For starters: A dish in danger of extinction

Picture the scene: it’s the year 2050. We’re sitting down to a snail risotto and rabbit terrine for dinner. Your children have never tasted salmon and have rarely eaten an ounce of chocolate, a rare and expensive product due to rising temperatures affecting cocoa production. Also, forget your breakfast toast: avocados require a lot of water and are becoming extinct.

That’s the concept behind The Last Supper, a new gastronomic club from innovative 39-year-old South African chef Vanessa Marx, who runs the Riverhouse restaurant in Richmond, an affluent town in the southwest of London. The menu, served once a month, consists of nine dishes featuring numerous endangered ingredients, as well as sustainable alternatives.

“A woman asked me how I dared to host a dinner party showcasing all these endangered foods,” Marx says before the guests begin to arrive. “I told her my intention was precisely to raise the issue. I wanted to get people talking about it, and so far, it's working.”

The chef speaks openly about sustainability, although she actually prefers to let her dishes lead the conversation. “My language is food,” she says. She started cooking 22 years ago in Cape Town, a place now besieged by devastating droughts due to climate change. At a time when few people embraced environmental concepts, she championed food waste reduction, grass-fed and free-range beef, and sustainable seafood. “Everyone thought I was crazy,” she recalls.

Five years ago, she moved to the United Kingdom and conceived her concept for the gastronomic club with Diana Verde Nieto, an Argentinian living in London, a sustainability advisor for the United Nations, and the author of Reimagining Luxury: Building a Sustainable Future for Your Brand. Nieto believes that our perception of luxury is becoming more conscious, moving away from ostentatious displays of wealth like caviar and yachts and toward concepts like wellness retreats and “barefoot luxury.”

The two women connected when Marx heard Nieto talk about ingredients becoming extinct. “My first reaction was, ‘what are you talking about?’” Marx says. “I had never considered that in my lifetime, there might be a food that would cease to exist.”

Nieto nods. “I think we overeat,” she adds. Our diets have changed radically in the last 50 or 100 years. “Vanilla, chocolate, coffee, and olive oil are part of my diet now, but they weren’t at all what my grandparents ate,” she reflects, noting that these popular foods destabilize the food system and have a domino effect on the environment. “We’re riding these trends, causing an incredible amount of stress for the population and the soil.” For example, the trend among Westerners to consume quinoa is putting pressure on local producers in Peru.

I had never considered that in my lifetime, there might be a food that would cease to exist”

Vanessa Marx

Is the average citizen starting to feel judged? We’re told everywhere that chicken and beef are terrible for the environment. “I agree with that 100%,” Nieto replies. “We have to focus on [cooking with] chickpeas, legumes, and grains, and, above all, eat seasonal and local products.”

The menu at The Last Supper is a mix of foods that may no longer exist in the future (such as oysters, mussels, and bluefin tuna, which could disappear due to rising sea temperatures and overfishing). But it also offers the opportunity to try new foods: river trout instead of salmon and rabbit instead of chicken. “I’ve not only highlighted things that might be missing, but also things we should consider,” Marx notes.

Snails, a rare dish in the UK that elicits grimaces of disgust from diners, are used in a risotto, smothered in garlic butter. Marx argues: “These little critters could save the world, because they are one of the most regenerative sources of protein available.”

The chalk stream trout is more popular and is accompanied by a saffron-infused mussel cream sauce. The chef explains that England is home to 85% of the world’s 200 known chalk streams, although they are threatened by pollution.

Will there really be no chocolate in 2050? And worse, no coffee? In addition to the obvious foods, which we all know aren’t exactly sustainable, there are also some ingredients on the menu whose risk of extinction isn’t as well known. “We have a hard time with smoothies, because all those fruits are pollinated by bees,” Marx says bluntly. “With bananas too, because they’re all cloned and besieged by disease.”

Recently, a diner complained about the price of a scallop starter for two, at 22 pounds (about $28). Marx’s solution? “If you don’t like it, go for something else. But in my restaurant, we only serve scallops that have been caught by hand; we don’t use the product that arrives frozen from Canada in plastic tubs. That, for me, is non-negotiable.”

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