3 Critically Endangered Foods & How They Can Affect Your Nutrition Goals

Our diets are not as nutritionally diverse as they once were—quite the understatement, according to award-winning food journalist Dan Saladino. In fact, in his new book Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need To Save Them, he notes that over time, humans have eaten over 6,000 different species of plants. Today? We mainly eat nine. This lack of diversity has much to do with our modern agricultural practices that focus on churning out a few domesticated staples (namely: wheat, rice, and maize). As a result, we lose more of those nourishing, vulnerable crops that depend on a thriving ecosystem—and our nutritional load may suffer. 

"We need a greater awareness of the environment in which we exist and the food and farming stories that surround us," Saladino says on this episode of the mindbodygreen podcast. "We have so fundamentally changed our relationship with food that we are paying a huge price in terms of our health and the health of the planet as well." 

"I went to a village in Eastern Turkey where a really small number of farmers had kept hold of an emmer," says Saladino. Emmer is one of the earliest domesticated types of wheat in the world, feeding ancient Roman and Egyptian communities for thousands of years. "It's the wheat that the people who erected Stonehenge were consuming," notes Saladino. "It was such an important type of grain." 

Some regions still cultivate this type of wheat, but it's not nearly as widespread as it once was. Think less "endangered," more "fell out of favor" with the rise of modern, mass-produced wheat in the 20th century. "People who are growing it today love these landraces not only for their resilience but because they have these deep root systems as well," says Saladino. "The argument is that they can reach nutrients in the soil that modern wheat—which doesn't have that root system—can't."  

Murnong, a nutty, potato-like tuber native to Australia, is also not quite considered endangered—but it is vulnerable. Like emmer wheat, this crop has fed communities for thousands of years: "This food that can exist underground for a very long time was the go-to energy source for the Indigenous people of Australia," says Saladino, until Europeans arrived around the 18th century and introduced sheep and cattle to the ecosystem. "They spread through the landscape and pretty much wiped out this [root vegetable]," Saladino notes. 

For now, we'll just emphasize how crucial it is to protect this fish species, not only for your own health but for the health of the environment at large. See, wild salmon is abundant in omega-3s, astaxanthin, and other essential vitamins and minerals that can support whole-body health. Omega-3s, for example, fuel a slurry of important processes in the body, including heart health, brain health, and vision.*