How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization by Richard Manning
What to do with all this grain?
What did we lose when we went from roaming the earth in social bands searching for food to settling down in one place to cultivate crops and raise animals? We went from a community partaking of a varied diet that supported one another when the hunt was good to one where wealth and power belonged to those with the biggest grain storage bins, animals are treated abominably, and the majority of our calories come from grains. Grains become the ultimate commodity: easily stockpiled and providing dense carbohydrate energy but poor nutrition.
This is not to say that hunter-gatherers did not experience need, hard times, even starvation just as all other animals do. We would be hard-pressed, however, to find communities of any social animal except modern humans in which an individual in a community has access to fifty, a hundred, a thousands times, or even twice as many resources as another. Yet such communities are the rule among post-agricultural humans.
I don’t believe this book sets out to offer solutions to the problem of agriculture, but it does a fine job in journalist style of putting forth the various elements that led to the adoption of agriculture and the problems it is causing both humans and the planet. Manning covers such diverse subjects as the development of the human brain, famine, cannibalism, diseases of agriculture, food taboos and fads, and how grains came to dominate the American landscape.
When we look at agriculture today, we see a small number of industrial giants growing rich from the production of a few grains–wheat, corn, and rice–along with hay and the starchy potato. Science and industry concentrate their efforts on maximizing the potential of these commodities through genetic modification, fertilization, and improvements in cultivation and harvesting. Small farms are no longer self-determined producers benefiting their communities, but are serfs at the whim and mercy of commodity buyers–and they’re disappearing.
This is a book not just about agriculture but about the fundamental dehumanization that occurred with agriculture. It will argue that most of humanity struck a bitter bargain over the past ten thousand years, trading in a large measure of our sensual lives for the bit of security that comes with agriculture.
These tax-supported commodities aren’t foods that feed people but grains that are grown in excess, traded, fed to livestock, put in every conceivable packaged product, and then dumped on underdeveloped nations putting local farmers out of business and causing malnourishment and obesity. The concentration of farm land into grain production led to such policies as adding ethanol to fuel and the development of USDA food pyramid. The food pyramid doesn’t reflect nutritional need but the interests of food producers benefiting from the glut.
Manning writes: “I have come to think of agriculture not as farming, but as a dangerous and consuming beast of a social system.” I have to agree. Farming to me is the practice of working with the land to produce food that nourishes people, food that can be directly eaten and not processed into something else. Farming is community. Agriculture is exploitation. Perhaps after reading this book you’ll believe that also.
Buy Against the Grain from Amazon.
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Nice summary, Joanne.
This is confirmation bias on my part, of course, but I recently posted in a similar vein over at my new blog. It’s hard to make a dent in conventional wisdom, but if we keep pounding, some will be found who posses an ‘ear to hear’.