Food is fun. We all think about food a lot. After all, where would we be without it? But beyond that, cuisine is fun, flavourful, a universal field for human creativity and artistry. In many cultures, prominently including our own, food brings family and friends together to prepare it, and to enjoy it together around the table. In other societies, the hunting or gathering party itself is an important social event. While modern Western culture puts less emphasis on the social aspects of going after food, many of us still relish hunting, fishing, gardening, even for some shopping.
On The Dark Side. But food also has its darker sides in our culture, embodied in factory farms and feedlots; in profligate use of fossil fuels to produce it; in processing that removes natural nutrients and in many ways turns the raw food product into materials that are cheap, tasty, unhealthy and even addictive; in the heedless brutality of much of our meat production; in careless use of pesticides, hormones, and fertilizers; in salmon farms that pollute and deplete wild salmon populations; in GMOs that do God knows what to us and our environment; in extravagance and waste and ignorance about where our food comes from and what its real costs are.
# | # | #
Food and Our Culture. All that means that we have a cultural problem, in the deepest sense of the word, about food. It’s right in front of our eyes every time we drive to the supermarket and buy a shrink-wrapped steak, a GMO soybean product, or a clump of bananas from Ecuador; yet it remains (and indeed is kept) hidden. I’ll offer it in a nutshell. (Of course, it won’t really fit in a nutshell; it’s a big, complicated problem). But here’s the nutshell version anyway: Our modern food system, how we sustain our biological being, the way we eat, is inequitable and unsustainable. Food is one of the great necessities of life, and one of its great enjoyments. Let’s get it right.
Like most cultural problems, but more clearly than many others, this one is rooted in biology. Food connects us to the physical and ecological grounds of our being even more directly than many other things do. When you think about food the mind can run off into many different directions, but one of them leads to soil and water, to weather and seasons, to honey bees that fertilize flowers and soil bacteria that feed plant roots. And pretty soon you realize that unless science-fiction dreams of colonizing outer space become real, we have to get real here on Earth.
Getting Real. We have to get along with everything else as one strand of the intricate web of life on this Earth. Earthly life would continue just fine without us; but we can only exist within it. So it only makes sense that we need to sustain that which sustains us; but we aren’t doing that—not well enough, anyway, to keep out of trouble.
# | # | #
Food and the Tap-Root of Civilization. As usual, it’s really interesting and informative to dig down into the roots of our current problems. Again as usual, many of those roots—indeed a major tap-root—goes right down to the agricultural revolution roughly ten thousand years ago. Agriculture made possible the growth of cities and civilization beginning about five thousand years ago. Those two events, the invention of agriculture and the birth of civilization, together were a major turning point in human evolution the fallout from which we’re still trying to understand, grapple with, and control today. Five to ten thousand years ago, though! That seem like an awfully long time to think about. But let’s put it in perspective.
Through the long expanse of human evolutionary history (fifty thousand years at the barest minimum, or two hundred thousand, or six hundred thousand, depending on what criteria you use to define “human), hunting-gathering societies lived as directly, locally, part of the webs of life in which they evolved. That was our beginning, and it went on that way for a very, very long time—all but the latest small fraction of the time we’ve been on the Earth, in fact. It was the way of life in which and for which we evolved as highly social, highly communicative, and eventually cultural beings.
It’s important to remember that—to be aware of our beginnings as we try to understand ourselves and our current challenges. The time we’re most concerned with here—since the invention of agriculture and the rise of cities and states—represents only a tiny fraction of our species’ time on Earth. Indeed, much of the world still subsisted by hunting and gathering well into modern times, and a few tribes in the remote areas of the globe still largely do so.
# | # | #
The Mother of All Unintended Consequences. The inventions (it happened independently in different places) of agriculture must have seemed like the merest common sense to people who simply, here and there, began to care for and purposefully propagate the seed grasses and other species that they gathered. It thus began simply enough.
In the course of daily living, some foraging groups began to manage favoured wild species more intensively. After a long time, some of these species gradually became cultivated crops and domesticated animals that human communities had modified from their wild ancestors by selection, and on which they now primarily depended. That transition from hunting and gathering to sedentary agriculturally-based subsistence didn’t happen all at once; and each incremental step along the way must have seemed like minor additions to their ongoing ways of securing food for their family and tribe.
That shift from simple foraging to full-blown agriculture took a long time measured by the span of a human life, but it happened in the blink of an eye in evolutionary perspective. Similarly, the implications of that fateful transition took a long time to play out on the time-scale of human experience, but represent only the last few moments of our cultural history.
After hundreds of thousands of years, suddenly, everything speeds up. And now we have New York City and Hong Kong, cars, jets, nuclear bombs, epidemics, and over-population. Talk about unintended consequences!
Why was agriculture such a fateful turning point? When humans began cultivating and breeding crops, and domesticating animals, we stopped living as part of the natural world and instead began controlling nature, putting ourselves above the webs of life in and from which we emerged.
Of course, that can only ever be relatively so, however much increasingly sophisticated technologies tempt us to feel that we’ve truly “conquered nature” or some such nonsense. But the invention of agriculture and the subsequent growth of cities was, nevertheless, a momentous turning point. I think of it as the fulcrum of human history.
(But then, the scientific revolution only about five hundred years ago also was a major fulcrum of history as well—more on that later. Don’t want to bite off more than we can chew. It’s enough here to register that both of these events powerfully changed how we relate to nature, and our experience and understanding of being human.)
