Su filindeu, or "threads of God," is the rarest pasta in the world. For a century, it was made by a single family in the Sardinian city of Nuoro for religious celebrations. Today, there are fewer than 10 people there who know the secret to making the pasta as thin as a strand of hair.
Rosalía Chay is one of the few chefs in Mexico who still cooks using an underground oven called a pib to make cochinita pibil. Maya people in the Yucatán Peninsula have prepared it this way since at least 400 AD.
It takes a full day working in temperatures up to 1,000 degrees Celsius to make one batch of Himalayan black salt, or kala namak. The salt was once used as a medicine to treat indigestion.
The Gozenshu Brewery is one of the few in Japan using bodaimoto, a 600-year-old fermentation method, to make sake. They use it to make junmai, or pure rice sake that has no added alcohol or sugar. But mass-produced sake made with cheap additives is threatening the business.
The Inge-Glas company is one of the oldest in the world still making Christmas ornaments the traditional way.
Indonesia's mie lethek noodles, or "ugly" noodles, have a distinctive dull grayish color when cooked. We visited a factory that still makes them using 2,000-year-old methods — one of only two such factories left in the country.
The Avedis Zildjian Company is the the oldest cymbal maker in the world. For 400 years, the family business survived migration, a world war, and the worst economic crisis in America.