How the Romans' Favorite Food Went Extinct

As a species, humans are alarmingly adroit at wiping outfloras and faunas who sit lower on the food chain. This is not a new phenomenon.We famously ate all the woolymammoths, giantsloths, and giantflightless birds wherever we found them. More recently, our diets and theinvasive species we brought with us killed off dodos,aurochs,and passengerpigeons to name just a few. Earlier this year, the Chinese Paddlefish wasofficially declared extinct, and many other species are teetering on the edgeof oblivion thanks to our collective actions.

We’ve also got a bad track record when it comes to plants. Microculturesof various vegetables havebeen decimated over the last century or so, but our sad history ofannihilating the foods we love most stretches back millennia. Take, forinstance, the Greek and Roman delicacy Silphium.

Silphium

According to ancient accounts, silphium was some kind ofgiant fennel plant, which grew only in a narrow band of the Libyan coast—calledCyrene at the time. According toHerodotus, Cyrene was settled by Greeks from the over-populated island ofThera who took a hint from the Delphic Oracle and started a colony on Africanshores. Their new settlement was verdant, and they prospered agriculturally. Thenative Libyans showed them a strange plant called Silphion, which soon becametheir main export.

Based on images appearing oncoins from Cyrene, as well as descriptions from Herodutus, Pliny, andothers, historians think that Silphium was related to fennel and was part ofthe Ferulafamily.

Why was it so popular? Because, according to who youbelieve, it tasted great and cured just about everything under the sun. Accordingto Lenore Newman, silphiumtasted slightly of leeks, and was used as a seasoning in many Roman dishes. Theone surviving Roman cookbook, written by MarcusGavius Apicius (who literally ate himself to bankruptcy and suicide)prominently features silphium, and even offers a cheap substitute—asafoetida,which is still extant today, and apparently smells awful.

There is another reason that silphium eventually became worthits weight in gold, hoardedby Julius Caesar, and became extinct. For one, the Romans thought it was a contraceptive.This was huge, because the Romans likedto get into it. According to Pliny the Elder, silphiumwas good for sore throats, snake bites, hemorrhoids, gout, mange, epilepsy andliterally making snakesexplode. Pretty useful stuff!

The ravenous appetites of the Ancient Mediterraneans likelyspelled the doom of the plant they loved so much. Silphium only grew in aspecific part of the North African coast, and attemptsto cultivate it were unsuccessful. As human encroachment spread aroundCyrene, arable wild land for the plant diminished. While there were strictquotas for harvesting wild silphium, they were often ignored by poachers. Plinycites sheep grazing as one of the primary causes of its extinction, but achange in climate may also have been to blame. Because we don’t even knowexactly what it was or looked like, it’s very hard for modern historians tocome with an accurate reason for extinction, or even if it actuallywent extinct.

We do know, however, that by the time Caesar was hoarding it,wild plants had been missing for decades. When Pliny the Elder was writing,only one wild stock was to be found; and then was promptlyplucked and presented to the (famously bad) Roman Emperor Nero as anovelty.

Whatever the reason for extinction, we can be certain that our Latin forbearers had a hand in it. As Lenore Newman says in our interview with her, “We just really struggle with big, large-scale, long-term management efforts to ensure our foods survive.” Turns out we’ve struggled with them for a long, long time.

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