Interview with Author Taras Grescoe

His journalism has been published in many of the world’s leading newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Guardian, and National Geographic. Taras Grescoe is the author of seven nonfiction books and a widely read commentator on the interplay of food, travel, and the environment. His journalism has been published in many of the world’s leading newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Guardian, and National Geographic. We’re living at a time when the generation that experienced tyranny, and in many cases fought to overthrow it, is dying off. This is particularly dangerous in Italy, where some of the most po-tent symbols of Fascism linger on—I’m thinking of the obelisk dedicated to Mussolini in the Foro Italico in Rome, Mussolini’s mausoleum in Predappio, but there are many others—and were never removed from the national landscape. We’re also living in a time when we seem to be forgetting history—when the study of history is being forsaken for the instant gratification we find in smartphones and social media.

Since 1900, three-fourths of the genetic diversity once stored in farmers’ fields has been lost. Under the guidance of a British expert in Roman cookery, I spent three months fermenting garum from Portuguese sardines. It’s now become a secret ingredient in my own cooking; it brings savory intensity to all kinds of stews and pasta sauces. Making garum was a way of discovering how unfamiliar—but also how delicious—ancient cooking really was. I realized the Roman mix of sweet, sour, and savory has more in common with Cantonese cooking than it does with modern Italian food. Taras Grescoe is a journalist, travel writer, and author of several nonfiction titles, such as Straphanger, Bottomfeeder, and The End of Elsewhere.

Food security in the future lies in the diversity of foods we ate in the past.

Relying on original recipes and evidence from the organic remains, they were able to recreate this umami-rich sauce made of small, fermented author Taras Grescoe fish. They recruited top chefs in the city of Cadiz, Spain to cook with their recreated garum. I got to sample some of their dishes, and the results were spectacular. I wanted to do the same for Rome as I’d done for Shanghai—bring a lost city, the Rome of a century ago, back to life. Fortunately, there’s hope for the future of food—though the solution might strike some as counterintuitive.

Interview with Author Taras Grescoe

Humanity’s backup plan, unfortunately, is to keep the seeds and semen of plants and livestock in gene banks. There’s a gene bank for olives in Cordoba, Spain, another for wheat in Morocco, for corn in Mexico, and the mother of them all, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is located north of the Arctic Circle on an island halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole. The problem is that seeds kept inert in cold storage aren’t evolving with and adapting to changes in the environment. Agrobiodiversity, which refers to the range of plants and livestock that feed us, is also in decline. A tenth of the 6,000 or so breeds of domesticated animals used in agriculture are already extinct.

So he regularly puts chapulines, which are sort of lime-toasted crickets, into his tortilla and into his burritos. He’s always been into relatively extreme foods like kalamata olives and capers, that kind of thing. I think we’re seeing an even greater narrowing of diversity, the way things are going. So those three revolutions sort of brought us to where we are today, and a lot of people are saying it’s time to tap the brakes, that the food system is broken. Then there’s the green revolution, which really kicked things into overdrive starting in the 1960s, where you’re bringing the power of fossil fuels along with fertilizers, along with new breeds of wheat that can feed the millions and the billions.

In the tradition of Michael Pollan, Anthony Bourdain, and Mark Bittman, an exciting and globe-trotting account of ancient cuisines—from Neolithic bread to ancient Roman fish sauce—and why reviving the foods of the past is the key to saving the future. I was just visiting the Roman ruins of Baelo Claudia, east of Cádiz in Spain, as part of the research. The subject is the archeology of taste, and how attempts to revive lost and forgotten foods are offering hope for the future of food in a time of diminishing biodiversity. On a global level, we have Trump who wants to MAGA—just as Mussolini wanted to Make Italy Great Again after her “mutilated victory” in the First World War, in which she was seen as hav-ing been short-changed in the spoils of war by the other Allied powers. The past Mussolini wanted to revive, in Rome and the rest of the country, was the glory days of the Roman Empire under Augustus.