Books and Arts -- Book Review

文学与艺术——书评

Rare foods -- Refined tastes

稀有的食物——精致的口味

Eating to Extinction. By Dan Saladino.

《吃到灭绝》，作者：丹·萨拉迪诺。

The unhappy fate of the Large White pig is a case in point.

大白猪不幸的命运就是一个很好的例子。

Picture the quintessential farmed swine -- pink, long-bodied, almost cartoonlike -- and you will probably be imagining a Large White.

想象一下典型的农场养殖猪——粉红色，长身体，几乎像卡通动物一样——而你可能会想象出一只大白猪。

Originating in England in the 19th century, the Large White quickly put on weight (ie, meat) and could be kept inside or out.

大白猪起源于19世纪的英国，它的体重（也就是肉）增加很快，而且在室内或室外饲养都行。

From England, it was exported to Europe, Australia, Argentina, Canada, Russia, America and China.

它从英国被出口到欧洲、澳大利亚、阿根廷、加拿大、俄罗斯、美国和中国。

Today, it fills the world’s biggest industrial pig farms.

如今，大白猪填满了世界上各大工业养猪场。

But in the past few years African swine fever has swept through such farms, from China to South-East Asia, Mongolia and India.

但在过去几年里，非洲猪瘟席卷了这些农场，从中国到东南亚、蒙古国和印度。

By summer 2020 it had reached Europe -- and may have killed nearly half of China’s pigs and a quarter of the world’s.

到2020年夏天，猪瘟到达了欧洲——这时它可能已经杀死了中国近一半的猪和全世界大约四分之一的猪。

Homogeneity made the planet’s piggy population a pathogen’s playground.

同质性使地球上的猪群成为了病原体的游乐场。

Such stories remind readers of the stakes, but the real delicacies in Mr Saladino’s book are its tales of people who have tried to resist the shrinkage of diets, sometimes heroically.

这样的故事提醒读者注意其中的风险，但萨拉迪诺先生书中的真正精彩之处在于它讲述了人们试图对抗饮食缩减的故事，有时甚至是充满英雄主义的。

Nikolai Vavilov, for example, founded the world’s first seed bank, in Leningrad (now St Petersburg).

例如，尼古拉·瓦维洛夫在列宁格勒（现在的圣彼得堡）建立了世界上第一个种子银行。

He and his disciples gathered more than 150,000 seed samples before he was sent to a prison camp under Stalin.

在他被送到斯大林统治下的集中营之前，他和他的门徒收集了超过15万份种子样本。

In 1943 Vavilov “was claimed by the very thing he had spent his life working to prevent: starvation”.

1943年，瓦维洛夫“被他毕生致力于阻止的那件事夺去了生命：饥饿”。

His seed collection, however, lives on thanks to the immense sacrifice of the conservationists he inspired.

然而，他的种子收藏被保存了下来，多亏了他所激励的环境保护主义者做出的巨大牺牲。

Under siege by the Nazis, and with Vavilov stuck in prison, they moved hundreds of boxes to a freezing basement and took turns standing guard over their trove of genetic diversity.

在纳粹的围攻下，瓦维洛夫被关在监狱里，他们将数百个箱子搬到了冰冷的地下室，并轮流看守他们的基因多样性宝库。

“By the end of the 900-day siege”, writes Mr Saladino, “nine of them had died of starvation.”

“在900天的围攻结束时”，萨拉迪诺写道，“他们中有9人死于饥饿。”

Among them was the curator of the rice collection, found dead “at his desk, surrounded by bags of rice”.

其中包括负责大米收藏的看管人，他被发现死在“他的办公桌旁，周围是一袋袋大米”。

Mr Saladino offers many wonderful vignettes of indigenous food cultures.

萨拉迪诺先生写了许多关于本土饮食文化的精彩片段。

The most enchanting involves the symbiosis between the Hadza and a feathered collaborator, which evolved over thousands of years.

其中最吸引人的是哈扎族人和一只长着羽毛的合作者之间的共生关系，这种共生关系已经进化了数千年。

He witnesses an elaborate singalong between his host and a small black-and-white bird -- and realises that the exchange is guiding his party to a baobab tree, at the top of which is a honeybee hive.

他看到了一只黑白相间的小鸟和他的主人所唱出的精妙的歌——意识到这种交流是在引导他的同伴走向一棵猴面包树，树的顶部是一个蜂巢。

The bird can find the nest, but “can’t get to the wax it wants to eat without being stung to death”.

这只鸟能够找到蜂巢，但是“无法在不被蜜蜂蛰死的情况下吃到它想要的蜂蜡”。

For their part, the humans “struggle to find the nest but armed with smoke can pacify the bees”.

对他们而言，人类“苦于寻找蜂巢，但他们拥用可以平息蜂蜜的烟雾”。

Later that day, Mr Saladino’s group arrives at an isolated hut beside a well.

那天晚些时候，萨拉迪诺先生的团队到达了水井旁一个孤零零的小屋。

Inside are branded biscuits and sugary pop -- tokens of a global food industry that continues its relentless march.

里面有印有商标的饼干和含糖汽水——这是全球食品行业仍在无情进军的象征。

来源：经济学人