Renewing the Food Traditions of North America is a dramatic call to recognize, celebrate, and conserve the great diversity of foods that give North America the distinctive culinary identity that reflects its multi-cultural heritage. It offers us rich natural and cultural histories as well as recipes and folk traditions associated with one hundred of the rarest food plants and animals in North America. In doing so, it reminds us that what we choose to eat can either conserve or deplete the cornucopia of our continent. In addition, it offers a eulogy to a once-common game food that has gone extinct--the passenger pigeon--to underscore how rapidly a food species can be depleted if its habitat is destroyed and harvesting pressures are ignored. Rather than dwelling on the tragic losses, it highlights the success stories of food recovery, habitat restoration, and market revitalization which chefs, farmers, ranchers, fishermen, and foresters have recently achieved. Through such "food parables," editor Nabhan and his colleagues build a persuasive argument for eater-based conservation.

Implementing that call to action, the Renewing America's Food Tradition collaborative involves some of the country's most inspiring and effective non-profit organizations in targeting hundreds of rare and neglected foods unique to North America for such restoration and recovery. They have been compiled into the first-ever comprehensive list of the wild and domesticated food varieties that are threatened or endangered in North America, including heirloom seeds, fruits, and nuts; heritage breeds of livestock and poultry; fish and game; and wild-foraged plants.

In addition, this book offers a tool-kit to engage those who wish to personally support and participate in such recoveries, and a list of food festivals held across the continent to honor and enjoy some of the country's most iconic foods, from crab cakes to maple syrup and file gumbo. Organized by food nations named for the ecological and cultural keystone foods of each region--Salmon Nation, Bison Nation, Chile Pepper Nation, Cornbread Nation, among others--this book offers you an altogether fresh perspective on the culinary traditions of North America. After savoring this book, you will never look at the geography of food--or the necessity of conserving the biocultural foundation of culinary diversity--the same way again.

This work represents a dramatic call to recognize, celebrate, and conserve the great diversity of foods that give North America the distinctive culinary identity that reflects its multi-cultural heritage. Included are recipes and folk traditions associated with 100 of the continent's rarest food plants and animals.

Renewing America's Food Traditions is a beautifully illustrated dramatic call to recognize, celebrate, and conserve the great diversity of foods that gives North America its distinctive culinary identity that reflects our multicultural heritage. It offers us rich natural and cultural histories as well as recipes and folk traditions associated with the rarest food plants and animals in North America. In doing so, it reminds us that what we choose to eat can either conserve or deplete the cornucopia of our continent.

While offering a eulogy to a once-common game food that has gone extinct--the passenger pigeon--the book doesn't dwell on tragic losses. Instead, it highlights the success stories of food recovery, habitat restoration, and market revitalization that chefs, farmers, ranchers, fishermen, and foresters have recently achieved. Through such food parables, editor Gary Paul Nabhan and his colleagues build a persuasive argument for eater-based conservation.

In addition, this book offers the first-ever list of foods at risk in America (more than a thousand), shows how all of us can personally support and participate in such recoveries, and lists food festivals held across the continent to honor and enjoy some of the country's most iconic foods, from crab cakes to maple syrup and filA(c) gumbo. Organized by food nations named for the ecological and cultural keystone foods of each region--Salmon Nation, Bison Nation, Chile Pepper Nation, among others--this book offers an altogether fresh perspective on the culinary traditions of North America.

Writer, professor, and conservationist Gary Paul Nabhan is the director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University. Nabhan's writing is widely anthologized and translated, and has won the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing, a Western States Book Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship.Makalé Faber is the Director of Programs at Slow Food USA where she oversees five education, cultural, and agro-biodiversity programs: RAFT (Renewing America's Food Traditions), Slow Food in Schools, Ark of Taste, Presidia, and Terra Madre.Deborah Madison is a freelance writer and board member of the Foundation for Bio-Diversity and the Seed Savers Exchange, among others. As a freelance writer she has contributed to Cooking Light, Williams Sonoma's Taste, Vegetarian Times, Gourmet, Food and Wine, Bon Appetit, Garden Design, Fine Cooking, Organic Style, The LA Times, Orion, and others.