by Tom Standage
Accordingly, almost none of the food we eat today can truly be described as natural. Nearly all of it is the result of selective breeding—unwitting at first, but then more deliberate and careful as farmers propagated the most valuable characteristics found in the wild to create new, domesticated mutants better suited to human needs. Corn, cows, and chickens as we know them do not occur in nature, and they would not exist today without human intervention. Even orange carrots are man-made. Carrots were originally white and purple, and the sweeter orange variety was created by Dutch horticulturalists in the sixteenth century as a tribute to William I, Prince of Orange. An attempt by a British supermarket to reintroduce the traditional purple variety in 2002 failed, because shoppers preferred the selectively bred orange sort.
All domesticated plants and animals are man-made technologies. What is more, almost all of the domesticated plants and animals on which we now rely date back to ancient times. Most of them had been domesticated by 2000 B.C., and very few have been added since. Of the fourteen large animals to have been domesticated only one, the reindeer, was domesticated in the past thousand years; and it is of marginal value (tasty though it is). The same goes for plants: Blueberries, strawberries, cranberries, kiwis, macadamia nuts, pecans, and cashews have all been domesticated relatively recently, but none is a significant foodstuff.
Only aquatic species have been domesticated in significant quantities in the past century. In short, early farmers managed to domesticate most of the plants and animals worth bothering with many thousands of years ago. That may explain why domesticated plants and animals are so widely assumed to be natural, and why contemporary efforts to refine them further using modern genetic-engineering techniques attract such criticism and provoke such fear. Yet such genetic engineering is arguably just the latest twist in a field of technology that dates back more than ten thousand years. Herbicide-tolerant maize does not occur in nature, it is true—but nor does any other kind of maize.
The simple truth is that farming is profoundly unnatural. It has done more to change the world, and has had a greater impact on the environment, than any other human activity. It has led to widespread deforestation, environmental destruction, the displacement of “natural” wildlife, and the transplanting of plants and animals thousands of miles from their original habitats. It involves the genetic modification of plants and animals to create monstrous mutants that do not exist in nature and often cannot survive without human intervention. It overturned the hunter-gatherer way of life that had defined human existence for tens of thousands of years, prompting humans to exchange a varied, leisurely existence of hunting-and-gathering for lives of drudgery and toil. Agriculture would surely not be allowed if it were invented today. And yet, for all its faults, it is the basis of civilization as we know it. Domesticated plants and animals form the very foundations of the modern world.
PART II
FOOD AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE
3
FOOD, WEALTH, AND POWER
Wealth is hard to come by, but poverty is always at hand.
—MESOPOTAMIAN PROVERB, 2000 B.C.
TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SAILOR
The Standard Professions List is a document from the dawn of civilization, inscribed in the characteristic wedge-shaped indentations of cuneiform script on small clay tablets. The earliest versions, dating from around 3200 B.C., were found in the city of Uruk (modern-day Erech) in Mesopotamia, the region where writing and cities first emerged. Many copies exist, since it was a standard text that was used to teach scribes. The list consists of 129 professions, always written in the same order, with the most important at the top. Entries include “supreme judge,” “mayor,” “sage,” “courtier,” and “overseer of the messengers,” though the meaning of many entries is unknown. The list illustrates that the population of Uruk, probably the biggest city on earth at the time, was stratified into different specialist professions, some more important than others. This was a big change from the villages of farmers that had emerged in the region around five thousand years earlier. Food lay at the root of this transformation.
The switch from small, egalitarian villages to big, socially stratified cities was made possible by an intensification of agriculture in which part of the population produced more food than was needed for its own subsistence. This surplus food could then be used to sustain others—so not everyone had to be a farmer anymore. In Uruk, only around 80 percent of the population were farmers. They tended fields that surrounded the city in a vast circle, ten miles in radius. Their surplus production was appropriated by a ruling elite at the top of society, which redistributed some of it and consumed the rest. This stratification of society, made possible by agricultural food surpluses, happened not just in Mesopotamia but in every part of the world where farming was adopted. It was the second important way in which food helped to transform the nature of human existence. With agriculture, people settled down; with intensification, they divided into rich and poor, rulers and farmers.
The idea that people have different jobs or professions, and that some are richer than others, is taken for granted today. But for most of human existence this was not the case. Most hunter-gatherers, and then early farmers, were of comparable wealth and spent their days doing the same things as the other people in the same community. We are used to thinking of food as something that brings people together, either literally around the table at a social gathering, or metaphor ical ly through a shared regional or cultural cuisine. But food can also divide and separate. In the ancient world, food was wealth, and control of food was power.
