive and scary.

And so we'd kind of wander nearby and maybe pick off a baby or an animal that was sick, or one might have conveniently died.

We might have picked at its bones for dinner.

One of our most favorite megafauna was the mammoth.

10 tons of protein, fat, and fun.

There were mammoths all over the planet, right from the tropics to the polar regions.

Now, the mammoth we tend to picture are the polar mammoths.

They were fluffy, I guess is the way to put it.

They looked like fluffy elephants, although they were larger and they had very large tusks.

Fluffy elephants sound nice and cute, but they weren't all woolly.

Some were just kind of hairy, and they were all huge.

Most were about 12 feet tall.

That and those immense sharp tusks must have been totally terrifying.

And of course, they weren't really on the menu until we learned how to hunt effectively in groups from a bit of a distance.

So you really couldn't sneak up on one.

But about 50,000 years ago, things changed.

There was a big breakthrough in human tool making, including the development of spears for hunting.

And it was still probably a pretty dangerous endeavor, but if you could bring down a mammoth, it was a massive pile of meat.

This change, these spears and tools, and the ability to hunt animals like the mammoth and get a big stockpile of food, it changed everything.

Though early human species had left Africa before, this was the time Homo sapiens actually successfully migrated and eventually populated the planet.

And almost everywhere we went, there were mammoths.

Mammoths were in fact super adaptable.

They ate everything from trees to moss.

And so there were mammoths on every single continent other than Australia and Antarctica, which was handy for hungry humans.

Mammoth became a real favorite.

And everywhere we went, the mammoth population started to fall.

They vanished first in Africa, and then mammoths vanished in Europe and China, and then finally they disappeared from North America and up in the Arctic.

But why?

Why did they all all disappear?

Well, we ate them.

That is the long and short of it.

And they were just a really convenient meal.

And so if we chart human expansion, megafauna died off as we moved because they were the first easy food.

Well, but just because we were eating lots of mammoth, that doesn't necessarily mean we ate them all, right?

Surely there were other things going on that actually pushed them over the edge.

For a long time we thought shifting climate probably pushed them to extinction, but the real truth is there's a lot of smoking guns in that we have a lot of mammoth kill sites where there's a lot of mammoth bones, a lot of them with cut marks.

We can sort of see the way the extinction happened.

Scientists have studied this and they found that when humans moved into an area where a mammoth herd lived, the lady mammoths became sexually mature earlier.

This is the same thing that happens in groups of animals today when they get stressed out by major predators.

Another smoking gun, large marine mammals, and even little land mammals, they weren't disappearing at the same rate as the mammoths.

And so, if you see this one population, it's fine.

And then, right next door on land, the big animals are disappearing really rapidly.

So, that's a really good indicator.

Here's another clue that humans ate all the massive animals around.

About seven or eight hundred years ago, the very first humans arrived on what's now New Zealand, and they immediately started feasting on a 12-foot-tall, 500-pound flightless bird called the Moa.

We do know that we ate all of those.

In particular, Maori colonists, when they arrived, quickly killed off the Moa because they were a very popular barbecue food.

We ate the Moa into extinction pretty recently, so that's documented.

But archaeologists have found out that the same pattern happened everywhere.

Pretty soon after we showed up, the local megafauna bit the dust.

Every continent had its own, and North America in particular, we lost a lot.

We lost North American lions and cheetahs, North American camels.

Of the six bison species, only two survived and it was really a near thing for them.

We lost a lot of the musk ox, the North American mammoth, mastodon, elephants.

Basically, it's like a Noah's Ark that just vanished.

And here's the final piece of the puzzle, the nail in the coffin that makes it clear that we were guilty of this culinary extinction.

Once we ate all those massive animals like the mammoth and killed them all off, we had to find something else to eat.

So we invented farming.

The development of farming itself is another good indicator that this was important in that

We were so reliant on those big animals that once we killed them off, we had to find another way to get enough calories.

There were too many of us to hunt and gather roots, berries, and small animals.

So as those animals disappear, you see that Neolithic revolution occur, that shift to farming and developing permanent settlement.

So, really, the story of the mammoth, the ending, is really a story of beginning for our current food system.

Can you imagine all of a sudden no more delicious mammoth for dinner ever again?

Instead, you have to sow crops and weed the fields and harvest and process grain or herd these stupid smaller mammals about and look after them?

Such a bummer.

Of course, we have no idea what ancient humans thought about the switch to farming because they didn't leave a written record.

