吃到灭绝——人类食物多样性锐减（上）

Books and Arts -- Book Review

文学与艺术——书评

Rare foods -- Refined tastes

稀有的食物——精致的口味

Eating to Extinction. By Dan Saladino.

《吃到灭绝》，作者：丹·萨拉迪诺。

The French eat foie gras, the Icelandic devour hakarl (fermented fish with an aroma of urine), Americans give thanks by baking tinned pumpkin in a pie.

法国人吃鹅肝，冰岛人吃哈卡尔（一种带有尿味的发酵鱼），美国人吃罐头南瓜做成的南瓜派来庆祝感恩节。

The range of human foods is not just a source of epicurean joy but a reflection of ecological and anthropological variety -- the consequence of tens of thousands of years of parallel yet independent cultural evolution.

范围广泛的人类食物不仅是享口腹之乐的源泉，也是生态和人类学多样性的反映——这是数万年平行而独立的文化进化的结果。

And yet, as choice has proliferated in other ways, diets have been squeezed and standardised.

然而，随着选择以其它的方式激增，饮食已经被挤压并且标准化了。

Even Parisians eventually let Starbucks onto their boulevards.

甚至巴黎人最终也让星巴克进入了他们的林荫大道。

Dan Saladino, a food journalist at the BBC, reminds readers of what stands to be lost.

BBC美食记者丹·萨拉迪诺在提醒读者，我们可能会失去什么。

In “Eating to Extinction” he travels far and wide to find “the world’s rarest foods”.

在《吃到灭绝》一书中，他走遍世界各地，寻找“世界上最稀有的食物”。

These include the murnong, “a radish-like root with a crisp bite and the taste of sweet coconut”; for millennia it was a primary food for Australia’s Aboriginals, before almost vanishing.

其中包括murnong，“一种像萝卜一样的根，咬起来很脆，有椰子的甜味”；几千年来，它一直是澳大利亚原住民的主要食物，后来几乎消失了。

The unpasteurised version of English Stilton, meanwhile, was salvaged from hygiene rules by an American enthusiast who renamed it Stichelton.

与此同时，英国斯蒂尔顿奶酪的未经巴氏灭菌的版本被一位美国爱热心人从卫生法规中抢救出来，并将其重新命名为斯蒂切尔顿。

The book’s overarching theme is the rapid decline in the diversity of human foods over the past century.

这本书的中心主题是：在过去的一个世纪里，人类食物的多样性迅速下降。

Inside the stomach of a man who died 2,500 years ago, and whose body was preserved when it sank into a Danish peat bog, researchers found the remains of his last meal: “a porridge made with barley, flax and the seeds of 40 different plants”.

在2500年前去世的一名男子的胃里，研究人员发现了他最后一餐的残留物：“一种由大麦、亚麻和40种不同植物的种子制成的粥。”

In east Africa, the Hadza, one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer tribes, “eat from a potential wild menu that consists of more than 800 plant and animal species”.

在东非，作为仅存的狩猎采集部落之一的哈扎族人，“吃的是由大概800多种植物和动物组成的野生菜肴”。

By contrast, most humans now get 75% of their calorie intake from just eight foods: rice, wheat, maize, potatoes, barley, palm oil, soya and sugar.

相比之下，大多数人如今75%的卡路里摄入来自这八种食物：大米、小麦、玉米、土豆、大麦、棕榈油、大豆和糖。

Even within each of those food groups there is homogenisation.

甚至在这些食物群体中也存在同质化现象。

Decades of selective breeding and the pressures of global food markets mean that farms everywhere grow the same varieties of cereals and raise the same breeds of livestock.

数十年的选择性育种和全球粮食市场的压力意味着各地的农场都在种植相同品种的谷物，饲养相同品种的牲畜。

Why should anyone care about having 25 varieties of wheat when a single one can be optimised to produce more grain, in more reliable fashion and with a guarantee of the same taste, year after year?

当一种小麦可以年复一年地以更可靠的方式生产出更多的谷物，并保证同样的味道时，人们为什么还要在乎小麦的种类有没有达到25种呢？

For the same reason that fund managers seek to diversify their assets.

与基金经理寻求资产多样化的原因相同。

In an ever-changing world, diversity is an insurance policy.

在一个不断变化的世界里，多样性是一种保险策略。

The pressures of climate change and rapidly spreading diseases make that insurance all the more important.

气候变化和迅速传播的疾病带来的压力使得这种保障变得更加重要。