As with the adoption of farming, the changes in food production and the associated transformation of social structures took place simultaneously and were intertwined. A ruling elite did not suddenly appear and demand that everyone else work harder in the fields; nor did greater productivity produce a sudden surplus to be fought over, with the winner crowned king. Instead, the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle meant that previous constraints on individuals’ ability to amass goods and cultivate prestige, both of which are frowned upon by hunter-gatherers, no longer applied. Even so, the emergence of more complex societies took some time: In Mesopotamia, the shift from simple villages to complex cities took five millennia, and it also took thousands of years in China and the Americas.
Control of food was power because food literally kept everything going, by feeding humans and animals. Appropriating the food surplus from farmers gave ruling elites the means to sustain full-time scribes, soldiers, and specialist craft workers. It also meant that a certain proportion of the population could be pressed into service on construction projects, since the farmers who remained on the land would provide enough food for everyone. So a store of surplus food conferred upon its owner the power to do all kinds of new things: wage wars, build temples and pyramids, and support the production of elaborate craft items by specialist sculptors, weavers, and metalworkers. But to understand the origins of food power it is necessary to start by examining the structure of hunter-gatherer societies, and to ask why people had previously regarded the accumulation of food and power to be so dangerous and destabilizing—and why this changed.
ANCIENT EGALITARIANS
Hunter-gatherers may only have had to spend two days a week foraging for things to eat, but their lives were nonetheless ruled by food. Bands of hunter-gatherers have to be nomadic, moving every few weeks once the food resources within range of each temporary camp start to become depleted. Every time the group moves, it has to take all of its possessions with it. The need to carry everything limits individuals’ ability to accumulate material goods. An inventory by modern anthropologists of a family of African hunter-gatherers, for example, found that they collectively owned a knife, a spear, bow and arrows, a wrist guard, a net, baskets, an adze, a whistle, a flute, castanets, a comb, a belt, a hammer, and a hat. Few families in the developed world could list all their possessions in a single short sentence. These items were, furthermore, collectively ow
ned and freely shared. Rather than having everyone carry his or her own knife or spear, it makes more sense to share such items, since some people can then carry other things, such as nets or bows. Bands in which items were shared would have been more flexible and more likely to survive than bands in which items were jealously guarded by individuals. So bands in which there was social pressure to share things would have proliferated.
The obligation to share also extended to food. Modern hunter-gatherers often have a rule that anyone who brings food back to the camp has to share it with anyone else who asks. This rule provides insurance against food shortages, for not everyone can be sure to find enough food on a given day, and even the best hunters can only expect to kill an animal every few days. If everyone is selfish and insists on keeping their own food to themselves, most people will be hungry most of the time. Sharing ensures that the food supply is evened out and most people have enough to eat most of the time. Ethnographic evidence from modern hunter-gatherers shows that some groups have even more elaborate rules to enforce sharing. In some cases a hunter is not even allowed to help himself to food from his own kill (though a family member will ensure that some food is passed to him indirectly). Similarly, trying to claim a patch of land, and its associated food resources, is not allowed. Such rules ensure that the risks and rewards of hunting and gathering are shared throughout the group. Historically, bands that practiced food sharing were more likely to survive than those that did not: Competition for resources tends to encourage overexploitation, and ownership disputes would have caused bands to fragment. Once again, food sharing predominated because it conferred clear advantages upon bands that adopted it.
All of this meant that hunter-gatherers did not try to accumulate status goods to enhance their personal prestige. Why bother, since such goods would have had to have been shared with others? It is not until the advent of agriculture that the first indications of wealth or private ownership appear. As one anthropologist noted, having observed hunter-gatherers in Africa:
A Bushman will go to any lengths to avoid making other Bushmen jealous of him, and for this reason the few possessions the Bushmen have are constantly circling among members of their groups. No one cares to keep a particularly good knife long, even though he may want it desperately, because he will become the object of envy; as he sits by himself polishing a fine edge on the blade he will hear the soft voices of the other men in his band saying: “Look at him there, admiring his knife while we have nothing.” Soon somebody will ask him for his knife, for everybody would like to have it, and he will give it away. Their culture insists that they share with each other, and it has never happened that a Bushman failed to share objects, food or water with other members of his band, for without very rigid co-operation Bushmen could not survive the famines and droughts that the Kalahari offers them.
Hunter-gatherers are also suspicious of self-promotion and attempts to create obligation. The !Kung Bushmen, for example, believe that the ideal hunter should be modest and understated. After returning from the hunt he must downplay his achievements, even if he has killed a large animal. When the men go to fetch the kill, they then express their disappointment at its size: “What, you made us come all this way for this bag of bones?” The hunter is expected to play along, and not to be offended. All of this is intended to prevent the hunter from regarding himself as superior. As one !Kung Bushman explained to a visiting ethnographer: “When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”
To further complicate matters, the !Kung have a tradition that the meat from a kill belongs to the owner of the arrow that killed it, rather than the hunter who fired it. (If two or more arrows bring down the kill, the meat belongs to the owner of the first arrow.) Since the men routinely exchange arrows, this makes grandstanding by individual hunters even less likely. Particularly skilled hunters are thus prevented from cultivating prestige for themselves by conferring large amounts of food on others and so creating an obligation.