A Question. For now, let’s just keep in mind how the seemingly simple, everyday, immediately practical choices of our ancestors had truly momentous repercussions. That began after tens or even hundreds of thousands of years when humans, quite late, finally began to seriously intervene in the natural systems and cycles that supported them. When they did that, they set up new relationships, new interactive feedback dynamics, in their interactions with the natural world. As far as they were concerned, in the moment, on the surface, they just used their natural powers of observation and foresight to ensure incrementally more reliable and abundant supplies. Why not, if you can? It only makes sense.
But from our standpoint in the present, with hindsight, we see that with the advent of agriculture our ancestors took the fateful step of intervening in systems of great complexity, of which they themselves were part. They assumed control of certain ecological dynamics without understanding their effects on the whole system. They didn’t really know or understand what they were doing, nor what the consequences would be. Are we continuing to do the same thing today, equally blindly, on ever larger and more consequential scales?
Maybe not quite. We’re beginning to understand what we’re doing, what we make ourselves responsible for, when we try to seize control of ecological systems of which we’re one part.
# | # | #
But Don’t Worry. … ? Agricultural societies get along with nature in different ways. Some traditional societies learned over the centuries to live within their ecological means. Others didn’t learn, and collapsed. Yet others, of which we are the latest manifestation, also didn’t learn to live within their means but survived—even thrived—by growing and expanding into new territories and raking in new resources. The latter option seems great for a while; but the problem is that it can only go on for so long. It’s not sustainable in the long run. Throughout the history of civilization we see empires rise and fall. We in the modern West are the (so far) globally dominant end-product of five thousand years of expansionary civilization—a realization that gives food for thought—a lot of thought.
But, darn it, don’t worry! We’re different from all the others: smarter, more advanced, far more technologically sophisticated, able to fix any problem we put our minds to. Aren’t we? Surely, of all the others, We have achieved the end of history. Haven’t We alone finally risen above the nasty undertows of human history that drag other civilizations down and bury them under the treacherous waters and shifting sands of time?
Maybe not. A closer look at the dynamics behind those nasty undertows of history is not so reassuring.
The Technology-Ecology Spiral. A particular, out-of-balance, positive feedback dynamic that operates between its technology and its ecology drives expansionary civilization. Technological advances (agriculture, for instance) make it possible for a society to exploit its local environment more effectively. That inevitably causes problems, one answer to which is the search for further technological fixes. As newsman Eric Sevaried tersely put it, “the cause of problems is solutions.” In his book wonderfully titled The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006, p.148), Michael Pollan offers a familiar example. “When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know,” he writes,
“a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine.”
Then, the problems caused by pesticides lead to even more technological fixes, such as genetic engineering for pesticide resistance, or regulatory controls which require more bureaucracy and breed social conflict and resentment against government. The technological fixes require ever more complex machinery and organizations. And so it goes: The technology-ecology spiral in action as a primary engine of social/cultural evolution.
Along with its creation of solutions that cause problems, the technology-ecology spiral, archeologists have found, also tends toward more hierarchical, centralized, and militaristic societies. Technological interventions in natural systems that evolved over many millions of years cause ecological problems. One tempting “fix” for these problems is more technology; the other is expansion, growth. “We’ll just grow beyond the problem, get our neighbor’s resources, or move somewhere else.” The more effective expansionary civilizations (Europe and European North America, for example, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to now) conquer and absorb the others. That expansionary process generates—both makes possible and requires—ever more effective means to discipline and control people as the state gets ever larger and more diverse. So, the technology-ecology spiral becomes a (I think probably the) major engine of cultural evolution.
In later times the expansionary states’ economic control of resources and populations reaches beyond—far beyond—its own political boundaries. That requires a strong military. Then, once the economic system is forcefully put in place it becomes a powerfully coercive and disciplining force in its own right—as economic historians and anthropologists have noted for decades, and Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine (2008) recently exhaustively documents for current issues and broader audiences).
The positive feedback dynamics of the technology-ecology spiral work well for the expansionary society—so long, at least, as it can find new territories or markets to expand into, it has the power to quell resistance by the natives, and the problems caused by new technological fixes remain themselves fixable by further technology. We may have reached a tipping point, however, where these conditions don’t hold any longer. Increasing numbers of leading scientists fear that this is so. The ecological and social problems we’re causing affect the globe and get ever more tightly coupled. Mere technological fixes won’t solve complex systemic problems like climate change, species extinction, and growing inequality. Brute expansion is largely off the books now too. New geographical frontiers are closed or closing—that’s one thing that globalization means. Unlike Columbus’s day, the global community now frowns on genocide and occupation.
It seems that, maybe, finally, we must come to grips with the underlying dynamics of the relationships between human culture and its environment that give rise to the “growth imperative.”
# | # | #
Thinking About Food. Well, let’s leave it there for now. In summary, there is a lot to think about food. Thinking about food opens a doorway directly to a fundamental social/ecological dynamic that is at the root of our current crisis. It’s a dynamic not just of capitalism, nor communism, nor any other current “ism.” It’s a dynamic of civilization; and the crisis we are in is truly a crisis of civilization itself. Along with their physical and social pleasures, the simple acts of buying food, fixing it, and eating it, can open our hearts to thinking more deeply about our complicated relationships with the living Earth that we are in and of.