Near a Thousand Tables (19 page)

It may be helpful, before penetrating more deeply the controversy concerning the origins of agriculture, to set the problem in the context of other cases of
great changes effected in societies in despite or defiance of crudely calculated popular interests. Great economic revolutions are often equivocal in their effects and people sometimes show amazing resilience when their standards of living fall—provided they acknowledge that the deterioration is inevitable or short-term. The case of industrialization is analogous to that of the introduction of agriculture. There seems little doubt that industrialization, for instance, normally begins with short-term damage to workers' standards of living. It wrenches them from a rural arcadia and crowds them into slums. It tears them from rooted communities and abandons them in the rat race. Some social reformers in the early nineteenth century told the victims of early industrialization that things could only get worse: capitalism was inherently exploitative and only blood could purge its evils. In retrospect, the workers who invested their labor in industry and made it work seem wiser than their advisers. Their sacrifices paid off and industrialization brought unprecedented prosperity to unpredicted numbers of people. Nevertheless, this prosperity was preceded by a period of transition when workers who suffered from the grueling living conditions of early industrial cities had to see it through, in the hope of better times or the conviction that they had no viable alternative.

A similar dilemma can be detected in the shanty dwellers who crowd around modern megacities in industrializing countries today, filling unsanitary heaps of gimcrack dwellings, beyond the reach of civic and social services. Some are drawn, some driven to the city; in some cases, their reasons for migration are a bit of both. Human beings are risk-taking creatures whose calculations of self-interest are often rationally baffling. Rationality—at least, as understood by economists—seems unable to predict mass behavior. We ought therefore to discard one of our most tenacious myths about human nature and admit that man is not an economic animal. Enlightened self-interest does not always guide our decisions, especially when we make them collectively. Anyone making an informed calculation of the ratio of effort to return would never have introduced or tolerated the agrarian systems on which the ancient civilizations of Sumer, Egypt, the Indus and the Yellow River relied. The introduction of agriculture, in early cases, may well have happened in defiance of the obvious interests of many of the people who took part in it.

The farming concept first arose in a world that was getting warmer, during the thaw that followed the last ice age. Any convincing explanation needs to take this context into account; indeed, the most popular theory, for at least twenty years from the mid-1930s, relied entirely on the “oasis hypothesis”—the assumption that higher temperatures would bring drier conditions and force animals, plants and
men into ever closer contiguity and interdependence around watering holes. The thaw, however, seems to have been too slow to trigger this kind of crisis and there is no evidence which directly links agricultural origins to climatic change: indeed, farming seems to have started independently, in so many different parts of the world, in such widely contrasting climatic conditions, that it appears pointless to try to insist on any
climatic prerequisites
.

Since the 1950s, when confidence in the oasis hypothesis began to wither, almost every other imaginable type of explanation has been advanced. Farming, claimed one of the pioneers of modern historical geography, was a by-product of the leisure of fishermen in Southeast Asia, who devoted the spare time which abundance gave them to
experimentation with plants
. Or it was an invention of hill dwellers in what is now northern Iraq, whose habitat was peculiarly rich in domesticable grasses
and grazing herds
. Or, on the contrary, it was an invention of “marginal zones” where the need for new foods would be most acute: an equalizing device, in other words, by inhabitants of an underprivileged environment, where wild
food sources were few
. Or it was a process made possible not by climatic change but by the supposedly universal pattern of development of society—the “culmination of ever increasing cultural differences and specialization of
human communities
.” Or it was a spontaneous happening—the surge of new species, springing abundantly from waste heaped
where people lived
. Or it was a strategy enforced by “stress,” either because population was increasing or because men were hunting other food sources to extinction: pressure of growing populations or shrinking resources imposed the need to find new species to adapt for food or more intensive methods of production of
existing foodstuffs
.

This last hypothesis seems, perhaps, superficially convincing. It is consistent with common sense; and it is supported by impressive work by anthropologists on transitions to agriculture which have happened under scholarly scrutiny in recent times. The need for new resources can explain—beyond cavil—why some relatively unsystematic farming peoples, such as seasonal farmers or those who practice cultivation without attempting hybridization, should develop new techniques. But, as an explanation for why agriculture arose in the first place, it seems ill matched to the facts of chronology. Extinctions—or even significant diminutions—in hunters' victim-species cannot be shown to have happened in any of the right places at any of the right times. Populations certainly grew in the most dedicated farming cultures—but, in most places, more probably as a consequence than
as a cause
. Population pressure explains why agricultural intensification could not be reversed without catastrophe, because of the “ratchet effect” which makes it impossible, while population rises, to go back to less intensive
ways of getting food; but it does not explain why it started. Intensification of agriculture, finally, was only possible in regions with abundant resources: it seems more reasonable to claim that plenty, rather than dearth, was a prerequisite of the development.

The feebleness or failure of all these theories, the uselessness—indeed—of every kind of materialism in explaining mass agriculture, drives inquirers toward religion or, more generally, culture as a source of explanations. One widely canvassed and highly persuasive explanation is rooted in studies of political culture. Food does not only sustain the body; it is also a source of social prestige. Competitive feasting in a society where power, in the form of allegiance and obligation, is bought with food can generate huge increases in demand, even if population is static and
supplies are secure
. Societies bound by feasting and leaders favored by conspicuous munificence will always find a use for intensive agriculture and for massive storage spaces. Monumental civilization is a function of a particular
kind of conviviality
.

Alongside this political context for understanding farming, it is tempting to endorse the opinions of scholars who have explained the option for agriculture in antiquity as a
religious response
. To plow or dibble and sow and irrigate are profoundly “cultic” actions: rites of birth and nurture of the god on whom you are going to feed; an exchange of sacrifice—labor for nourishment. The power to make food grow is represented in most cultures as a divine gift or curse or a secret stolen by a culture hero from the gods. Animals have been domesticated for sacrifice and divination as well as for food. Many societies cultivate plants which have a part at the altar but not at the table, like incense or ecstatic drugs or the sacrificial corn of some high Andean communities. Where crops are gods, tillage is worship. Planting may have originated as a fertility rite, or irrigation as libation, or enclosure as an act of reverence for a sacred plant.

If none of the proffered explanations seems wholly convincing, it may be because we have misunderstood the introduction of agriculture as a conscious process, a deliberate strategy to serve articulable ends. Farming could have been something that just happened; it might have been uncaused; or it might have been an evolutionary adaptation, or a change resembling such an adaptation, unwilled by the species involved in it. Traditionally, works on the origins of intensive agriculture have not asked why people wanted it—that has been taken for granted—but how they got the idea, as if there were something strange or extraordinary about it. It may help to shift perspective and approach the problem of farming as if it were normal. After all, we now know that the transition from gathering happened frequently and independently, in a variety of different environments, and
gradually got more intensive in most of them. It can therefore no longer be represented as singular or uncharacteristic of the history of the relationship between people and plants.

In this perspective, farming and gathering reappear together, as parts of a single continuum in the management of sources of food; at the margins, they are hard
to tell apart
. The Papago of the Sonora Desert drift in and out of an agrarian way of life as the weather permits, using patches of surface water in fast-maturing
varieties of beans
. “Even the simplest hunter-gatherer society,” as the archaeologist Brian Fagan has well said, “knows full well that seeds germinate
when planted
.” The agronomy of the ancient alluvial valleys was another—but more puzzling—part of the same continuum. The process of “agrarianization” seems rapid in comparison with earlier periods but it still had plenty of time to unfold piecemeal, over several millennia, as changes in the relationships of people to other biota accumulated little by little. The terms in which the naturalist David Rindos has described early farming seem helpful. It was a phenomenon of “human-plant symbiosis” and “co-evolution,” an unconscious relationship, like the cultivation of fungi by ants; strains of foodstuffs which emerged as a result of human selection and replanting needed human agency to survive and reproduce—for instance, in the case of emerging kinds of edible grasses, because their seeds would not fall to the ground
without husking
. Agriculture was a revolution by accident—a new mechanism intruded unintentionally into the process of evolutionary change.

