Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (7 page)

All these pressures made for a huge change in human activity. Humans had exchanged the mobile, instinctive, and day-to-day existence of the forager for the responsibilities of the structured, disciplined, and productive life of one who farms and processes food. A remarkable adjustment had to be made: evolution had equipped humans with a mentality for survival in the savanna environment. Fortunately, some of the same qualities, such as ingenuity, fortitude, and persistence, could be pressed into service to make a success of this new existence. On the other hand, humans are not by nature tidy or given to planning for the future or to organizing large groups. These first farmers had to learn, the hard way, the skills to manage
themselves on a larger scale and to make provision for the future.

Farming fixed people in one place, so they created the first permanent villages. This marked one of man’s most important shifts from animal clan-like life. The density of their populations increased vastly. As foragers, an individual would rarely see a group of more than 50 people; in a whole lifetime, he or she might encounter no more than 400 strangers. Today, we come across just as many on a single visit to the shopping mall.

There was a second, quite unexpected consequence that changed forever the way human society is organized. As foragers, humans lived day-to-day and hand-to-mouth. They gathered what they needed for the day and consumed it, then they repeated the process the next day. Everybody took part in the procurement of food—if not, they starved. With the advent of farming came a radical change: farmers had to produce food in advance of requirements and store it. This enabled the production of food surpluses. In a very short time, these surpluses were used to support artisans whose skills only indirectly helped food production. Here was the start of the “division of labor,” where individuals specialized in just one activity, such as the making of tools, baskets, or bricks.

The farming life was in many ways more insecure than the foraging one. The stores required protection from pilferers and bandits, so warrior castes arose. The total dependence on a successful harvest required the gods to be placated, so priestly castes came into being. As intermediaries between the people and the gods, the priesthoods in turn developed ever more complex rituals, sacrifices, taboos, and superstitions.

In forager societies, the barter system is well developed. Humans are very good at keeping a record in their heads of who owes what and to whom: they keep score and make sure that they leave no obligation unreturned and that nobody cheats or gets a free ride. It is easier to police this in a forager society. They know everybody with whom they are dealing and many of them are direct relatives. There is a high degree of trust. However, in these new, densely populated farming societies, this delicate balance breaks down. With the division of labor, the number of transactions multiplies. Farmers, tradesmen, artisans, and all the different occupations have to make deals with each other all the time—just to stay fed, get raw materials, and trade finished product. Furthermore, they were less likely to know each other or have mutual kinship ties.

There was an urgent need to keep records of who does what—and owes what—to whom. This led to another revolution in human society: the invention of writing and numbering. In this way, an intellectual class of scribes and bookkeepers came into being. It is from this time that we have the first written records, or “history.” (Everything that happened before this time is known as “prehistory.”) Barter of goods is an unwieldy and inflexible way of trading on this scale, so money was invented. With that came special classes of financiers, money lenders, and accountants. With the multiplication of transactions between people who did not know each other, lawyers and judges were needed to draw up contracts and resolve conflicts. To manage these complex societies, a class of bureaucrats came into being. All these specialized groups were fed from the food surpluses.

The food reserves were a fabulous source of wealth quite unknown to hunter-gatherers. With concentration of knowledge in just a few hands, some people were able to commandeer an unequal share of these resources for themselves and their relatives. In this way, potentates, priests, and merchants accumulated vast amounts of power and wealth.

In due course, many villages grew into cities; some cities became the centers of great empires such as Sumer, Babylon, and Egypt. With this evolution came a completely new way of organizing society. By necessity, and in a great many ways, the new society was at variance with our naturally adapted Savanna Model society. This dislocation affects us even more today, leading to all kinds of unwarranted stress and psychological disturbances.

The people who adopted farming had, unknowingly, grasped a tiger by the tail. Their population densities had grown well beyond the point where they could return to a simple forager existence. So, all peoples who depend on farming (and that includes us) have to put up with its inherent drawbacks. However, until now, we had not even realized the extent to which our lives are affected by this lack of harmony with our savanna-bred natures.

THE SPREAD OF FARMING

As biologist-historian Jared Diamond points out, only a few varieties of plants in the world lend themselves to being farmed and the farmer had little choice but to focus his efforts on those few.
³⁷
This practical reality greatly reduces the
variety
of foods eaten. So, it was for our first planters in Kurdistan. Instead of consuming plants from the hundreds of wild, foraged species, the farmers’ diet was now limited mostly to just four farmed species—wheat, barley, lentils, and beans. As the centuries rolled by, farmers gradually domesticated some fruits (such as apricot and apple) and vegetables (such as onion and leeks), but they remained a tiny part of the diet.

The farming techniques developed in Kurdistan spread rapidly to neighboring areas. Within 1,000 years, farming was practiced in the plains between the Tigris and Euphrates (in present-day Iraq) and eastwards to western Persia (Iran). Farming spread westward into areas of present-day Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and finally the Nile valley of Egypt. It was the scene of the struggles and migrations of some of the earliest known peoples, including Sumerians, Assyrians, Akkadians, Semites, Babylonians, and Phoenicians. On a map, the area traced out looks rather like a French croissant (a crescent shape). In 1916, an American Egyptologist at the University of Chicago, James Henry Breasted, coined the term
The Fertile Crescent
, which became the byword for the cradle of farming. Farming was also quickly taken up even further to the west, in Cyprus, Crete, and Greece, and in India to the east.

Dating the Earliest Farming Sites

The dates we give for the start of farming are the best estimates available. Exploration of ancient sites is ongoing and new sites could yet be discovered that push the earliest dates back in time. In addition, it is possible that improved dating technology will cause minor revisions to currently accepted dates. However, for our purposes, we are only interested in seeing the general pattern of when farming came about. It does not really matter when it happened exactly or, indeed, which farmers were the first. The essential points are that, in the grand sweep of human history, it is a recent occurrence and that farming started in certain localities and not in others.

As time went by, other groups of people, quite independently, discovered how to farm grains using whatever resources were locally available. The Chinese began with millet about 7500
b.c.
and moved on to rice about 1,000 years later. From there, rice cultivation spread to Burma, Indo-China, and India. Rye, which grows well in cold climates, was first harvested 3,000 years ago when agriculture spread to northern Europe. Oats came along only 1,000 years ago, also in northern Europe.

The Indians of Mexico were the first to cultivate corn (maize) 7,000 years ago. By ingenious selection of the best varieties, they gradually bred it from a normal grass seed into the much larger and plump cob that we know today. Columbus brought corn back to Spain and it spread to similar climates in the Old World.

In the United States, the main communities cultivating corn were those living close to their Mexican counterparts in the Southwest. It was not until 200
a.d.
that corn spread out from that area and then only to the Indians on the eastern seaboard, such as the Iroquois. Even so, it was regarded as a minor crop. Most of the other Indians of the United States—the Apache, Comanche, Sioux, Cheyenne, the Cahuilla in the south, and the Chinooks in the north—were hunter-gatherers. After the arrival of European farmers to America, wheat, not corn, was the main crop planted for human consumption. It may come as a surprise to learn that in the United States corn did not become a big item of human consumption until the 1950s. Until then, Americans only consumed corn in a minor way in the form of popcorn, corn on the cob, and hominy; corn’s main use was to fatten cows and hogs.

Recent Origins of Breakfast Cereals

The modern commercial concept of corn as a breakfast food originated in the vegetarian beliefs of the American Seventh-Day Adventists. In 1906, a Seventh-Day Adventist named Will Kellogg founded a company to make “Corn Flakes” for this niche market. Then, in the late 1950s, came a remarkable example of how smart advertising can dramatically change a nation’s eating habits. A new marketing campaign promoted “breakfast cereals” so persuasively that consumption skyrocketed. In just a generation, they became the chief food of choice at breakfast for an entire nation. Progressively, governments have required the cereals to be fortified (or, as the cereal companies prefer, “enriched”) with an ever-lengthening list of vitamins and minerals.

We have so far focused on grains because they were the storm troopers of the farming revolution. As the centuries rolled by, many more foods were brought into production (and others abandoned). In the next chapter, we will look at how these new foods were introduced and the consequences (for better or for worse) of human consumption. In the meantime, let us note that it took a long time for farmed products to become common around the world.

The peoples of ancient Kurdistan (northern Iraq) happened to be the first to develop farming, but as we have seen, later and quite independently, cereal farming was invented in China and Mexico. However, not all farming started with cereals: the Incas of Peru began with potatoes (5,500 years ago) and moved on to a grass seed called “quinoa” only later. The Indians of the eastern United States first cultivated the sunflower for its seeds 4,500 years ago. The root of the sunflower (we know it as Jerusalem artichoke) was also eaten.

Sometimes, farming percolated outwards from these centers, often by conquest, to neighboring territories, but the process was not always rapid. For example, the Celts, Germans, Anglo-Saxons, and Scandinavians did not farm until 2,500 years ago, a mere 100 generations past. Indeed, up to the present day, there are still a few non-farming populations: isolated forager bands of San Bushmen (Southern Africa), Aborigines (Australia), Hadza (Tanzania), the fierce Sentinales (Nicobar Islands), and Aché (Peru) have escaped efforts to corral them into fixed hamlets and farms.

Farming always began with plants. However, where suitable animals existed, their domestication quickly followed. In the Fertile Crescent, sheep and goats were soon farmed. The same happened in China (pigs), Mexico (turkeys), and Peru (llamas and guinea pigs). The types of plants cultivated and breeds of animals raised were specific to the locality. But the plants and animals of the Fertile Crescent are the ones that spread to Europe and came to dominate the Western food supply until the late Middle Ages (around 1300 to 1500).

THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF FARMING

Over the centuries, farmers gradually improved their techniques. Irrigation was an early innovation practiced by Sumerians and Egyptians alike: it improved yields and removed much of the uncertainty of unpredictable rainfall. Farmers learned to maintain soil fertility in several ways. They would plant a field with a different crop each year and in one of the years, the farmer would leave the field unplanted and allow nature to replenish soil nutrients, a process known as “lying fallow.” The Romans knew that alternating a leguminous crop with a cereal crop improved the quality of the latter, but without knowing why. We now understand that legumes put an important nutrient back into the soil—nitrogen.

Yield

The term
yield
simply means the amount of crop that is produced by a given area of land. It is often measured as bushels per acre. (A bushel is about 9.3 gallons.) A good yield for wheat is 50 bushels per acre; for corn, it is 130 bushels per acre.

They learned that spreading farmyard manure on the land improved the quality of the crop. Farmers were great naturalists: they watched out for the best growing plants and selected their seeds for the next planting. In this way, they developed varieties that possessed more desirable qualities: for example, they resisted disease better, had better yields, or were easier to harvest.