Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food

Written by Lenore Newman

Narrated by Tanya Eby

A rollicking exploration of the history and future of our favorite foods.

When we humans love foods, we love them a lot. In fact, we have often eaten them into extinction, whether it is the megafauna of the Paleolithic world or the passenger pigeon of the last century. In Lost Feast, food expert Lenore Newman sets out to look at the history of the foods we have loved to death and what that means for the culinary paths we choose for the future. Whether it's chasing down the luscious butter of local Icelandic cattle or looking at the impacts of modern industrialized agriculture on the range of food varieties we can put in our shopping carts, Newman's bright, intelligent gaze finds insight and humor at every turn.

Bracketing the chapters that look at the history of our relationship to specific foods, Lenore enlists her ecologist friend and fellow cook, Dan, in a series of "extinction dinners" designed to recreate meals of the past or to illustrate how we might be eating in the future. Part culinary romp, part environmental wake-up call, Lost Feast makes a critical contribution to our understanding of food security today. You will never look at what's on your plate in quite the same way again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Oct 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781515946212

Lenore Newman

Lenore Newman is the Director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley, and an Advisor for Cellular Agriculture Canada. She is an associate professor in the Faculty of Science at UFV where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Food Security and Environment. Lenore was a member of the Premier’s Food Security Task Force, sat on the BC Minister of Agriculture’s Advisory Committee on Revitalizing the Agricultural Land Reserve, and regularly speaks to government and community groups. She has published over fifty academic journal articles and book chapters, and her opinion pieces on the future of farmland use and other food-related issues have been published in the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun, and the Georgia Straight. Her first book, Speaking in Cod Tongues, was published to wide acclaim in January 2017 and won a Saskatchewan Book Award. Her second book, Lost Feast, was published by ECW Press in 2019. It was awarded silver in the 2019 Forward INDIES and was the winner of a Canadian Science Writers Award. She holds a PhD in Environmental Studies from Toronto’s York University and lives in Vancouver, Canada.