Of Ghost Foods and Culinary Extinction
I recently finished listening to the Gastropod episode “Of Ghost Foods and Culinary Extinction,” which I highly recommend. (The link goes to a brief write up in The Atlantic with the podcast embedded.)
My undergraduate degree is in environmental science, and part of the reason I chose to study economics in graduate school was to understand, why do people continue to use up and pollute our natural resources despite knowing about the consequences?
Economics does indeed provide answers as to why, but these answers do not inspire much optimism, especially regarding species extinction. An AER paper titled “Elephants,” is an example. It describes how (from a human/economic perspective) a species that is harvested for storable goods (like ivory tusks) could have two potential “optimal outcomes” (a.k.a. equilibria) : one is ongoing survival, the other, extinction. Given certain conditions, at a high enough price, the model predicts that extinction will be rational in an economic sense.
The paper’s authors did propose two potential solutions if a government has the goal of protecting the species…but governments change, priorities changes, climates and habitat ranges change. Even if we can think of and implement solutions to eliminate “extinction equilibria,” the concept is troubling — but it does provide an answer my question.
The thumbnail painting is of the storied “Ansault Pear” which everyone raved about but somehow still went extinct. The Gastropod podcast gives an interesting history of this culinary extinction as well as those of the herb silphium and the passenger pigeon.
Pairing the strands of knowledge outlined here together implies that we need to be more thoughtful about species conservation — especially and selfishly in the realm of edible species — since rational (in the economic sense) market forces can potentially lead us to use up resources we’d rather keep around. As climates and habitat ranges change, genetic diversity in our food supply will take on renewed importance since crops will need to adapt to changing weather patterns or new geographies.
Our food markets have fine-tuned agricultural production towards efficiency, product standardization and durability, and low costs. These attributes have created great benefits for consumers, but it’s time to add within-species genetic diversity to that list so that we can avoid future species extinction. We’ve seen the start with the end of Red Delicious’s reign, now what’s next?
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Some food diversity resources I know and like: