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Eat it to save it.

It may seem counterintuitive to eat species hovering on the cusp of extinction. And frankly, no one wants you to put a polar bear in the Crock Pot.

But now that more mainstream consumers have resolved the paper versus plastic issue with canvas bags, embraced organics and focused on "buying local" to reduce carbon footprints, this is the next wave in food-ethics consciousness:

The concept of rescuing traditional foods from obscurity by creating a market for them.

Tucson ethnobotanist and author Gary Nabhan, whose book "Renewing America's Food Traditions" is the new bible for what's known as "eater-based conservation," says fewer than 30 plants now provide 90 percent of the world's nutrition.

That fact has placed thousands of heritage food species at risk.

No longer is the Carolina northern flying squirrel a standard ingredient in regional fire-thickened stews. American chestnuts have been devastated. And good luck finding stands of paw-paw patches, a wild fruit often likened to mangoes or pears.

So Nabhan and collaborating partners from seven conservation groups spent four years devising an inventory of nearly 1,100 food species unique to 13 food regions in North America that are threatened, endangered or, in some cases, gone from our marketplaces.

Seed banks or some breeding programs can store them away so they aren't lost forever. But the only surefire way to save these foods, food conservationist Nabhan said, is to make sure they ultimately end up on our forks.

That begs the question: If we can pick up a jar of peanuts and a bag of apples at the grocery store, why does it matter whether we have access to the pre-Civil War peanut out of Mississippi or the Magnum Bonum apple out of North Carolina?

In part, it's why we have people who do microbrews rather than simply downing a Budweiser: taste, pride and connoisseurship.

On a bigger note, Nabhan said, food regions are missing important commercial opportunities.

"Tourists come to Arizona for the natural and cultural heritage. We should link our sense of place to our sense of taste," Nabhan said. But it's the rare local restaurant that offers mesquite tortillas, cholla buds and tepary beans.

Unlike some environmental messages that come with a heaping side dish of sacrifice and guilt, this one is all about pleasure.

"We want people to really experiment and enjoy the flavors and colors and fragrances and textures of these foods from our regions," Nabhan said.

Martha Burgess started learning about traditional desert foods after coming to the University of Arizona for graduate school in 1967.

The ethnobotanist now sells at local farmers' markets 14 heirloom beans native to not only American Indians, but also to Hispanic and Anglo pioneer families.

Society has become disconnected from traditional foods, Burgess said. "Human nature is to do what's easiest. You're going to buy what's available, so you'll go for the pizza and corn dog rather than grow tepary beans," she said.

But she's seeing interest pick up considerably. "The cost of fuel and the whole movement toward buying locally is going to make it easier to create markets for some of these foods," Burgess said.

Tucson falls squarely in what has been coined the "Chile Pepper Nation" in Nabhan's book, and it's a region with 174 threatened traditional foods.

Nabhan doesn't want you to eat everything on the list. The Sonoran pronghorn is too vulnerable for people to eat it. But most of the foods can be found with a little effort.

One of those foods, the Sonoran white pomegranate, though, just got more threatened. The book says the local Catalina Heights Nursery is the only commercial outlet that distributes the critically endangered albino plant, which has been in the region for hundreds of years.

Alas, not even that nursery does so any longer.

Catalina Heights owner Eddie McPheeters said you couldn't tell the difference from the exterior of the fruit, and it was not quite as acidic as the more traditional pomegranate strains.

But for customers who seek out pomegranates to put color in their dishes, red ones simply work better than pale ones. So he said he doesn't have any immediate plans to bring the white back.

When Nabhan did a recent interview on National Public Radio about his book, some pragmatists suggested there are good reasons these crops or animal breeds have been trumped by more commercially viable ones.

They're persnickety — either they aren't as shippable or durable or uniform, it was suggested. Maybe they take longer to get to breeding age. Maybe they lay fewer or smaller eggs.

Nabhan disagrees. The black Spanish turkeys he grows, for example, are more Keira Knightley than the overstuffed Pamela Anderson models that dominate commercial ventures. But what they lose in breast, they make up for in richly flavored back meat and drumsticks.

Rancher Dennis Moroney, who runs the 47 Ranch 12 miles north of Bisbee, said he hasn't found any problems with the Navajo-Churro sheep he's raised the last three years.

Aside from their wool being good for weaving, he said, they've adapted to the desert over 400 years, so they are very hardy and virtually parasite-free.

He's been selling the meat at Food Conspiracy Cooperative Grocery and local farmers' markets.

"I think there are lots of people really tuned into the idea of eating locally and trying out native foods," Moroney said.