Domestication

The origins of domesticated plants and agriculture are buried in a dim and unrecorded past of 10,000 years and more. Recent experience with Stone Age cultures of the Amazon basin and elsewhere has shown that such cultures have a sophisticated knowledge of plants for such purposes as food, medicine, and the tools and poisons used for hunting and fishing. Amerindian cultures improved a wide range of species by deliberate selection of the more productive and useful forms. Manioc (Manihot utilissima) remains a staple of large sections of Latin America, especially Brazil and the Amazon basin. A woody tuberous plant whose origin in the savannas of South America has long been lost, it is propagated vegetatively by planting a piece of tuber or a segment of stem. The tuber is ground to make a flour that must be washed to remove toxic quantities of hydrocyanic acid before being eaten directly or baked into a flat bread called cazabi (cassava).

Corn, or maize (Zea mays), was domesticated about 10,000 years ago either from teosinte (a perennial Zea that exists today) or from a lost ancestor that existed in the highlands of what is now central Mexico. Its culture had spread as far north as southern Maine by the time of European settlement of North America. Corn is now the third largest plant-based food source in the world. Other plants domesticated from the region include the common bean, squash, chili, tomato, avocado, papaya, guava, sapodilla, cotton, sisal, and vanilla.

The process of domestication appears to have involved selection and cultivation of the most promising and productive of plants long harvested in the wild. Continued selection brought drastic shifts in the population, shifts in the frequency of genes, and the development of new races totally dependent on humans to maintain them. Races developed in this way have been called cultigens to emphasize their dependence on cultivation. Such is the case with corn: the original stock has probably been lost, although teosinte may offer clues as to the source.

Major crop plants have been domesticated over the last several thousand years from sources identified by the Russian botanist N.I. Vavilov. Common wheat (Triticum vulgare) and rye (Secale cereale) probably were first domesticated from the grasses of Central Asia. Various millets (Panicum) and barley (Hordeum hexastichum) originated in the mountainous regions of central and western China, rice (Oryza sativa) probably in the Indian region.

Domestication is not a concept that’s well understood by people who claim to be against it. I saw domestication as bringing animals and plants under human control and it was appalling to me, a short trajectory that ended in hens tormented in battery cages and primates brutalized in head injury experiments. Of course, my entire diet was composed of domesticates, with the exception of a serving or two of fiddlehead ferns every spring, but they were plants, so I simply didn’t think about it. It was the animals I wanted to save from human exploitation, and in the vegan outlook, exploitation begins with domestication.

There was an exact moment when that definition cracked open for me. It was six o’clock on a January morning, and well below zero. I had a half gallon of hot water to haul through three feet of ice-slick snow so that my chickens would have something to drink. Water had dripped into the doorjamb the warm day before and then frozen the door shut in the night. Never mind the long task involving screw-drivers, butter knives, and matches to unthaw the door. Somewhere between burning my palm and feeling a hideous blob of snow hit the back of my neck, I thought: I’ve had it backward all these years. I’m not exploiting them. They’re happy, safe, warm, and fed. I’m the one who’s miserable. Chickens won’t even walk in snow, let alone haul supplies to me. That wet drip sliding down my spine was like a cold jab of reality. Chickens have gotten humans to work for them. In exchange, they take care of us, but not by bringing us water. By providing food—meat and eggs—and a whole constellation of other activities useful for farms. It’s a partnership, and one that worked out well for both parties until factory-farming. The genome of the jungle fowl took a chance on humans and it was a gamble that paid off. We have carried chickens all over the globe, extending their range beyond the wildest dreams of a broody jungle fowl mom, ready and willing to give all to her eggs.

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The first requirement for domestication is a plant willing to stretch its genome to fit a human need. Humans harvest, unintentionally disburse, and protect the plant. These are activities common to hunter-gatherers, and they result in genetic changes to malleable, agreeable plants, like larger seeds and non-shattering rachises. Such plants become more attractive to, but also more dependent on, humans. David Rindos calls this stage incidental domestication. The next stage occurs when plants need humans to disperse them, and humans engage in specific behaviors to encourage the domesticate. Rindos calls this specialized domestication. The archaeological record shows corresponding changes in seed size, coatings, and dispersal mechanisms. The landscape also changes due to human activity, although these activities are still in the province of hunter-gatherers (usually burning and clearing). A diversity of wild plant species is still present as the domesticates do not provide enough sustenance and humans are still dependent on other resources. In the final stage, agricultural domestication, domesticates out-produce wild plants and humans engage in full-scale altering of environments for the sake of domesticates. At this point, species diversity plunges, and humans are dependent on fully domesticated plants and animals.

(From The Vegetarian Myth)