People eat less than they used to—not necessarily in terms of quantity but of diversity, with merely a few plants constituting 80% of our diet. This is unprecedented! Professor Jarosław Dumanowski talks with Magdalena Kasprzyk-Chevriaux about the foods we have forgotten and the importance of our culinary roots.

Jarosław Dumanowski: They say that, every fifty years, mankind loses half of its knowledge about nutrition. Such estimates aren’t, of course strict, but they provide us with some insight into how acute this problem is.

Magdalena Kasprzyk-Chevriaux: Why do we need this forgotten knowledge back?

Partly because, in terms of the history of food, we are living in a very peculiar moment. It’s the time of gastronomy and everything is topsy-turvy. We’re undoubtedly losing knowledge and resources. The climate is changing, food production has become industrialized, and the divergence of farmed plants and animals is rapidly decreasing.

Under such circumstances, this lost knowledge could be quite useful. We need to archive it; reproduce it; perhaps bring it back.

And to create gene banks of ancient plants or animals.

I’m adamant that there should also be a place for the forgotten historical and cultural knowledge on how to make use of those bygone species, since we cannot predict what and when we will need. For now, such knowledge