Last summer, I walked into Mexico City’s admission-free corn-themed museum—Cencalli: Casa del Maíz y la Cultura Alimentaria—and was amazed and inspired to learn of the hundreds of varieties of corn that are Indigenous to Mexico and the cultural significance that comes with them. Having recently taught Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Young Readers Edition 2015) to my eighth-grade students as part of their English Language Arts curriculum, I had come to loathe the way the United States’ unique brand of capitalism embraced “Big Agriculture” and monocrop methods that resulted in environmental degradation and the loss of biodiversity. Sarah Lohman’s Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods reignited the excitement I felt stepping into Cencalli and learning about deeply cultural foods and their significance, as well as the people working to keep them growing.
Endangered Eating delves into eight foods across the United States that are at risk of disappearing. A non-academic text,...
University of California Press