Home/Ark of Taste
A catalogue of the foods we are in danger of losing, and a plan for bringing them back.
What it is
The Ark of Taste project seeks to preserve the forgotten foods that are in danger of being lost as a result of our fast-paced lives and intensive food production methods. It is a living catalogue, kept by the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, of products from all over the world that are worth saving and at genuine risk of disappearing.
Getting a product aboard the Ark is not an academic exercise. It is a way of putting a name to something, telling its story, and pointing people towards the small-scale producers who still make it. By promoting those producers we are able to safeguard traditional Welsh products and return them to the market, which is the only place a food can really survive.
Seven Welsh products are already included. We are working on adding more.
The Welsh Ark
Each of these is on the international Ark of Taste register. Behind every one of them are producers still doing the work.
A hardy hill breed shaped by the valleys and uplands of south Wales. These are sheep bred to thrive on rough mountain grazing that would defeat a lowland animal, and that diet of heather, bilberry and mountain grass is what gives the meat its character. As hill farming has come under pressure, the number of flocks kept to the traditional type has fallen.
Livestock
A fresh, crumbly cow’s milk cheese with deep roots in the mining valleys, where it was carried underground as a day’s food. Industrial block production very nearly finished off the real thing. Farmhouse Caerphilly, made in traditional rounds and given time to mature, develops a soft, mushroomy rind and a creamy edge beneath it that the supermarket version simply does not have.
Dairy
Traced to a single old tree growing against a building on Ynys Enlli, the island off the tip of the Llŷn Peninsula. When the fruit was examined it appeared to match no known variety, which makes this an apple found nowhere else in the world. Grafts have since been taken so the variety is no longer dependent on one tree in an exposed spot in the Irish Sea.
Fruit
An old Welsh hill breed, unmistakable for its markings and known in two forms: Torddu, meaning black belly, and Torwen, meaning white belly. Like the other native mountain breeds it is small, tough and well suited to the Welsh uplands, and like them it has lost ground to faster-growing commercial crosses.
Livestock
A white, lop-eared native breed and one of the rarest pigs in Britain. The Welsh pig fell out of favour when the industry moved to leaner, faster hybrids, but butchers and curers prize it for exactly what the industry rejected: the quality of its fat, and meat that behaves properly when it is cured, air dried or slow cooked.
Livestock
Gathered by hand from the sands of the Burry Inlet on the Gower, by families who have worked the same beds for generations. The work is done on foot, at low tide, with a rake and a sieve, and the knowledge of where the cockles lie is passed down rather than taught. Licensing protects the beds, but the tradition depends on there still being people willing to do it.
Seafood
Grown in and around Denbigh in north Wales and effectively nowhere else, which is unusual enough to have earned it protected status. It ripens late, in September, and the town celebrates it every autumn. A local fruit in the truest sense: tied to one place, with the people of that place keeping it going.
Fruit
Nominate a product
The Ark grows by nomination, and the nominations come from people who know. Growers, fishers, bakers, butchers, market traders, and people who simply remember something their grandmother made and cannot find any more.
A product belongs on the Ark if it is distinctive in taste, tied to a particular place and its people, made in limited quantities, and at real risk of disappearing. If something you know fits that description, tell us about it.
Get involved
Every member makes the network stronger, and a stronger network means more producers found, more products saved and more people eating well.
