by Nick Taranto
Why, for example, do we gorge on high-calorie riskily altered food with little nutritional value that makes us feel bad and is literally killing us? It’s a puzzle why we binge on the sweetest and greasiest food we can find, until we consider the eating habits of our forager forebears. In the savannahs and forests that foraging humans inhabited, high-calorie sweets were extremely rare. Twinkies don’t exactly grow on trees. Food in general was also in short supply. A typical forager thirty thousand years ago had access to only one type of sweet food—fruit. If a foraging woman came across a tree bursting with bananas, the most biologically rational thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could, before the local group of chimps came and attacked her. The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food, especially high-calorie, very sweet food, is hardwired into our genes.8
One hundred thousand years later, we may live in condominiums or suburban mansions, but our genetic memory still thinks we are in fight-or-flight mode. That’s why I find it so damn hard to stop at just one Thin Mint Girl Scout cookie—my DNA is yelling at my brain and stomach to stock up while I still have the chance. The presence of these “famine-fighting genes” is widely accepted and is certainly partially responsible for the modern obesity epidemic.9
Recent research shows that sugar and sweetness can induce reward and craving sensations that are more powerful than those induced by addictive drugs like cocaine. Although this evidence is limited by the difficulty of comparing rewards and psychological experiences in different humans, it has been supported by recent experimental research on sugar and sweet reward in lab rats.
Overall, this research has revealed that sweet reward can not only substitute for addictive drugs like cocaine but can even be more rewarding and attractive. At the neurobiological level, the behavioral underpinnings in the brain that sugar rewards appear to be more robust than those of cocaine. The research says this “reflects past selective evolutionary pressures for seeking and taking foods high in sugar and calories. The biological robustness in the neural substrates of sugar and sweet reward may be sufficient to explain why many people can have difficulty to control the consumption of foods high in sugar when continuously exposed to them.”10
Just so we’re clear here, research now proves that sugar is more addictive than cocaine—which is pretty insane to think about, especially as we explore in future chapters how the modern food industry is built around jamming as much sugar and sweet as possible into many of the foods we consume every day.
Most foragers lived itinerantly, roaming with their tribe in a constant search for food. They followed seasonal growth cycles and animal migrations, sometimes traveling thousands of miles per year. Most foragers fed themselves as they could, rummaging for bugs, picking berries, burrowing for roots, trapping small animals, and hunting big game. Despite the Hollywood conception of “Man the Hunter,” gathering was humans’ main activity, and it provided most of their calories.11
Foragers also had more stimulating and satisfying lives than farmers or modern-day factory workers. During the preagricultural era, a forager might head out with his friends at nine in the morning. They’d scavenge nearby, gathering nuts, digging up edible bugs, catching snakes, and occasionally sprinting away from predators. Several hours later, they were back at the camp to cook lunch over the fire. That left them plenty of time to tell stories, play with the children, and just hang out.12
Humans foraged for millions of years, and the human body was well adapted to it—foraging provided ideal nutrition. Evidence from fossilized skeletons indicates that ancient foragers were less likely to suffer from starvation or malnutrition and were generally taller and healthier than their farmer and factory worker descendants. Average life expectancy was just thirty to forty years, but this was due mostly to the high rate of child mortality. Humans who made it through the hazards of childhood had a good chance of reaching the age of sixty, and some even made it to their eighties.13
The foragers were able to stave off both starvation and malnutrition through their varied diet. Especially in premodern times, farmers tended to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet. Most of the calories feeding an agricultural population came from a single crop, like rice, that lacks much of the nutrition humans need.14
By contrast, ancient foragers regularly ate dozens of different foods. When you don’t know where your next meal will come from and calories are scarce, you become very creative very quickly—necessity is truly the mother of invention and variety. This variety ensured that the ancient foragers received all the necessary nutrients to survive. By not being dependent on any single food source, they were less liable to suffer when one particular food source failed. Agricultural societies, even to this day, are frequently ravaged by famine when crops fail. Foragers definitely suffered from periods of hunger, but they were able to handle such disasters more easily. If they lost some of their staple foods, they could gather or hunt other species or move to a less affected area.15
The nutritious and varied diet and the relatively short working week led anthropologists to define preagricultural society as “the original affluent society.”16 But let’s not get too caught up with the picturesque visions of hunter-gatherer glory. The truth is that hunter-gatherer societies, like every human society before and since, were very complicated. What we know for sure is that the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society would change our species forever—starting with how we ate and what we cooked.
The Agricultural Revolution
For millions of years, humans ate by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals—with an emphasis here on wild. Our forebears hunted, gathered, and cooked without cultivating or domesticating a single plant or animal. Humans spread from East Africa to the Middle East to Europe and Asia, and finally to Australia and America—but everywhere we went, our ancestors continued to live by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals. Why do anything else when your lifestyle feeds you more than enough and supports a rich world of social structures, religious beliefs, and political dynamics?17
All this changed about ten thousand years ago, when humans abandoned hunting and gathering in exchange for farming. Our great-great-grandparents (raised to the two-hundredth power) believed that cultivation, planting, and herding would provide them with more food and better lives. The Agricultural Revolution was a literal revolution in the way humans lived.
The Agricultural Revolution started around 9000 B.C. in what is today modern Turkey, Syria, and Iran. Wheat and goats were domesticated by approximately 9000 B.C.; peas and lentils around 8000 B.C.; olive trees by 5000 B.C.; horses by 4000 B.C.; and grapevines by 3500 B.C. Today, more than 90 percent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 B.C.—wheat, rice, corn, potatoes, millet, and barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last two thousand years. From the Middle East, agriculture spread far and wide. By the first century A.D., the vast majority of people throughout most of the world were farmers. As historical anthropologist Yuval Harari recounts, “If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient farmers.”18
Historians once believed that the Agricultural Revolution was a massive advance for humankind. The narrative goes something like this: “Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people. Eventually, people were so smart that they were able to decipher nature’s secrets, enabling them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat. As soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandoned the grueling, dangerous, and often spartan life of hunter-gatherers, settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers.”19
That idyllic vision is nothing more than a modern Excel slave’s bucolic fantasy. Instead of bringing a new era of better living, the Agricultural Revolution brought farmers more difficult and less satisfying lives than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time on more interesting and diverse activities and were in less danger of starvation. The Agricultural Revolution increased
the amount of food at the disposal of humans, but the extra food did not always translate into better nutrition or more freedom. Instead, this extra food led to population explosions and wealth accumulation for a select few, those who would become the kings, emperors, and priests. The average farmer worked harder and longer than the average forager and in return received a worse diet and a worse life. As Guns, Germs, and Steel author Jared Diamond would put it, the Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.20
Some argue that the handful of plants that humans purportedly domesticated actually domesticated us. It is these plants (wheat, rice, corn, potatoes, millet, and barley) that transformed us from nutritionally balanced, freely roaming foragers into the forebears for obesity, diabetes, and deskbound death.
At the start of the Agricultural Revolution, wheat was just a wild grass confined to a small range in the Middle East. By the advent of Christianity, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains, where not a single wheat stalk grew ten thousand years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, an area slightly larger than Saudi Arabia.21
For twenty-first-century Americans, corn is even more of a modern miracle of domestication. It’s one we take for granted every day, multiple times per day—because in some way, shape, or form, corn has found its way into almost everything we eat. And that is not a good thing. But more on that in the next chapter. For now, how did this bizarre Mexican grass go from the obscure to the omnipresent?
A Corny History
Ten thousand years ago, the earliest Mexicans were learning how to master maize, or what we call corn. Scientists working during the first part of the twentieth century uncovered evidence that they believed linked maize to what, at first glance, would seem to be a very unlikely parent: a Mexican grass called teosinte.22 Researchers discovered that all maize was genetically most similar to a type of teosinte from the tropical Central Balsas River Valley of southern Mexico, suggesting that this region was the cradle of corn evolution. By calculating the genetic distance between modern maize and Balsas teosinte, they estimated that domestication occurred about nine thousand years ago.23
The most crucial step in the domestication process was freeing the teosinte kernels from their stony cases. Another step was developing plants where the kernels remained intact on the cobs, unlike the teosinte ears, which shatter into individual kernels. Early cultivators had to notice among their stands of plants variants in which the nutritious kernels were at least partially exposed, or whose ears held together better, or that had more rows of kernels, and they had to selectively breed them. It is estimated that the initial domestication process that produced the maize that forms the basis of what we know today required a few thousand years.24
Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of corn. From clearing to plowing to picking to watering and fighting off pesky animals and bugs, humans had not evolved for such tasks. We were adapted to climbing trees, killing snakes, and burrowing for bugs, not to farming. Even more disruptive, farming required so much time and diligence that people were forced to live next to their cornfields—forever. Over the course of a couple of thousand years, we went from climbing trees to cleaning corncobs.
Corn convinced ancient Americans to exchange a relatively good and freedom-filled life for a more miserable and domesticated existence. Corn did not offer a better diet. Wild grains made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the Agricultural Revolution, and a diet based on any one grain is nutritionally poor. Corn didn’t help people gain more food security either. Farmers rely on a small number of plants for their livelihood, and if those plants fail, the farmers tend to fail as well. And failure for farmers was no hasty retreat from a marauding savannah lion—rather it often meant widespread famine and death. And farming corn also didn’t lead to a reduction in intertribal violence. Actually, it was just the opposite. As farmers literally and proverbially planted seeds, they acquired more stuff. Instead of being able to pack up and move camp at the sign of violence like foragers, farmers had to fight in order to defend their homes, fields, equipment, and food stores.25
Agriculture offered very little for humans as individuals, but farming was a great leap forward for humans as a species. Farming allowed the human population to boom by growing more food per square foot than was ever possible without cultivation. More food meant more people. Humans were sicker and less happy, but we were able to multiply—and that is ultimately how you win the game of evolution. Winning for a modern-day business is defined by scale and growth. The same is true for the evolutionary success of humanity. If a species stops expanding and multiplying, eventually it goes extinct, just as a company without profits and growth eventually goes bankrupt.
This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions. Yet why should individuals care about this evolutionary calculus? Why would any sane person lower his or her standard of living just to multiply the number of copies of the human genome? Nobody agreed to this deal: The Agricultural Revolution was a trap.26
The CRAP Trap
As more effort was directed toward cultivation, there was less time to hunt and gather, and the foragers became farmers. By 8500 B.C., Mexico and parts of the modern-day United States were peppered with permanent villages that were tied to corn farming.27
With the move to permanent villages and the increase in food supply, the population soared. Babies were fed on corn porridge in addition to breast milk, which meant that women could have more children. As people began living in disease-ridden settlements, as children fed more on cereals and less on mother’s milk, and as each child competed for his or her food with more and more siblings, child mortality soared. In most agricultural societies, at least one out of every three children died before reaching twenty. Yet the increase in births still outpaced the increase in deaths; humans kept having larger numbers of children.28
The average person in 5,000 B.C. lived a harder life than the average person in 15,000 B.C. It’s pretty wild to think that ten thousand years of evolution and “progress” actually led to a regression in happiness and health. But our ancestors didn’t realize what was happening. Small changes and “improvements” that were supposed to make life easier and better actually made life much worse.
Does this sound familiar? To me, it sounds a lot like what happened over the course of the twentieth century, which we’ll get to in a few pages. As the Agricultural Revolution unfolded, the promise and pursuit of an easier, better, more convenient life actually resulted in unhappiness, stress, and poor health. This same process afflicts us today.
When I left the Marine Corps, I drank the Kool-Aid and went to Wall Street. I told myself I would work hard to earn money and that by the time I was forty I would retire to pursue my passions. However, what I saw on the trading desk disabused me of this vision. The forty-year-olds on my trading floor had seven-figure mortgages, children in private schools, multiple cars with expensive monthly lease obligations, and a general addiction to the finer things in life that is commonly referred to as the Goldman handcuffs. And it’s not entirely their fault. What are they supposed to do, go back to farming?
One of the beautiful curses of being human is that we can adapt to anything, both good and bad. This is good because it allowed my dad’s family to survive Nazi concentration camps and long periods of starvation and hardship. This is bad because convenience becomes routine—we get used to a certain luxury, and eventually, we take it for granted. We’ll talk about this more in chapter 9 when we discuss the hedonic treadmill. Eventually, we reach a point where we can’t live without it. Processed foods are the perfect example of
what I call the CRAP Trap.
Over the last fifty years, fast food was invented to make life easier and better. Previously, it took a lot of work to plant, nurture, and grow food, harvest it, take it to market, barter, shop, carry it home, prepare it, cook it, and serve it warm to your family. It took months to run this process from end to end. The advent of the drive-through allowed us to get food without all the hassle in a matter of minutes. We’ve saved all that trouble and time, but do we live a more relaxed, healthier, happier life? We definitely save time, but few would argue that it’s worth the ultimate price we pay.
Today, the occasional antitechnologist refuses to shop at a grocery store or eat at a restaurant, just as historically some humans refused to farm. But the Agricultural Revolution didn’t need every tribe to take part. It only needed one. Once one group settled down and started cultivating, whether in the Middle East or Mexico, agriculture was unstoppable. Since farming led to massive population growth, farmers had more bodies and hands to fight against hunter-gatherers. The foragers could either run away or start farming themselves.29
The story of the CRAP Trap is the story of how we allowed food to become so broken. Our search for an easier life transformed the world in ways nobody could imagine. Nobody planned the Agricultural Revolution or our dependence on farming. Many small decisions aimed at filling our stomachs more conveniently had the cumulative effect of forcing our ancestors to be less healthy and happy. As monumental as the Agricultural Revolution was, the twenty-first-century Industrial Food Revolution would change the face (and waistline) of humanity in an even more dramatic way.