the ESSENTIAL HISTORY of FOOD pt 2

Photo credit: Kevin Dooley, Flickr

Yesterday I was reviewing my notes on principles of social change and on number eight of the list I wrote, “history is essential.”  Boy, after spending the last two weeks studying the history of humans and their food, this statement couldn’t be more real to me.  What I’ve been learning has so radically altered my perspective that I’m afraid I can’t keep to my original promise of “short” posts.  But I do promise, it’ll be interesting! Something to note: throughout this blog I italicize the word “civilized” as it the best term I have to indicate the non-primitive way of being in the world.  My use of italics is remind us that civilized does not necessarily mean a better way, as we commonly do assume.

I went into my research with a few assumptions that I didn’t know I had.  The first assumption is rooted in the words “sustainable agriculture.”  The term in itself presumes there is, or at least there was, such a thing as truly sustainable ag.  But, what I’ve learned is that from its birth it may never have been.

Among people who are knowledgeable about such things, it is generally agreed that the invention of agriculture was the single most important happening in the history of the homosapien.  There is very little in civilized culture that is not shaped by the act of our ancestors settling down and growing their food.  Nevertheless a settled agricultural food system certainly had its disadvantages.  Compared to their farming counterparts, hunter-gatherers worked less, were more active, had a more various diet, weren’t at the whim of famine and generally were free of certain diseases that only develop in agricultural communities.  Farmers, for their part, were slaves to their own inventions: the domesticated plant and animal.

Scientists have many theories of why certain human populations developed agriculture.  (There still remain a few non-agricultural hunter-gatherer groups today).  It could have been political, since control of food gave total power either within your own tribe or over another.  It could also have been religious, as cultivation (root word: cult, latin for worship) may have initially been a ritualistic act to submit oneself to the powers of mother earth.  There also may have been certain pragmatic attractions such as having predictability in the acquisition of food.  It also allowed for people to settle and acquire goods rather than be nomadic.

However one thing does seem pretty certain and it’s that the development of agriculture wasn’t a conscious decision.   Despite the amazing fact that ag was born on almost every continent at the same time (approximately 10,000 years ago), it didn’t come to being overnight.  The process from hunting and gathering to domestication was gradual.  It took place over the course of many centuries, similar to the amount of time from Jesus’ day to now.

Moving from foraging to farming was like a gradient.  Our ancestors probably started small, spreading seed or planting tubers in convenient spots to improve their foraging spoils.  Similarly with animals, peoples following wild herds became so symbiotic in their relationship the animals were slowly domesticated.  There was no singular moment where we chose to leave behind the wild and by the time agriculture had reshaped human culture it was too late to go back.  Our whole way of being and understanding the world was changed.

Naturally then we presume farming is a more evolved way of being.  Commonly we believe that with the advancement of time comes the advancement of wisdom.  Yet history shows that we cough and sputter forward, at times more compassionate and wise, and at times more arrogant and unjust.  Agriculture could easily be argued as a less rational food system than hunting and gathering.  Yet because we have built our civilized world on this foundation, we can’t imagine it any other way.

Which leads me to my second major revelation in this study: we humans have pretty much always been poor stewards of our planet; it’s not a recent phenomenon.  What’s different about now is we can be destructive on a much larger and rapid scale.

We aren’t the first civilization at a food crisis.  Many have risen and fallen because of their agricultural practices, from small tribal groups that we know only through archaeological evidence to enormous powers like the Roman Empire.  Although in the beginning Rome was a farming nation, at it’s peak Rome’s own lands were depleted and crop failure was common.  Rome consequently depended on importing food from its colonies, particularly in North Africa.  Yet they followed the same land use methods that had damaged the once rich soil of Rome.  They cleared the land of its stabilizing and nutrient giving native trees (many of which were used to build the Roman fleets for war).  Without their solid roots holding together the topsoil and pulling up water from deep underground, the soil eventually couldn’t sustain the crops.  Many arguments are made of what exactly caused the fall of the Roman empire, but their agricultural and food practices seemed to be one of them.

