If some magical pill could deliver all the necessary nutrients in perfectly calibrated amounts,

sparing us all the time, money, and effort we spend on food, nobody would take that deal. Food is so much

more to us than calories and vitamins. It's pleasure and culture and heritage. But we can't

truly experience legacy recipes if all our ingredients are generic monocultural varietals grown for

the ease of farming and the ability to survive the long journey to the grocery store.

From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd.

My guest believes it is vital that we find ways to conserve threatened food sources for their biodiversity in a fast-changing climate

and for their links to the past in our fast-changing civilization.

Sarah Lohman is a food historian and author. Her new book is called Endangered Eating,

America's Vanishing Foods. Sarah, welcome to think. Oh, thank you so much for having me on.

So you write that you had always thought about American cuisine as constantly expanding

to include new dishes. You know, we're all familiar maybe with different foodways than we had

been decades ago. How did you start to realize, though, that a lot of American food ingredients

have actually been disappearing from what's available to us? You know, it was through coming across an article

that was actually in BBC travel and it was about the world's rarest pasta. This pasta is called

Sufilindeu. It's made by maybe half a dozen women in Sardinia. Traditionally, they had to be from

the same family. And if you want to try it,

you can only do so twice a year after you complete, I think, a 37-kilometer pilgrimage across

the mountains of Sardidia. So, of course, that's all very evocative and fascinating. But the reason,

you know, this article was being written is because it was featuring this thing

called the arc of taste. The arc of taste is put together by Slow Food International, and it's

an online encyclopedia of rare, delicious, distinctive foods that are on the verge of extinction.

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