"Renewing America's Food Traditions is a beautifully illustrated and dramatic call to recognize, celebrate, and conserve the great diversity of foods that gives North America its distinctive culinary identity and reflects our multicultural heritage. It offers us rich natural and cultural histories as well as recipes and folk traditions associated with the rarest food plants and animals in North America. In doing so, it reminds us that what we choose to eat can either conserve or deplete the cornucopia of our continent." While offering a eulogy to a once-common game food that has gone extinct - the passenger pigeon - the book doesn't dwell on tragic losses. Instead, it highlights the success stories of food recovery, habitat restoration, and market revitalization that chefs, farmers, ranchers, fishermen, and foresters have recently achieved. Through such "food parables," editor Gary Paul Nabhan and his colleagues bulld a persuasive argument for eater-based conservation.