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Here is an edited excerpt from “Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love” (HarperOne, 2015). The following is about food, but it’s really about love. It’s about that moment when you find yourself savoring something so wholly and intently ,you never want to let it go. I thought this love, at least in the culinary sense, could be found only in superlative places: a secret supper club in London, a hidden bistro in Paris or a roadside dhaba in Mumbai. But I know now that the greatest love is found in humble places: in my morning coffee, in a morsel of bread or in a bite of chocolate. And that to pay closer attention to these ordinary pleasures isn’t just to see them anew but to experience them in a whole new way. I had forgotten how to do this. I had forgotten how to be present to what was right in front of me, knowing only how to love what shouted for my attention. Until I realized I could lose them. Embedded in every conversation about feeding people, conserving natural resources and ensuring a healthy diet, both now and in the future, is the threat of the loss of agricultural biodiversity: the reduction of the diversity in everything that makes food and agriculture possible, a shift that is the direct result of our relationship with the world around us. I know it feels counterintuitive to contemplate loss, particularly against the backdrop of floor-to-ceiling aisles in supersized supermarkets. In a Walmart (the No. 1 grocery chain in America) in Winston-Salem, N.C., I counted 153 flavors of ice cream and eight brands of yogurt. But then I looked further. The choices are superficial — primarily in flavor and secondarily in brand, most of which are owned by the same company. In addition, more than 90 percent of every container of yogurt, milk and ice cream is made with milk from one breed of cow, the Holstein-Friesian, known as the highest-producing dairy animal in the world. Bananas — America’s most popular fruit — carried only a single descriptor: “banana.” Although no variety was listed, I know it was the threatened Cavendish. There are more than 1,000 varieties of bananas grown in the world; however, the one that ends up on supermarket shelves isn’t the one that has the best texture or taste but one that transports easily and has, so far, managed to beat back disease. I saw six kinds of apples, including Granny Smith, Gala, Fuji and the mealiest, most inappropriately named apple: Red Delicious, bred for beauty, not taste. Apples were among the first fruits to be cultivated. The original was probably small and tart, closer to what we think of as a crab apple. But, through breeding, we slowly transformed its texture, taste, color, size and level of sweetness. There are now 7,500 varieties of apples grown all over the world, fewer than 100 of which are grown commercially in the United States. In fact, nearly every historic fruit and vegetable variety once found in the United States has disappeared. For millennia, we’ve made decisions about what to grow or not grow, and what to eat or not eat. That’s what agriculture is: a series of decisions we, and our ancestors, have made about what we want our food and food system to look and taste like. But our ability to make those decisions — and indulge in our pleasures — is being compromised in ways that are unprecedented. Take, for example, the pistachio. The transformation of the pistachio industry was the unintended consequence of political strife, part of a cascade effect of trade restrictions that were meant to punish the captors of hostages. It had nothing to do with food or farmers. Iran used to be the center of the world’s pistachio industry. Those little green nuts are actually seeds that Persians bred to split open, and they come from the same family of plants (Anacardiaceae) as mangoes, cashews and poison ivy. An integral part of Middle Eastern foods and celebrations, pistachios originated in Afghanistan and are one of Iran’s biggest exports after petroleum. Evidence of the nuts dating back to 6 B.C. has been found in both of those countries. In 1929, botanist William E. Whitehouse traveled to Persia (now Iran) to collect pistachios in hopes of finding a variety that would be suitable for growing in America. Of the 20 pounds of nuts he gathered, only one variety flourished — in California’s San Joaquin Valley. To put that in perspective, a single nut weighs one-40th of one ounce. There are 320 ounces in 20 pounds. Out of everything he collected, one nut (seed) took root. Food is bound to place. That small female nut was, at that time, the only one that could handle the climate and other environmental conditions of the United States. Whitehouse named the pistachio Kerman, after a famous carpetmaking city near the birthplace of the nut. The tiny but mighty Kerman built a fledgling American pistachio industry that started to blossom in the 1960s and exploded decades later when, in 1980, President Jimmy Carter instituted a full trade embargo on Iran as a result of the 444-day hostage crisis. That included all agricultural products. The ban devastated the Iranian pistachio market and empowered the United States to build its capacity for pistachio cultivation. Today, America is one of the world leaders in its production. The nearly 520 million pounds of pistachios that were grown domestically in 2014 descended from that one Kerman, a variety that represents almost all of what is planted. When I first learned of about the loss of biodiversity, and the many reasons it has occurred, I was incredulous. I had spent my life obsessed with food — and it was disappearing? Why hadn’t I heard about this? How was this possible? The answer lies in the fact that many of these changes have happened slowly, over time. These losses in food are buried in the soil, tucked in beehives and hidden in cattle feedlots. They start with microorganisms invisible to the naked eye and echo through every link in our food chain — from soil to seed to pollinator, from plant to fish to animal — compromising the very ecosystems that make much of our food possible.
