To save it, ya gotta eat it?

By Kim Severson | New York Times News Service

May 7, 2008

Some people would just as soon ignore the culinary potential of the Carolina flying squirrel or the Waldoboro green neck rutabaga. To them, the creamy Hutterite soup bean is too obscure and the Tennessee fainting goat, which keels over when startled, sounds more like a sideshow act than the centerpiece of a barbecue.

But not Gary Paul Nabhan. He has spent most of the past four years compiling a list of endangered plants and animals that were once fairly commonplace in American kitchens but now are threatened, endangered or essentially extinct in the marketplace. He has set out to save them, which often involves urging people to eat them.

Nabhan's list, 1,080 items and growing, forms the basis of his new book, an engaging journey through the nooks and crannies of American culinary history titled "Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods" (Chelsea Green Publishing, $35).

The book tells the stories of 93 ingredients both obscure (Ny'pa, a type of salt grass) and growing in popularity (the mission olive), along with recipes that range from the accessible (Centennial pecan pie) to the challenging (whole pit-roasted Plains pronghorn antelope).

To make the list, an animal or plant has to be more than simply edible. It must meet a set of criteria that define it as a part of American culture too. Nabhan's book is part of a larger effort to bring foods back from the brink by engaging nursery owners, farmers, breeders and chefs to grow and use them.

"This is not just about the genetics of the seeds and breeds," said Nabhan, an ethnobotanist and an expert on American Indian foods who raises Navajo churro sheep and heritage crops in Arizona. "If we save a vegetable but we don't save the recipes and the farmers don't benefit because no one eats it, then we haven't done our work."

He organized his list into 13 culinary regions that he calls nations, borrowing from American Indian and other groups. The Pacific Coast from California to northern Mexico is acorn nation. Its counterpart on the mid-Atlantic coast is crab cake nation. Midwesterners live in corn bread nation.

His work is based on extensive trips around the country, where he listened to old-timers and cataloged hundreds of hard-to-find plants and animals.

"The daunting thing is that so much about American traditional foods comes out of people's heads and isn't in any book," he said. He had little trouble getting people to share their knowledge.

Nabhan engaged seven culinary, environmental and conservation groups to help him identify items for the list and return them to culinary rotation.

He acted like a broker for the groups, some of which had been trying to save traditional food for decades. Organizations including the Seed Savers Exchange and the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy contributed suggestions for the list. Then, leveraging the rising interest in regional food, he engaged hundreds of chefs, farmers and curious eaters to grow and cook some of the lost breeds and varieties.

Leading the way are members of the gastronomic group Slow Food USA, which assesses whether foods on Nabhan's list are delicious and meaningful enough in the communities where they originated to be worth reviving and promoting. Foods that do become part of the group's Ark of Taste.

The Chefs Collaborative, a group of more than 1,000 professional cooks and others dedicated to sustainable cuisine, willingly signed on too.

And everyone in Nabhan's alliance tried to encourage farmers and ranchers to grow the seeds and the breeds, promising to deliver buyers if they did.

Some of the items on the list, like Ojai pixie tangerines and Sonoma County Gravenstein apples, were well on their way back before Nabhan came along. But other foods are enjoying a renaissance largely as a result of the coalition's work.

The Makah ozette potato, a nutty fingerling with such a rich, creamy texture that it needs only a whisper of oil, is one of the success stories. It is named after the Makah Indians, who live at the northwest tip of Washington state and have been growing the potatoes for more than 200 years.

There have been other revivals, the moon and stars watermelon and the tepary bean among them. The effort to reintroduce heritage turkeys to the American table was a precursor to the work of Nabhan and his collaborators.

But Nabhan doesn't want people to eat everything on his list. The idea of eater-based conservation, which holds that to save something, one has to eat it, works well for agricultural products and some wild foods like clams that benefit from regular harvesting. For some wild species, however, like the foot-long, pink-fleshed Carolina flying squirrel, a harvest would create too much pressure on a tiny population.

The squirrels used to make regular appearances in Appalachian game-meat stews. But as their forests declined, so did the squirrel population; they are now on state and federal endangered species lists.

Because the squirrel was once so important to the diets of North Carolina and east Tennessee, Nabhan included it on his list, along with a recipe for the thick vegetable stew called Kentucky burgoo.

It calls for corn, lima beans, spring water and 2 pounds of cubed and fried squirrel meat. Just don't use flying squirrel.