10 things to eat before they die

Today Online 31 May 08;

ONE of the most publicised meals last year was a gala dinner in England called Ten Things to Eat Before You Die. It was a fantastical finale to the country’s annual Eat! culinary festival that comprised an indulgent five-course £85 ($229) menu.

On the list were foods from around the globe such as beluga caviar and Japanese wagyu along with lesser-known treats — Lindisfarne oysters harvested from oyster beds that used to belong to English monks and acorn-fed Iberico ham from Spain, for instance.

The meal drew flak for being, as The Times described it, “faintly revolting to hear about — like reading Seneca or some other mullet-obsessed Roman rhapsodising about the rainbow of colours an expiring red mullet turns when its death throes are viewed through the sides of a glass bowl”.

This year’s festival, which ended last Thursday, was also capped with a lavish, similarly-priced dinner. There was, however, one big difference: Its theme was Ten Things to Eat Before They Die.

Festival director Simon Preston was quoted by The Guardian and The Journal as saying: “(The previous year’s event) was all the usual stuff and people loved it, but we wanted a bit more food for thought this year. We are ... highlighting major international issues such as those of fair trade and sustainability.”

The recent, more politically-correct meal — organised together with Slow Food’s Ark of Taste, a global movement that aims to save near-extinct foods — made a plea for 18 speciality producers, from Afghanistan to the Guatemalan highlands, who are struggling to stay in business.

Among other items, it featured golden lentils from France, wild Ballobar capers from Spain, jams from Romania and Formby asparagus from England. Mullet bortaga, a type of dried caviar, was also selected from a list of hundreds of candidates, but the only people who produce it — Mauritanian nomads — did not respond in time.

The idea was to generate awareness of these delicacies, all of which suffer from under-consumption, before they vanish from the planet. The event organisers, reported The Guardian, also hope to make some of these great foods known to foodies so that high-end retailers may pick them up, thus allowing the small producers to make a living selling their delicacies.

Items such as the English asparagus, for example, used to be widely served aboard transatlantic liners as it can keep for up to a year when frozen. But since precious few such ocean journeys are made these days, it is now grown only over 1.6 hectares. And the previously-popular Spanish capers haven’t been harvested for commercial purposes since the 1980s after other varieties began to be grown in Andalusia and North Africa. Now, they can’t get sold outside of the local villages.

Because there are many other cheaper brands available, these foods (that are far more labour-intensive to produce) rely on the top end of the market to keep them going. Said Preston: “We face an increasingly homogenised, globalised world of food. This is a way to help these admirable producers and show that their food genuinely does taste different, and better. We need people who love food to eat these products out of the endangered zone.”

According to The Guardian, the sold-out dinner also highlighted “subtle ways in which local producers have used their surroundings to produce distinctive food”.

The Romanian jams, for instance, are produced in the historical region of Transylvania with berries and fruit that grow around seven villages founded by 13th-century Saxon immigrants. They are hand-made by Romanian women to supplement low farming incomes.

The mullet caviar that didn’t make it to the menu is made by the Imraguen nomads of Mauritania’s Banc d’Arguin National Park by salting, rinsing and pressing mullet eggs between boards after the fish have been steered towards their nets by schools of dolphins. The nomads are the only people permitted to fish in the park, a Unesco World Heritage site, because they use motorless boats.

It is these producers, said Ark of Taste’s Suzanne Wynn, who are really “doing something properly ... and it upsets me to see that nobody cares”.

“I hope the dinner will make people see that what we have needs protecting,” she said. “There are all sorts of varieties of fruit and vegetables, for example, that are disappearing. Some of them don’t matter in that they don’t taste any different from other varieties, but some things are worth preserving.

“That’s the message we want to get out if we are to stop things from dying apace.”

What was on the menu (credit the Guardian):

From the United Kingdom –

- Lancashire asparagus: The Formby crop is down to a few farmers after the loss of the transatlantic liner market.

- Herdwick mutton: Staunchly produced since Beatrix Potter’s day but confined to the Lake District.

- Raw milk cow’s cheese: Traditional process reintroduced by Irish artisan producers in the 1970s to international acclaim but a small market.

- Perry pear juice: Unsuited to mass production and now limited to Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire.

From Spain –

- Ballobar capers: Introduced to the Aragon region of Spain by the Moors but long since gone wild. Costly to harvest and outpriced by Andalusian and Moroccan rivals.

From Guatemala –

- Huehuetenango highland coffee: Needs forest shade and laborious depulping and bean-raking for its famed flavour.

From Afghanistan –

- Herat raisins: Known since the fourth century AD but the 120 varieties are struggling against Afghanistan’s disruption and more lucrative crops such as poppies.

From Romania –

- Saxon village preserves: Based on berries and other fruits from Transylvania, made by Romanian women to supplement low farming incomes.

From France –

- Saint Flour golden lentils: Thin skins absorb sauces well but livestock has taken over much of the French land used in its early-20th-century heyday.