Supermarkets can display dozens of products while the biological foundations of those foods become steadily narrower. Food journalist Dan Saladino argues that lost crop varieties, animal breeds and food traditions are not only cultural losses; they remove options that agriculture may need in a changing climate.
Abundance can conceal fragility
Saladino points to Britain’s historic apple diversity: the Victorians could have eaten a different variety each day for years. Those apples carried traits such as flavour, storage life and disease resistance. Modern shelves offer year-round fruit, but a much smaller set selected for consistent appearance, sweetness, crunch and transport.
The same narrowing appears in major global crops. A system built around a few genetically similar varieties can be efficient when conditions are stable, yet highly exposed when a new pathogen, drought pattern or temperature extreme arrives. Diversity spreads risk because different plants respond differently to the same stress.
Saving diversity means keeping it in use
Seed banks and catalogues are essential, but Saladino stresses the farmers, cooks and communities who continue to grow and eat rare foods. The Slow Food Ark of Taste makes threatened foods visible; markets and public interest then give producers a reason to maintain them.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reinforced the wider lesson in 2022. Concentrated production and interconnected supply chains deliver low-cost food in ordinary years but transmit shocks rapidly when grain, oil and fertiliser supplies are disrupted.
The practical response is not nostalgia. It is to preserve more genetic and regional options, support the people who manage them and treat diversity as infrastructure for future food security.
Read the interview
‘We’re running out of time’: Dan Saladino on why the loss of diversity in our foods matters was published by The Guardian. Credit: Dan Saladino, author of Eating to Extinction, and the Guardian environment team.