Quite the opposite, in fact: When a hunter has had a run of good luck and produced a lot of food, he might stop hunting for a few weeks in order to give others the chance to do well, and so avoid any possibility of resentment. Taking a few weeks off also means the hunter can allow others to provide him with food, so that there is no question of an outstanding obligation to him.
Richard Borshay Lee, a Canadian anthropologist who lived with a group of !Kung on several research trips during the 1960s, ran afoul of these rules when he tried to thank his hosts by holding a feast for them. He bought a large, plump ox for the purpose and was surprised when the Bushmen began to ridicule him for having chosen an animal that was too old, too thin, or would be too tough to eat. In the event, however, the meat from the ox turned out to be tasty and tender after all. So why had the Bushmen been so critical? “The !Kung are a fiercely egalitarian people and have a low tolerance for arrogance, stinginess and aloofness among their own people,” Lee concluded. “When they see signs of such behaviour among their fellows, they have a range of humility-enforcing devices to bring people back into line.” The !Kung, like other hunter-gatherers, regard lavish gifts as an attempt to exert control over others, curry political support, or raise one’s own status, all of which run counter to their culture. Their strict egalitarianism can be regarded as a “social technology” developed to ensure social harmony and a reliable supply of food for everyone.
Food determines the structure of hunter-gatherer society in other ways, too. The size of hunter-gatherer bands, for example, depends on the availability of food resources within walking distance of the camp. Too large a band depletes the surrounding area more quickly, which makes it necessary to move the camp more often and means the band needs a larger territory. As a result, band sizes vary between six to twelve people in areas where food is scarce and twenty-five to fifty people in areas with more abundant resources. The bands consist of one or more extended families, and because of intermarriage most members of the band are related to each other. Bands generally do not have leaders, though some people may have particular roles in addition to the traditional male and female tasks of hunting and gathering, respectively, such as healing, making weapons, or negotiating with other bands. But there are no full-time specialists, and these particular skills do not confer a higher social status.
Hunter-gatherer bands maintain alliances with other bands, to provide both marriage partners and further insurance against food shortages. In the event of a shortage one band can then visit another to which it is related by marriage and share some of its food. Inter-group sharing in the form of large feasts also takes place at times of seasonal food overabundance. Such feasts appear to be universal among hunter-gatherers and provide an opportunity to arrange marriages, perform social rituals, sing, and dance. Food thus binds hunter-gatherer societies together, forging links both within bands and between bands.
That said, it is important not to over-romanticize the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The “discovery” of surviving hunter-gatherer bands by Europeans in the eighteenth century led to the creation of the idealized portrait of the “noble savage” living in an unspoiled Eden. When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed the doctrine of communism in the nineteenth century, they were inspired in part by the “primitive communism” of hunter-gatherer societies described by Lewis H. Morgan, an American anthropologist who studied Native American societies. But even though the hunter-gatherer life was more leisurely and egalitarian than most people’s lives are today, it was not always idyllic. Infanticide was used as a means of population control, and there was routine and widespread conflict between hunter-gatherer bands, with evidence of violent death and even cannibalism in some cases. The notion that hunter-gatherers lived in a perfect and peaceful world is beguiling but wrong. Even so it is clear that the structure of
hunter-gatherer society, which was chiefly determined by the nature of the food supply, was strikingly different from that of modern societies. So when people took up farming, and the nature of the food supply was transformed, everything changed.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE “BIG MAN”
As people began to settle down and hunting and gathering shaded into farming, the first villages were still broadly egalitarian communities. Archaeological evidence shows that the earliest such villages, typically inhabited by no more than one hundred people, were made up of huts or houses of similar shape and size. But settlement and agriculture changed the rules that had previously discouraged people from pursuing wealth and status. The social mechanisms that had been developed to suppress man’s inherent tendencies toward hierarchical organization (clearly visible in apes and many other animal species) began to erode. Once you are no longer moving around, it starts to become possible to amass surplus food and other goods. The first signs of social differentiation begin to appear: villages in which some dwellings are larger than others and contain prestige items such as rare shells or ornate carved items, and burial grounds in which some graves contain valuable grave goods and others from the same period do not. All of this implies that the concept of private property quickly became accepted—there is no point in owning status goods if you have to share them—and a social hierarchy started to emerge in which some people were richer than others.