The Curse of Farming

That’s the how of agriculture. It doesn’t explain the why. Why would humans give up a life of near-perfect health and leisure for back-breaking labor and bad nutrition?

The transition to agriculture has long been celebrated ... as a major advance in civilization, but ... health deteriorated during the changeover. The advent of agriculture leaves almost forensic traces in bones and fecal remnants, evidence of crimes against the basic human template: malnutrition, osteomyelitis and periostitis (bone infections), intestinal parasites, yaws, syphilis, leprosy, tuberculosis, anemia (from poor diet as well as from hookworms), rickets in children, osteomalacia in adults, retarded childhood growth, and short stature among adults. Medical anthropologists can look at a bone and tell in a glance whether the subject lived in a hunter-gatherer or an agricultural society. The hunters look great. The farmers are falling apart.

And then there’s the endless effort. The average hunter-gatherer works seventeen hours a week, which leaves plenty of time for creative endeavors, spiritual concerns, gossiping, and the all-important nap. Agriculturalists work from dawn to dusk and then some, and even in modern America, with all our hallowed technology, the average US citizen works over forty hours a week, which doesn’t even include life maintenance tasks (traditionally assigned to women) like cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing. Beastly indeed. Why did humans do it?

Various theories have been put forward, but none of them have stood up to the facts. The one I learned in school was that human population pressure forced people to make their territories more productive. It would make sense if only it were true. If overpopulation were the stressor, then archaeologists would find the brittle, shrunken, and degenerated skeletons of the malnourished before evidence of agriculture, but they don’t. They find instead the long, strong, disease-free bones and teeth typical of hunter-gatherers. It’s after agriculture that human populations swelled past carrying capacity. Population pressure seems to have played no direct role in early stages of domestication, conclude Douglas T. Price and Anne Birgitte Gebauer.

The archaeologists need to talk to the pharmacologists. Bighorn sheep will chew their teeth down to the gums to eat psychoactive lichen off of rocks. Cattle will return to eat locoweed until it kills them. Birds get stoned on cannabis seeds, and jaguars eat the bark off the yaje vine to hallucinate. Elephants make wine from palm sap. Birds fill up on fermented berries until they’re drunk and disoriented enough to die by flying while intoxicated. Ducks seek out narcotic plants. Monkeys and dogs love opium smoke. Chimps will surmount their fear of fire to smoke cigarettes, and tobacco is addictive to a number of animals, including parrots, baboons, and hamsters. Reindeer will ignore food to pursue hallucinogenic mushrooms if they smell them in use by Lapp shamans. Now consider that the poppy was one of the first domesticated plants—and ain’t nobody harvesting those tiny little seeds to make a meal.

There are pharmacological substances in the annual domesticates called exorphins. They’re opioids, affecting the human brain the way that opium does. And yes, they are addictive. Milk, another agricultural food, also contains exorphins, though in much lesser quantities. G. Wadley and A. Martin, the researchers who developed this theory, state,

the ingestion of cereals and milk, in normal modern dietary amounts by normal humans, activates reward centres in the brain. Foods that were common in the diet before agriculture ... do not have this pharmacological property. The effects of exorphins are qualitatively the same as those produced by other opioid ... drugs, that is, reward, motivation, reduction of anxiety, a sense of well-being, and perhaps even addiction. Although the effects of the typical meal are quantitatively less than those of doses of those drugs, most modern humans experience them several times a day every day of their adult lives.

According to Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades, No one binges on steak or eggs or pork chops; they always binge on cookies and candies and other carbohydrate junk foods ... Cereal grains and products made from them have an allure that transcends the mere taste bud stimulation they provoke.

We did it because we got addicted, because those annual grains offered up a happy, chemical hit. Plants have been playing with chemistry for one hundred million years, trying out strategies to repel potential predators and attract potential helpers. They make substances like caffeine that dull the appetite, hallucinogens that initiate massive confusion, hormones to disrupt future reproduction, and frank poisons to kill, all amazing in their precision. They also experimented with chemicals to attract, and that provide bliss, ecstasy, spiritual insight, and (all hail the goddess Theobroma) stimulate pleasure centers. Too much of this and the potential animal helper is a useless addict. But just enough and the addict can do a lot for the plant—and will do what it takes to get more.

Like conquer the world.

[...]

This is what agriculture is: you take a piece of land and you clear every living thing off it, down to the bacteria. Then you plant it to human use with a tiny handful of species, often endless miles of a single plant like corn, soy, wheat. The animals are killed, often into extinction. They simply have nowhere to go. There were somewhere between 60 and 100 million bison in the United States in 1491. Now there are 350,000 bison, and only 12 to 15,000 of those are pure bison that were not crossbred with domestic cattle. The land held between 425,000 and a million wolves; only 10,000 now remain. Some species of ground-dwelling birds were wiped out before they even had names (European names, that is; I’m sure the indigenous peoples knew what to call them). The North American prairie has been reduced to 2 percent of its original size and the topsoil, once twelve feet deep, can now only be measured in inches.

Agriculture is based on annual monocrops, the precise opposite of perennial polycultures, and it does the opposite of what nature does: it destroys topsoil. The deterioration of the soil is the inescapable injury of agriculture to the environment, writes Steven Stoll. Or as Tom Paulison puts it, The planet is getting skinned. Agriculture is a catastrophe that never allows the land to heal. And keeping the ground bare involves enormous effort. Because life wants to live. The trees keep trying to make a forest, the grasses want their prairie, and the waters ache for a wetland. Abandon cleared land in New England, and you’ll get pokeberry and brambles, then sumac and birch, then maples and oaks and pines. In five years it’ll be covered in saplings; in ten years they’re too big to cut with a handsaw. This is the earth protecting itself, covering its body in a living armor of green.

But its armor isn’t thick enough, not when the assailants are humans. Agriculture is more like a war than anything else, an all-out attack on the processes that make life possible. Daniel Hillel explains,

by its very nature, [agriculture] is an intrusion and hence a disruption of the environment as it replaces a natural ecosystem with an artificial one ... The moment a farmer delineates a tract of land ... he is in effect declaring war on the preexisting environmental order. Wishing to grow a particular crop ... the farmer must now treat all the native species as noxious weeds or pests, to be eradicated by all possible means. However, in an open environment the wild species continue to reinstate their stolen domain, so the farmer’s war is never finally won.

Agriculture is a march to the sea that’s encircled the globe. The only land left is the stuff agriculturalists can’t use: too cold, too hot, too steep, too dry.

And agriculture isn’t quite a war because the forests and wetlands and prairies, the rain, the soil, the air, can’t fight back. Agriculture is really more like ethnic cleansing, wiping out the indigenous dwellers so the invaders can take the land. It’s biotic cleansing, biocide. In the history of civilization ... the plowshare has been far more destructive than the sword. It is not non-violent. It is not sustainable. And every bite of its food is laden with death.

(From The Vegetarian Myth)