The Frightening Sameness Beneath Hundreds of Flavors

Listen nowDownload file
Embed player

Walk through the largest supermarket chain in America and you’ll find 20 different kinds of potato chips. 153 flavors of ice cream. An acre of cold cereals. Why do we have so many choices? Or do we?

Where we might see hundreds of flavors, varieties and brands of food, food journalist Simran Sethi sees a scary kind of sameness.

She breaks the bad news about our shrinking global diet in her book “Bread, Wine and Chocolate - the Slow Loss of the Foods We Love.” A startling figure from her book: three-quarters of the world’s food now comes from just 12 plants and 5 animal species.