Disappearing Foods of America

I couldn't resist posting this map of Disappearing Foods in America from the NYTimes after I found the link via Eating Asia. The related article about how Gary Paul Nabhan, a food historian, has come out with a new book on ingredients (plant and animal) once vital to American culture that are now endangered or extinct. Through publishing the book he hopes to be able to save or resurrect, through farming and breeding, these disappearing foods.

The only foods on the map I can recall ever eating are free-range American bison and California mission olives (well, the olive oil, at least.) It's possible that I've had some of the New England fruits, but I can't say for sure. (I feel so ashamed!)

Which makes me wonder what foods in China I'm missing out on, that were popular ingredients decades or centuries ago that have been lost to industrialisation. And what I'm eating now won't be around in 20, 10, or even 5 years.

On a different note, I'm in Hong Kong, after a nice leisurely train ride that was nothing like the horrendous trip I took in February. I love this place. Clean(er) streets! Good milk tea! Unresistricted internet! Ah...if only HK weren't so expensive to live in...