But is it possible they had any idea that they killed off all the mammoths, that it was their fault?

Almost certainly not.

We have pretty good evidence right into Roman times that people really didn't understand extinction.

It isn't until we get to the Romans that they start to understand humans can actually impact the earth.

This sounds weird, but think about it.

Why would you understand extinction?

The world was vast and unexplored.

There were lots of things in it.

Imagining that some of them could disappear forever is pretty dark.

For a long time, it was almost unfathomable.

But the Romans started poking around their fields and they came across some huge bones, like mammoth bones, and this gave the Romans some ideas.

And they were really kind of of the opinion that these bones were from gods and monsters from a previous heroic age.

So thousands of years ago, various ingenious Romans found these huge bones from millions of years ago, and they put them together into mishmash skeletons that look like the griffins and centaurs and titans of Roman myth.

The popular understanding was not that these creatures had once lived here in our world and then gone extinct due to, say, shifting environmental pressures.

Instead, for the most part, these bones were treasured as relics from a mythic past, a previous world order that existed before our human era, but had come to some kind of epic, cataclysmic end at some unspecified time.

But there was a dissenting opinion in that the Romans had noticed that some of the animals they were used to were disappearing from their ranges, such as the lions of Greece and the aurochs of Italy.

And so some Roman philosophers started to wonder if maybe this was humans' fault, that we were the ones who'd been thinning out the lions of Greece and those huge wild cow ancestors in Italy.

a few Romans came very close to figuring out both extinction and evolution.

But not before they'd actually eaten their most favorite herb into extinction, the wondrous silphium.

Silphium is in some ways the thing that I'm obsessed with.

I would love to try silphium.

Silphium is a herb.

It grew in the northern part of Africa in what is now Libya.

Silphium was enjoyed for maybe thousands of years and by cultures all around the Mediterranean.

The Egyptians and the Minoans had a special symbol for it.

The Greeks were obsessed with it.

And then came the Romans.

And, I mean, we know it must have tasted good to the Romans, because they put it in everything.

Silphium apparently had a stalk-like fennel, and leaves that look like parsley, and heart-shaped seeds.

It supposedly tasted a little bit like leeks once it was cooked.

And this plant was critical to the economy of the northern African colonies.

It grew wild all around what's now Libya.

At the time it was a Greek and then later Roman colony called Cyrene, and it was so critical to their economy that their coins were all embossed with an image of the silphium plant.

And we have one cookbook remaining from Roman times that's often referred to as a peace.

And most of the recipes contain silphium.

Apisias used silphium in everything.

He used it in recipes for chicken, lamb, fish, eggs, and lentils.

He recommended using it in salads and he liked to sprinkle it on melons.

He even added the juice of silphium roots to gravy.

So Romans clearly loved silphium.

And then it started to become more and more difficult to get a hold of.

It was always valuable, but suddenly it was also really rare.

The Roman emperors started to use it as a form of currency.

They started to bank it along with gold and jewels in the royal vaults.

And so you have these kind of silphium hoards start to appear.

Even Episius, who used silphium liberally, was aware that many Romans could no longer afford as much of it as they wanted.

In his cookbook, he suggested that silphium lovers could soak pine nuts in the juice of silphium roots, and then those nuts would take up the flavor, and you could use them crushed over dishes to get a hint of your favorite unaffordable herb.

It was growing everywhere around Cyrene when the Greeks ate it a few hundred years BCE, but by the time Apesius wrote about silphium at the turn of the millennium, it was already on its way out.

Which indicates it must have been very important and it must have been highly desired because it literally was a period of a few centuries that it was sort of burst onto the culinary scene in Rome, was overexploited and then was gone.

By the time the natural historian Pliny the Elder came along, he was born in 23 AD, silphium was basically gone.

And he never got to taste it himself.

And there was a rumor the last stock was given to the Emperor Nero.

But is it really gone?

I mean, Lenore wants to taste silphium, clearly, and obviously, Nikki, you and I both do too.

Could there still be any growing somewhere?

It's vaguely possible, though unlikely.

It had a very tight range.

People really spent a lot of time looking, so it's unlikely we would find it growing because the climate has gotten much harsher in that region.

Now, the tantalizing thing is, in northern Libya, there might be remaining samples of the plant in tombs of rich and powerful people, especially in the ruined Roman cities of the area.

But of course, because that area is so unstable,

we really haven't been able to do any proper archaeological digs in decades.

But how would we even know if we found it?

The seeds were very distinctive.

They were heart-shaped.