Some scientists, like Wes Jackson, actually assert that agriculture has never been a sustainable method of acquiring food because we have depended entirely on annual crops, rather than perennials.  As the roots of Roman trees held together the soil and pulled up nutrients from deep below, the roots of annual crops do the opposite.  No matter how we try to change the use of pesticides or monocultural cropping, we are still dependent on annuals that cause soil depletion.  The depletion requires us to use remediation via fertilizer, and because of the insufficient root structure of our crops, some of that fertilizer will still get washed into our waterways, which then disrupts their ecological balance.  Jackson asserts that this vicious cycle exists because, at its core, there has always been a problem with agriculture.  Farming, no matter how organic, is not natural.  It is a human invention and rarely does it mimic the resilience of natural systems.  (Jackson actually is doing great work developing perennial crops.  So don’t lose hope yet.)

Bad farming practices weren’t our only sin in our history with food.  Many animal species have been made extinct by over hunting; the larger the animal, the more likely.  Large animals, like the extinct wooly mammoth, were so hard to kill individually it was easier to kill them collectively, such as driving a herd off a cliff.   Relatively few were taken for food compared to the number killed.

They are often romantic notions that primitive peoples have a wiser relationship with food than civilized folk but this isn’t altogether true.  Extinctions of species have resulted by the hands of primitives as well.  I myself had always thought that horses only came to North America with the Spanish Conquest.  However horses did in fact live on this continent13,000 years before, and very likely died out at human hands, over hunted like the mammoth.

Some peoples did gain wisdom from previous mistakes, understanding that they should only select a small number of animals to kill or that they should return better specimens to the wild to encourage a healthy herd.  My theory is that because primitive peoples remained in much closer proximity with the land they maintain an intimacy and respect for the rest of the natural world that was lost in civilized contexts.  I am making a correlation here, but I suspect that a closer relationship with the land provides the impetus to learn from these mistakes.  If one lives separated from the land, it easier to exploit it for the sake of building empires and the opportunity to absorb the unintended consequences of our actions into future wisdom is diminished.

Although our current food crisis isn’t our first, it has been a long build from the moment we began to till the soil and domesticate plants and animals.  Modern ag is not a finish product along a progressive trajectory.  It was an experiment that stuck.   Still rather young in our evolution as species, we have manipulated the world for our own benefit and now the consequences of our actions are catching up to us.  As written in The Driving Force: Food Evolution and the Future: “The problem is that homo-sapiens has yet to reach adulthood.  In his relationship with his parent planet, homo-sapiens is still a child that has not learnt to look after his pocket money.”

Knowing this history is essential to making wise decisions for the future.  It brings our circumstances in context.  What is unique to the present time is that we have more knowledge available to us than ever before. We know the history.  We know the biology.  The difficulty is this time, on a global scale not just within our tribe, we must turn that knowledge into wisdom.  Doing that is not just done in the mind, but in the soul.

The history portion of my research is nowhere near complete.  Expect to see more on this over the next couple months and hopefully by the end of it, you’ll see more of how I’m tying it back to spiritual practice.

 

References

Crawford, M., & Marsh, D. (1989). The driving force: Food, evolution and the future. London: Heinemann.

Fernández-Armesto, F. (2001). Food: A history. London: Macmillan.

Goldsmith, E. The fall of the roman empire: A social and ecological interpretation., 2012, from http://www.edwardgoldsmith.org/28/the-fall-of-the-roman-empire/

Jackson, W. (2010). Tackling the oldest environmental problem: Agriculture and its impact on soil. In R. Heinberg, & D. Lerch (Eds.), The post carbon reader: Managing the 21st Century’s sustainability crises (). Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media.

Jackson, W., & Piper, J. (1989). The necessary marriage between ecology and agriculture. Ecology, 70(6), 1091-1993.

Rindos, D. (1983). The origins of agriculture: An evolutionary perspective. New York: Academic Press.

Solow, A. R., Roberts, D. L., & Robbirt, K. M. (2006). On the pleistocene extinctions of alaskan mammoths and horses. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103(19), 7351-7353.

Ungar, P. S., & Teaford, M. F. (2002). Human diet: Its origin and evolution. Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey.