Lost Feast

Lost Feast is an engaging exploration of our destructive relationships with our favourite foods. Looking back to the Romans and beyond, Newman tries to understand why, as a species, we seem so dedicated to driving what we love to extinction - and how, perhaps, we might be able to stem this trend before we literally have nothing left to eat. Newman looks at historically popular foods from mammoths to passenger pigeons, silphium to pears, and also clearly demonstrates how the imminent loss of pollinators such as bees will be catastrophic for human diets. Monoculture farming has resulted in widespread availability of cheap calories, but with such restricted choice that if our increasingly poisoned environment could no longer support, say, wheat or maize corn or soy, people en masse could well be one of the next species on the endangered list. It sounds like science fiction, but simply looking back over the past few decades, let alone centuries, shows a trend which should have a lot more of us very worried.

I am lucky to have been in France whilst reading Lost Feast so able to indulge in a spot of terroir cuisine that would have been considerably more difficult in the UK. We foraged enough hazelnuts and walnuts from nearby wild trees for a good nut roast, and a neighbour gifted us home-grown pears for poaching in spiced red wine. The French are still keen on preserving local food varieties and on the whole will pay enough to ensure growers and farmers receive a living wage. As a result I notice a much wider choice of produce available even in national supermarket chains. By contrast UK supermarkets might have thirty similar-yet-different processed pasta sauces, but only three varieties of apples, mostly flown from the other side of the world and tasteless.

I appreciated Newman's focus on not only our ever decreasing choices, but also the poor quality of mass-grown fruit and vegetables and factory-farmed meat compared to their properly nurtured counterparts. We have so quickly become accustomed to subsidised, bland food that I see people horrified at the true price of real ingredients. I remember just thirty years ago a roast chicken was an expensive treat to be savoured maybe once a month. Now I could afford to eat mass-produced chicken for every dinner if I wanted to, but I would say it's over a decade since 'savour' was the appropriate verb!

Lost Feast isn't just a disaster story though. Newman looks to the future of food by trying out laboratory-grown meat and plant-based meat alternatives, and by visiting people who are returning to traditional ways of food production. She shows how each of us really can make a difference through our purchasing choices - and it's not through trying eat a whole turducken! Lost Feast was a fascinating book for me to read. As someone who is already concerned about where my food comes from, I already had an awareness of the current issues, but not how they fit into the historical record. I loved the idea of the Extinction Dinners as a means to demonstrate Newman's research and ideas. Lost Feast is a timely book, especially for foodies such as myself.