And so we would recognize it if we found it.

Of course, the problem is that,

you know, tomb raiders don't tend to look for plant matter.

They tend to be in there looking for gold and diamonds and such.

Okay, Cynthia, you, me, and Lenore in Libya, it's like Indiana Jones and the lost herbs.

That's my type of Indiana Jones.

Stay tuned, listeners.

Meanwhile, here's my other pressing question.

If the Romans loved this herb so, so much, why on earth did they let it go extinct?

They didn't want it to, that's for sure.

It was the base of the economy of the region.

But it was hard to manage, it was hard to cultivate, which meant you had a bit of the tragedy of the commons kind of problem,

where there was such an incentive to pick the plants and sell them that it didn't matter that it was rare.

And I think most people probably thought, oh, there's probably a few still down here and a few over there.

And let's just thin out a few here because we need a new horse or a new cart or whatever they needed.

It's that old thing where you just keep raiding the larder until the larder is bare.

Plus, the the city Cyrene was expanding and farming was expanding into the areas where silphium grew wild, and so its habitat was being destroyed.

It needed a particular microclimate to grow in.

And remember that weird origin story?

How one day there was a black rain in Cyrene and silphium just appeared after that?

That story made even people who kind of realized there was no silphium left, people like Pliny, it made them believe that maybe it wasn't necessarily gone forever.

I think he was sort of secretly hoping it would reappear somewhere, that as Rome expanded, it might expand into an area with a big field of silfium.

And also, he also did believe it could spontaneously regenerate, that there might be another black reign.

Once again, people at the time just didn't believe that something could be entirely gone.

And that was a common response because, of course, it was a big world, and certainly there was a lot of disbelief.

around things being gone gone, as it were.

And even with the mammoth, the Lewis and Clark expedition in America, one of the things they were on the lookout for was for living mammoth and mastodon.

They fully expected to find them somewhere out in the west.

Sorry, dudes, no mammoth, no silphium.

Although, mammoths, or the lack of mammoths, is actually what helped people finally get to grips with the entire concept of extinction.

But that took another nearly 2,000 years, and that very long holdup was partly because of the rise of Christianity and the belief that the Christian creation story was literal.

Christian thought really closed the door to

that model of extinction and a lot of people refused to believe extinction could possibly exist, including very educated people, because it went against, like, they couldn't imagine why

the sort of God they believed in that was actively working on earth would allow a species that had been created to disappear.

And if they all died, why wouldn't they just pop back into existence?

And this was a really strong line of thought until we get to the French Revolution, which really opened the door to radical thought.

Including the idea developed by one man, Georges Guvier, of an entirely lost world filled with lost animals.

Including the ones we used to eat for dinner.

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We're up to the 1700s now in France, and we're about to meet the father of extinction, which is truly an amazing thing to be father of.

Georges Cuvier.

He's born in a fairly rural part of Europe,

but he strives, and

he wants to amass power.

And yet, he's still deeply scientifically curious, and he ends up working as a tutor.

As it turns out, the kid he was hired to tutor didn't demand a lot of his time, so Cuvier spent far more time perusing a special collection that the family had.

They collected fossils, and he was totally fascinated.

Then he moved to Paris.

He makes a little brief foray into revolutionary politics and spends a while, you know, arrested and pondering his fate and decides that maybe politics isn't for him and pivots.

into science and kind of protects himself from this incredibly terrible political time where you have the kings of France and then you have the revolution, and then you have the terror, and then you have the Reformation, and Napoleon.

And, and, and these were turbulent times.

And while Cuvier escaped the guillotine, he did go through some rough stuff of his own.

Cuvier married a widow.

She already had four kids.

Then they had four more together, and then they all died.

At this point, he was working at the National Museum of Natural History.

He throws himself into his work and becomes obsessed with the idea that every now and then large groups of animals go extinct.

Cuvier decided to gather the remains of all the world's extinct species.

He wanted to build like a macabre Noah's Ark, a menagerie of all the animals we've lost.

It starts very small in that he ends up curating this collection in France that contains bones from the New World.

And the sort of going theory is that they're a type of North American elephant no one's just seen yet.

His first finding is that no, these bones are not just from elephants, and in fact they come from three different species.

There were some elephants in there, but then there were also mammoths and mastodons.

He gets to the point where he realizes

there's no way that the mammoth and mastodon are still alive because he's digging them up all over and not finding any living animals.

He had amazing access to all sorts of bones from around the world because he was such a favorite of Napoleon's and Napoleon had a pretty vast network or actually an empire.