Whether invented or evolved, the farming of plants did more, in the long run, to alter the world than any previous human innovation. The impact of the hunters, fishers, and stockbreeders of the last chapter could not compare—not on the landscape, or on ecological structures or even on diet. Today, all the carbohydrates people eat, and nearly three quarters of their intake of protein, come from plants. Plants are 90 percent of the world's food. Almost all the animals in the human food chain are fed, not by grazing, but by fodder grown by farmers. Plant farming still dominates the world's economy: except in terms of the numbers of people employed in producing it, food producing has not yielded its economic supremacy to any of the new activities of the industrial and postindustrial revolutions. We still depend on it absolutely. It is the basis of everything else. In the story of the spread and rise of plant farming, moreover, a few crops exert disproportionate influence and demand most attention. These are the staples—the sources of starch which, since their first development by the world's earliest agriculturists, have provided most people with most of their food. They divide naturally into two classes: grasses first, then roots and tubers.

The most influential crops prehistoric farmers developed were the seed-rich grasses that store oil, starch and protein in their grains. Despite the enormous and growing importance of a few kinds of such grasses, of which wheat is the most prominent, most of the varieties we have lived with, for most of history, have been useless for cultivation, except as adornments. If you fly over Abu Dhabi or Bahrain, and see the lawns laboriously coaxed out of the sand, or marvel from the air at the private golf course of a Lappish millionaire—as if some cosmic jeweler had mounted a vast gem in bare rock—you might feel that inedible grasses, too, can be planted in the service of the defiance of nature. But, like the wheatlands and maize plots, these are late, freakish creations. In the long term, grasslands have normally been composed of varieties inedible to man, but suitable for other animals with ruminant habits or better digestions.

The developments of rye, barley, millet, rice, maize and wheat are therefore among the most spectacular achievements of humankind: turning grasses—which nature seemed to have designated as the food of other, better-equipped species—into the staple fodder of nonruminants like ourselves. Other important plants in the repertoire include buckwheat, oats and sorghum; but the big six are special because whole civilizations have relied for sustenance on each of them. They can be ranked in global importance according to a combination of factors: their impact on history, the extent of their role as staples and the scale of their contribution to feeding the world today. We can take them in ascending order.

Wild rye still grows across a great swath of the Middle East, around the Caucasus; but, if this was where it originated, it had to travel a long way before it came into its own as a civilization-sustaining staple. Modern cultivated varieties seem to have developed from others which no longer exist but it is still easy to discern, in surviving types, the virtues which attracted early cultivators and which destined rye for other climes: hardiness, resistance to different altitudes, responsiveness to cold. Rye grows as a weed in wheatfields and sprouts when adverse weather kills the wheat. Anatolian peasants call it “wheat of Allah”—a grace which compensates farmers for the
loss of the main crop
. It must also have seemed heaven-sent to would-be farmers on poor soils or in cold climates, where wheat was unreliable or uncultivable. In such environments, especially along the cold northern and eastern perimeters of the Roman Empire, it arrived as a weed and became a main crop. From the first millennium
B.C.
onward, until potatoes rivaled or replaced it in modern times (below, p. 179), rye was the distinctive food of the fields of the North European plain—dank, cold lands cleared from the postglacial forests,
zones where native grasses were sparse, puny and impossible to adapt for human use. Its main disadvantage is that it is peculiarly prone to the infestation which produces ergotism; some historians have traced the supposed frequency of mass delusions among medieval peasants to their heavy reliance on rye for food. Surprisingly, the pleasantly bitter taste of the grain and the moist, glutinous bread made from it are widely disliked. Pliny's condemnation of it as fit only for the poor has been endorsed by elites ever since. Now, however, it is undergoing a sort of upgrading as bourgeois food, with an appeal to discerning palates, to roughage-mad dieters and to enthusiasts for foods supposed to be “close to nature” because peasants make and eat them. It is also getting rarer, which, paradoxically perhaps, may help to account for its growing appeal at relatively high levels of wealth and education.