Chapter 2: Farming is fun!
As far back as this agriculture and settlements already brought on several consequences for humans we are still seeing today – social inequality, declining nutrition, a rise in infectious diseases and religion. Not all bad since it also brought things like advancement in knowledge, trade, art, technology and religion. (yes, I added religion twice)
This happening at the same time all over the world in one form or another, brought on by the warmer climate as the Ice Age were now becoming something of the past. All over the world we saw more and more the cultivation of grasses – rye, wheat, corn, rice and more.
We are still bonking like Bonobo’s, but with the high availability and ease of creating food (no more running around picking berries in the wild where carnivores are waiting to make you their next meal, or hunting a huge animal who would fight back) this led to a population growth within these settlements.
Another effect started to raise its ugly head, now on the environment for the first time, since Mr. and Missus Hunter/Gather would stay in an area, consume some berries and ate some animals, then moved on, leaving the area to regenerate itself. 5000 hectares was needed to support 1 hunter gatherer; the same area could now support 5000 humans.
Our settlement farming ancestors stayed in one place, manipulating the environment to grow their crops and herd their animals. The degradation of the soil and environmental impact became such a problem that it played a major role later on in the fall of one of the most technological advanced civilizations that the world has ever seen up to that point – the Roman Empire.
This went on for several thousands of years till around the 1500’s when things became more interesting. Now there are 461 million of us (remember the 10 million we started with) and farmers/settlers used their “new” acquired knowledge and technology from our growing brain to create more from less – a higher yield on a smaller area. We started replacing low yielding crops like rye with things like barley and wheat.
Where a hunter gatherer would eat around 100 grams of fiber each day, that dropped to 10 grams, and eating 600 different types of wild plants they got 10 times the amount of nutrients from wild plants compared to farmed. In every spoon full of raw organic food there is more microbes going into our gut than the whole population of New York. This led to zero cases found in our ancestors of things like cancer, heart, auto immune disease or diabetes.
By this time we started introducing fat into our diets, as our hunter gatherers ate wild animals, lean meat, we now raised our own which ate more and as we all know – fat equals flavor – and we start eating not only for sustenance and to survive, we started eating for pleasure. Apparently it is only eating and sex where you actually use all your senses at the same time – taste, smell, hear, touch and sight.
Everything is still fairly cool though, farmers started using crop rotation, fertilizers (all organic and natural realizing the benefit of nitrogen in manure) but then the word capitalism started coming to the fore.
Farmers, now becoming Business men, realized that they do not only have to feed those around them in their community, if they create more food, they could sell it to other communities and settlements. In conjunction with this they started to develop ways to preserve food – being able to keep food from when there is an abundance to when there is scarcity, and also to transport food over longer distances using different techniques – salting, drying, smoking and fermenting.
Fermentation of course my favorite – as it brought with it the creation of beer, wine and bread – the cornerstone of every nutritional breakfast…… As far as 10 million years ago it was found that animals, remember we are animals, consumed rotting fruit which sugars turned into alcohol. Production of beer and wine however had to wait for our brains to evolve, and evidence of this was found in 8000-year-old casks in Egyptian tombs. It was found that those ancient Egyptians actually had 17 different types of beer, and 24 different types of wine.
Something else that started happening was the cultivation of sugar. Before the cultivation of sugar, the sweet crave was satisfied by eating honey, and in some cases chewing on a reed like plant now known as sugar cane. The first refined sugar appeared 2500 years ago, and the dire need for us to consume sugar (which our bodies do not need, but crave) created an industry where today 27 million hectares of our planet is cover with it, and added to 80% of anything you buy in a supermarket.
We started using fermentation in making bread, where before wheat/rye was consumed in what we call flat breads. How do we know this? In hieroglyphics or ancient graffiti as I call it, and in aging of such, archeologists found that drawings went from people baking/eating flat breads, to people baking/eating bread that is much thicker, and sourdough was born.
People are now trading much more, where in the beginning of this period just about everybody was a farmer, down it went to only 20% of the population. The growth in capitalism led to the next big change in food production, around the mid 1700’s, which coincided with what we call today the Industrial revolution.
Chapter 3: Bring on the machines! (Coming soon)
“Ugly, barbaric, the worst of the worst human traits, insane, stupid, f’ed up – I am running out of words to describe war – many inventions stem from conflicts or the military as is the fact with canning. There is no evidence of Napoleon saying the well-known phrase “an army marches on its stomach” (what he did say was “To be effective, an army relies on good and plentiful food”) during the Napoleon wars the French government of the time offered a cash award of FRF 12,000 to any inventor who could devise a cheap and effective method of preserving large amounts of food.“