So Cuvier took advantage of Napoleon's empire to do all this research and then he gave a lecture at the Institute of Science and Arts in Paris on April 4th, 1796.

He said the mammoth and the mastodon had gone extinct.

And it's a bit of a leap and to be honest, it was kind of contentious.

Most of the big scientific figures of the time thought that the very idea of extinction was heresy.

Thomas Jefferson found the idea offensive.

He wrote that such is the economy of nature that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct or her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.

But Cuvier wasn't convinced by Jefferson's argument.

He has this feeling that he's right and he takes that forward

and he starts to ask, he says, send me any specimens that don't match living animals.

And he starts to collect these things, including the pterodactyl.

In fact, Cuvier named the pterodactyl, it means wing-fingered beast, which is quite an evocative name.

If you look at a pterodactyl, you're not going to confuse it with anything that's alive.

And he starts to get dinosaur bones and

giant cats.

And he builds what he calls the lost world.

And it's this collection of fantastic animals.

But he establishes, really without a doubt, there are so many.

He ends up with 50 or 60 60 extinct species There's no way they're all hiding in Oregon and and Washington state and he finally is the one who says look these animals are extinct.

They're gone like we said this idea is really controversial It was hard even for Cuvier to deal with he is a man of faith at some level and he starts to piece it together.

Well, you know, maybe they all died in a cataclysm and

he's convinced they die all together and that is where he gets it a little wrong and eventually is sort of undercut.

A cataclysmic extinction kind of matches with a biblical worldview, like the story of the flood that Noah made an ark to survive.

And so Cuvier also starts to think: well, maybe these animals are not all entirely gone forever.

Maybe there's some way the mammoths and the pterodactyls could basically pop back into existence.

It's one of the few times where he kind of abandons his scientific rigor and is just like, well, hey, maybe, you know, God can just say, let there be mammoth, and mammoth will appear, you know, along the banks of the Seine, and they'll be back.

And maybe that covers off the fact that this is really challenging the religious view of the world.

And he gets into this fight where he believes the only way extinction happens is all at once, because he's trying to preserve the biblical view of the world to some degree.

Cuvier can't see how evolution and extinction go together.

He doesn't believe in evolution.

That's a bridge too far from his faith.

And then you have Darwin come along and what we call the gradualists, saying, well, no, animals evolve and they change and sometimes they go extinct, but it happens occasionally.

And so he loses that fight at the time, even though he was half right and Darwin was half right.

Darwin didn't believe in cataclysmic extinction, which of course we know now can happen.

Think of how the dinosaurs were wiped out.

Darwin thought everything was gradual, both evolution and extinction.

And Cuvier only believed in that cataclysm.

But today, Darwin is the name we all know, and Cuvier is like, who?

And if he'd only thought about evolution, he could have captured the whole prize and understood the whole puzzle.

But he leaves that for our young friend Darwin to realize.

And Darwin folds both of them together as, you know, extinction being the dark mirror.

of evolution.

Okay, so it's now the 1800s and we understand the idea of extinction.

But the way Cuvier understood it, it was something that happened a really long time ago.

It's not something modern humans were involved in.

Darwin believed that extinction was a natural process, just like evolution, and his theory was that it didn't happen quickly.

And then came the passenger pigeon.

Yes, the extinction that started it all.

I mean, this project started because of a bird.

And that bird was Martha, the final passenger pigeon.

And I sometimes start with the passenger pigeon at the end, which is September 1st, 1914, in the afternoon.

When Martha dies, for the first time in human history, we watch a species go extinct, and we know exactly when it happened.

Today, we're not used to thinking of pigeons as impressive.

Flying rats is the more usual analogy.

But passenger pigeons were something else altogether.

Passenger pigeons were the most plentiful bird.

in North America.

40% of the birds in North America were passenger pigeon.

There were about 5 billion of them.

And they flew in these flocks of millions.

And they would cover the sky.

And the descriptions we have from people like Audubon of the sky going dark for days, of this rush of wind, like smoke, like an eclipse.

There are no images from this time period of the pigeons, so it is really hard to imagine.

But as Lenore says, when they flew overhead, they'd literally darken the sky in the middle of the day.

There were so many that it sounded like a tornado.

They flew all together and then they stopped and nested together, and their roosts ranged from a few acres to one that was nearly 400 square miles.

It's mind-boggling.

It's bigger than all five boroughs of New York City, nearly as big as all of Los Angeles.

