Eat It to Save It - Idea of the Day Blog - NYTimes.comEat It to Save It
Today’s idea: Farm biodiversity is disappearing, so we should eat endangered crops and livestock to boost demand for them and thereby save them from extinction, an article says.
Tamas Dezso for The New York Times With succulent pork back in demand, the Mangalitsa pig of Hungary made a comeback.
Food | You like heirloom tomatoes, right? The same sort of determined breeding that goes into those could preserve disappearing strains of pigs, turkeys, cows and all manner of crops, writes Emily Badger in Miller-McCune magazine — if there were sufficient consumer demand.
“But today, 99 percent of turkeys eaten in America come from a single breed, the Broad-Breasted White,” she writes. “More than 80 percent of dairy cows are Holsteins and 75 percent of pigs come from just three breeds.” Same holds for fruits and veggies, she says; while there used to be 15,000 varieties of apple, there now are 1,500.
“In an era when many problems — deforestation, climate change, water shortages — have been caused by human over-consumption, here is a problem of under-consumption,” Badger writes. “Biodiversity is disappearing precisely because people no longer consume it, and if we would just eat endangered crops and livestock now, restoring their role in the food supply, we could save them from extinction.”
And who knows? The preserved breeds might be better suited to whatever climate change has in store, before they become dinner. [Miller-McCune]