And you know LA is a city that's spread out far.

There were so many passenger pigeons in these roosts that writers from the Times say they saw birds sitting on top of other birds and whole mature trees being crushed by the sheer weight of all the birds.

Unsurprisingly, passenger pigeons were a big part of the Native American diet all over North America.

And they moved in this giant arc around the continent from the far north to the far south and then up the spine of the Rockies in a great circle.

So for the indigenous people of the Americas, the pigeons would just arrive every four or five years.

And they called them pigeon years.

In pigeon years, tribes came together to feast on pigeon and forge political alliances.

And they also laid up plenty of pigeon for the leaner years to come.

But

they didn't really hunt them.

to the point where it dented the population because the pigeons had worked out an evolutionary trick, which is to be present in great numbers.

So individually they were incredibly easy to kill.

But there were so many of them that they could survive fairly heavy predation.

And then the European colonists showed up.

Which is, as usual, when everything goes wrong.

Well, first it wasn't quite so bad, in part because the colonists thought that the local North American foods were inferior to the European varieties, but they did come around.

The passenger pigeons saved a number of early colonies by suddenly appearing when everyone was near starvation.

And they were almost seen as God-given in that way, and that suddenly there'd just be tons of free food.

Now if you're like me, you're thinking, okay, so they're useful, but do they taste good?

Because that's what I care about.

Now they were definitely pretty tasty, especially the young ones, because people did like them, especially if they were gravied heavy or wrapped in lard.

So they're tasty.

They're handy if you're about to starve, because there are so many of them.

And they're really easy to catch.

Well, the descriptions are almost of a carnival in that they would go out and they would throw bed sheets over them.

They'd throw their hat in the air and take down a couple of pigeons.

There were so many because they flew very low.

Netting was the most popular technique for actual professional hunting.

But basically any way you could kill a bird, they killed them.

There's descriptions of people riding quickly through the pigeons and finding out when they stopped that they had like a half dozen pigeons stuck in their coat.

At first, there weren't too, too many colonists in North America, and so supply kept pace with demand.

By the 1860s, passenger pigeon was the most popular bird at the market and the most plentiful, too.

And so, people came up with every recipe possible for them for all meals.

A famous ornithologist at the time wrote that, quote, wagon loads of them are poured into the market.

Pigeons become the order of the day at dinner, breakfast, and supper until the very name becomes sickening.

There are no prizes for guessing what happens to these once super plentiful birds next.

This is an episode about extinct foods after all.

And we have the three technologies that allow the extinction of this species.

The telegraph which allows people to stay exactly where the birds are.

The railway which allows dedicated pigeon hunters to head out on the road and find those pigeons.

And then the railway then lets you take those pigeons back to the market, which is the other piece of technology.

The great markets of the East were efficient distribution nodes to get large quantities of birds into the hands of the public very quickly.

And once those three pieces were working together, the species was basically doomed.

The passenger pigeon didn't die out right away.

First, of course, they became far less common, and so they were no longer cheap.

And as soon as they start to become rare, there starts to be a bit of a market for the pigeon as kind of a prestige dish.

And we get this last sort of great

rise of the passenger pigeon to the height of dining in the hands of Charles Randhofer, the cook for Delmonico's in New York.

We talked about Del Monaco's in our restaurant episode.

It was the first real restaurant in America, and it was super, super fancy.

And Charles Randhoffer is

this chef who can just take ingredients and take them to new places.

And he left us a book, The Epicurean.

And in it, he gives us the great trove of passenger pigeon recipes.

These pigeons wrapped in bacon and pigeons stuffed with truffles and fried with cabbage.

And he even bakes them into pies, which is a very classic preparation.

Although he remarks in his book that though the style of the time was to leave the feet sticking up so you knew it was pigeon pie, he doesn't do that because he doesn't feel that it's classy enough for his customer base.

But there had been so, so many passenger pigeons.

Didn't anyone notice they had started to disappear?

Well, it was fast.

It looked like there were still a lot of passenger pigeons, but what people were doing is they were picking off the young ones, and every time they interrupted a roost, the pigeons would move, and they wouldn't lay an egg.

And they were quite slow to lay eggs and raise young, and they mated for life.

So if you killed one of a pair, the other one would hang around, and it would look like you still had a bird, but there would be no little birds.

And so what started to happen is the flocks started to get old.

And as the birds died of natural causes, you had this species collapse where it just fell off a cliff and it surprised everyone.

The final collapse was so fast it was shocking.

But of course, people had noticed there were fewer birds, and the sky no longer went dark, and it didn't sound like a tornado when they flew overhead.

And people started to worry, and they started to try to fight to protect the pigeon.

The passenger pigeon was the first protected bird species in North America.

And it didn't really work out too well, of course, because it was just a bit too late.

By the 1890s, the very last few birds were sold at Fulton Market in New York, and then they were basically gone.

We could see it happening, and people were in disbelief.

They expected to find more birds or that it would turn around or the protection methods would work.

But

once their great numbers were diminished, wild predators could easily pick off the last few.

Eventually, we have the last bird die.

His name was Buttons.

Buttons was the last wild passenger pigeon.

He was shot in 1900 in Ohio by a young boy, and you can still see Buttons' little taxidermied body at the Ohio Historical Society.

And then you have these three captive colonies, and they make a frantic attempt to rebuild the species, but they just didn't breed in captivity.

And eventually, you have two colonies, then the one at the Cincinnati Zoo, where they bring all the birds together to try desperately desperately to save the species.

And then one day you have George and Martha named after the first couple of the U.S.

and then it's just her.

And then Martha died on September 1st, 1914.

This was the first extinction that we humans actually witnessed and knew what was happening.

It was, of course, a culinary extinction.

We often talk about the dodo as kind of iconic, but we didn't even notice the dodo was gone for several hundred years.

And a lot of people didn't even know it was a real bird.

And it sort of was pieced together after the fact.

The passenger pigeon, there was no denying it was us, and there was no denying when it happened.

And it did change the way we think of extinction.

Eating all the passenger pigeons certainly helped people finally come to grips with the idea of extinction, but it also left us without one of our main dinner options.

Yes, I argue that it opened up the space for the modern chicken industry because it sort of is the keystone species of wild bird that was really still providing a lot of protein.

Once the passenger pigeon is gone, we see this shift from wild birds to domestic birds and we see the rise of the chicken.

And it's this rise of industrial farming that led to another major wave of culinary extinctions.

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To understand the next wave of lost foods, you need to know one word, cultivar.

Species can be divided into subspecies.

And on the plant side, we call those cultivars when they're food crops or cultivated varieties.

If they're an animal, we call them breeds.

But for plants, cultivated varieties, which you see it's portmanteau, it comes together into cultivars.

So, like all the different apple varieties at the farmer's market, like pink lady and Macintosh and gala and honey crisp, those are cultivars.

And broccoli and cauliflower, those are actually also cultivars of the same species, too.

And what happened is until we had mass transportation,

each region would develop what we call land race.

A whole bunch of different cultivars that did well in that region and extended the season.

So you'd have, say, an early radish and then a sort of summer radish and then a fall radish.

So you had as much radish as possible.

In 1903, there were 463 catalogued varieties of radish in the United States, which is a lot of different radishes.

Nowadays, you'd be hard-pushed to find more than three types of radish, even at a high-end supermarket or farmer's market.

A lot changed when farming went industrial.

We could grow a lot of radishes in one place and then store them and ship them around the country, so you didn't have to worry about early ones and late ones, and you needed to grow the one radish that grew the best where you were growing it.

Why bother with diversity?

Technically, this was a good idea for us at the time, but the problem is a lot of those cultivars then went extinct because no one needed them.

And we lost in North America 80 to 90% of our fruit and vegetable genetic material that we had carefully crafted over centuries.

Europe did a little better than we did, but not much.

Even so, it's all a huge loss.

To me, and as someone who works with plants closely and does food, it's like we had a library and we burnt it and we only kept a few books.

It's like we kept one mystery novel and burnt the rest And one science fiction novel and burnt the rest, because we just didn't think we needed them.

And you might be thinking, okay, but one radish is much the same as another radish, and there are still a lot of tasty apples out there.

But let's consider the pear.

Pears don't seem like a big deal today.

Sure, they're tasty, whatever.

But once upon a time, pears were the queens of fruit.

They originally come from an area in what's now Kazakhstan that Lenore says probably inspired the story of the Garden of Eden.

Right at the point where there's a pinch point in the Silk Road where you have to thread your way above the deserts

to not die in the heat and the sand and you pass through these mountains and they're like paradise and on these mountains most of the world's wild fruit grew.

People passing through traders on the Silk Road they would pick up some of the pears growing there and take them home.

Maybe they'd grow some fruit from the seeds.

So pears went two ways.

People returning to China ended up breeding the Chinese pear, which, you know, is kind of round and crisp.

And people went to Europe and fostered the European pear.

In the ancient world, people really enjoyed their pears.

Homer called pears a gift from the gods.

The word paradise comes from the Persian paridisa.

Romans planted pears all over their empire.

But they really had just this moment in France under the Sun King in particular.

They became the Kardashian of fruit in that people had contests to breed pears.

They fought to make the best possible pear.

This is before the French Revolution in the 1700s.

Louis Coutours lived at Versailles and thousands of people's jobs were to make sure he had everything his heart could desire.

And what his heart desired was pears.

Luckily, Louis had a master gardener, a guy named Le Cantagny.

Le Cantagny was even more obsessed with pears than Louis was.

He drained a swamp at Versailles.

he brought in special soil, he built stone walls to create tiny microclimates, and he grew an amazing 500 cultivars of pears.

What they wanted was they didn't like the sandy texture of wild pears.

They wanted them to be smooth, like butter.

And they keep breeding and breeding, and then the revolution comes, and a lot of the stock is lost, but a lot of the English picked it up as a hobby.

And kept going on the quest for the butteriest pear of all.

And then the English brought their obsession with pears to America.

My home of New England, in particular, was a fantastic home for the pear because of our crisp winters.

Boston was the center of a pear fever.

The Boston Brahmins held pear tasting parties.

Thoreau wrote about pears.

When a hot new pear cultivar came to market, people would fight over it.

And then came the pinnacle of pear perfection.

It was actually bred in France, the ensalt.

That everyone raved about and thought was so amazing because you could spread it like butter.

Fruit fanciers said the ensalt was the best pear ever bred.

They said it had a rich, sweet flavor and distinct but delicate perfume and the flesh was so creamy and so white.

The problem was the trees were hard to grow and as the pear became more of a commercial fruit and because we were starting to move food around again by rail and by ship they started to thin out the varieties to just the ones that grew a nice uniform tree, produced uniform fruit, and that traveled well.

And the onsalt didn't fit that.

And yes, the onsalt disappeared entirely.

Somehow this tree that had won all these awards, that had been seen as this amazing variety, went extinct.

There are people out there hunting just to make sure because it seems unusual a pear could get so much good press and then disappear.

Pear trees are not quite as long-lived as apples, so it's actually pretty unlikely that there's an onsalt tree out there just waiting to be rediscovered.

But we do still have pears around, so could we, in theory, have the pear DNA we need to bring it back?

Yeah, you couldn't get them back.

Trees are sexual in the same fruit trees are sexual in the same way humans are.

So while technically you might contain the genes of your great-grandmother, you can't really re-engineer her out of yourself.

And it's the same with a tree.

Because of the way the genetics works, you can't sort of work backwards easily.

There are people who would tell me, well, no, we're working on it, but I don't know.

I half would expect my great-grandmother to reappear before the onsalt pear comes back from

other pear varieties.

So we've lost the onsalt pear, we've lost the passenger pigeon, we've lost silphium, at least until such time as we undertake the great gastropod archaeological expedition to the ancient tombs of Libya.

We've lost mammoths and we've lost many, many more foods, entire species and thousands of cultivars.

But how many of all the extinctions in the world could be considered culinary extinctions?

Lenore says that's hard to figure out because the definition itself is kind of hard to pin down.

It is a bit of a loose definition because such things are messy.

And I would say to me, a culinary extinction is one in which the consumption of the species for food played a major role in the loss of the species.

So though habitat loss did play a role in the passenger pigeon extinction, it was consumption that really put the nails in the coffin.

The dodo, on the other hand, Lenore doesn't classify that as a culinary extinction.

Yeah, humans ate a few dodos, but that wasn't what ultimately doomed them.

But then Lenore says, think about another flightless bird called the Great Auk that once lived on islands throughout the North Atlantic.

We ate all of them, and we literally scraped them into boats and ate them all.

And so it's a spectrum but definitely there's a lot of extinctions where there's a big smoking gun sitting on an empty plate somewhere.

In general there's a background rate of extinction.

Scientists have figured out that there's a normal rate at which species become unfit for their environment and disappear.

Lenore estimates that culinary species disappear at five times that background rate, which is noticeably faster.

The thing that bothers me about about that is you'd think that culinary species would go extinct at a rate slower than background because we care about them.

And so it's a bit of a mystery to me how we actually managed to lose the things we really want.

But maybe we didn't have a choice.

I mean, finding food was hard.

Did we have to eat these things because of hunger?

Let's say greed instead.

I mean, some of it is legitimately hunger, for sure, but there also is greed.

And there also is

a lack of understanding about how to manage the wild world and how to be stewards, how to

make sure that this doesn't keep happening because eventually we will eat ourselves into a real problem in which a number of our main food species will collapse.

It's a weird thing.

In general, people caring about food is good.

It's often those people who really, really care about flavor and heritage and tradition who keep species and heirloom veggies and rare breeds of animals alive.

But sometimes we love things too much.

The story of silphium kept reminding me of ramps.

These are wild onion-like greens that are super trendy and super popular right now.

They grow across the eastern region of North America and foragers are coming close to loving ramps to death.

I think at some point we have to ask ourselves if wild harvesting makes sense anymore.

They're so valuable that there's such an incentive to wreck the habitat.

And wild ramps are a great example because you get people that come in and take all of them, and then the colony's gone.

And it doesn't take much of that before the species collapses.

And that's kind of what we keep doing.

I mean, we're doing that right now with fisheries, where, you know, can it really hurt to just have one more?

Well, yeah, it does.

Right now, we're in a full-on extinction crisis, not just a culinary extinction crisis.

Humans keep expanding our footprint, our cities, and our farms into the landscapes other species need to survive.

And we're changing the climate way faster than most species can adapt.

Lenore pointed out how we're harming the fisheries.

You've probably heard that we've been eating way too much bluefin tuna, and that's at risk of extinction.

Chilean sea bass is another one that we've been eating too much of for the species to survive.

And then there's the issue of pollinators.

Our bees are disappearing, and so are a lot of wild pollinators, and we rely on pollinators for a full third of all the foods we eat.

apples and nuts and blueberries and avocados.

Lenore wrote an entire book about the foods we've already already lost to wake us up to the foods we are on the verge of losing because she's really worried and she thinks we should be too.

I light a little candle for chocolate and vanilla every day because

I really and also coffee.

Those three, chocolate, coffee, and vanilla, I worry about a lot.

And they're all plants that are vulnerable to loss of genetic diversity and they're prone to disease.

I don't want to imagine life without those things, much as I'm sure there's some Romans who let out a long sigh as they reclined for dinner because the silfium was gone.

I don't know if I can face the morning without coffee, and then I don't know if I want to be around without my little dessert.

So I really hope we work hard on those three species for sure.

People are, of course, working to save our food.

People are working to save cacao and vanilla and bees and tuna and all sorts of tastes all around the world that are traditional in those particular regions.

And I do feel everyone has a role, you know, right from government down to farmers and chefs and then down to the public, who at the end are the ultimate arbitrators of this in that they wake up every day and decide what to eat.

I care about all these missing tastes because I love food in all its variety.

But I can see some people making the argument that, you know, does it really matter that you and I can never taste silphium or passenger pigeons or the best pear ever bred?

Well, yeah, I think it does.

I mean, I agree.

But the soylent drinkers of the world might say, who cares?

There's millions of other species to eat and ways to get the nutrition we need.

Why do these culinary extinctions matter?

I think it matters practically

because

we do need to feed our species and that takes a lot of effort.

It takes most of our effort just to stay fed.

And we need that genetic diversity.

We need the options.

And that's what we're throwing away when we lose a species is options.

But I will go a little deeper and go back to Darwin, who really loved species for species' sakes.

He saw them as a reflection of creation as beautiful.

And I think they're beautiful too.

And I come back to Martha a lot because, you know, there's even, there's a word for what Martha was.

We call the last member of a species an endling, which is a terrible word.

and it's terrible that we have a word for that.

But the trick is to never get to the stage of Martha.

You never want to be looking at the last of something and be going, oops.

I think in turning around how we think about this, there is also a bit of redemption for us, a way to realize we can change and grow and be better.

Thanks this episode to Lenore Newman.

We have a link to her new book, Lost Feast, Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food, on our website.

Check it out.

There's much, much more in there than we could cover in our episode.

We'll be back in two weeks with a fresh new episode of Gastropod for your Aural Delight.

Those of you who pay very, very close attention may remember that at the end of our tiki episode, we promised that our next episode, this one, would be about the history and science of menus.

We lied.

But our next episode really will be, and it's a good one.

Stay tuned.

This month on Explain It to Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well: collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes, and fitness trackers.

But what does it actually mean to be well?

Why do we want that so badly?

And is all this money really making us healthier and happier?

That's this month on Explain It To Me, presented by Pureleaf.

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