An Edible History of Humanity

The fate of nations hangs upon their choice of food.

There are many ways to look at the past: as a list of important dates, a conveyor belt of kings and queens, a series of rising
and falling empires, or a narrative of political, philosophical, or technological progress. This book looks at history in
another way entirely: as a series of transformations caused, enabled, or influenced by food. Throughout history, food has
done more than simply provide sustenance. It has acted as a catalyst of social transformation, societal or ganization, geopolitical
competition, industrial development, military conflict, and economic expansion. From prehistory to the present, the stories
of these transformations form a narrative that encompasses the whole of human history.

Food’s first transformative role was as a foundation for entire civilizations. The adoption of agriculture made possible new
settled lifestyles and set mankind on the path to the modern world. But the staple crops that supported the first civilizations—barley
and wheat in the Near East, millet and rice in Asia, and maize and potatoes in the Americas—were not simply discovered by
chance. Instead, they emerged through a complex process of coevolution, as desirable traits were selected and propagated by
early farmers. These staple crops are, in effect, inventions: deliberately cultivated technologies that only exist as a result
of human intervention. The story of the adoption of agriculture is the tale of how ancient genetic engineers developed powerful
new tools that made civilization itself possible. In the process, mankind changed plants, and those plants in turn transformed
mankind.

Having provided the platform on which civilizations could be founded, food subsequently acted as a tool of social organization,
helping to shape and structure the complex societies that emerged. The political, economic, and religious structures of ancient
societies, from hunter-gatherers to the first civilizations, were based upon the systems of food production and distribution.
The production of agricultural food surpluses and the development of communal food-storage and irrigation systems fostered
political centralization; agricultural fertility rituals developed into state religions; food became a medium of payment and
taxation; feasts were used to garner influence and demonstrate status; food handouts were used to define and reinforce power
structures. Throughout the ancient world, long before the invention of money, food was wealth—and control of food was power.

Once civilizations had emerged in various parts of the world, food helped to connect them together. Food-trade routes acted
as international communications networks that fostered not just commercial exchange, but cultural and religious exchange too.
The spice routes that spanned the Old World led to cross-cultural fertilization in fields as diverse as architecture, science,
and religion. Early geographers started to take an interest in the customs and peoples of distant lands and compiled the first
attempts at world maps. By far the greatest transformation caused by food trade was a result of the European desire to circumvent
the Arab spice monopoly. This led to the discovery of the New World, the opening of maritime trade routes between Europe,
America, and Asia, and the establishment by European nations of their first colonial outposts. Along the way, it also revealed
the true layout of the world.

As European nations vied to build global empires, food helped to bring about the next big shift in human history: a surge
in economic development through industrialization. Sugar and potatoes, as much as the steam engine, underpinned the Industrial
Revolution. The production of sugar on plantations in the West Indies was arguably the earliest prototype of an industrial
process, reliant though it was on slave labor. Potatoes, meanwhile, overcame initial suspicion among Europeans to become a
staple food that produced more calories than cereal crops could from a given area of land. Together, sugar and potatoes provided
cheap sustenance for the workers in the new factories of the industrial age. In Britain, where this process first began, the
vexed question of whether the country’s future lay in agriculture or in industry was unexpectedly and decisively resolved
by the Irish Potato Famine of 1845.

The use of food as a weapon of war is timeless, but the largescale military conflicts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
elevated it to a new level. Food played an important role in determining the outcome of the two wars that defined the United
States of America: the Revolutionary War of the 1770s to 1780s and the Civil War of the 1860s. In Europe, meanwhile, Napoleon’s
rise and fall was intimately connected with his ability to feed his vast armies. The mechanization of warfare in the twentieth
century meant that for the first time in history, feeding machines with fuel and ammunition became a more important consideration
than feeding soldiers. But food then took on a new role, as an ideological weapon, during the Cold War between capitalism
and communism, and ultimately helped to determine the outcome of the conflict. And in modern times food has become a battlefield
for other issues, including trade, development, and globalization.

During the twentieth century the application of scientific and industrial methods to agriculture led to a dramatic expansion
in the food supply and a corresponding surge in the world population. The so-called green revolution caused environmental
and social problems, but without it there would probably have been widespread famine in much of the developing world during
the 1970s. And by enabling the food supply to grow more rapidly than the population, the green revolution paved the way for
the astonishingly rapid industrialization of Asia as the century drew to a close. Since people in industrial societies tend
to have fewer children than those in agricultural societies, the peak in the human population, toward the end of the twenty-first
century, is now in sight.

The stories of many individual foodstuffs, of food-related customs and traditions, and of the development of particular national
cuisines have already been told. Less attention has been paid to the question of food’s world-historical impact. This account
does not claim that any single food holds the key to understanding history; nor does it attempt to summarize the entire history
of food, or the entire history of the world. Instead, by drawing on a range of disciplines, including genetics, archaeology,
anthropology, ethnobotany, and economics, it concentrates specifically on the intersections between food history and world
history, to ask a simple question: which foods have done the most to shape the modern world, and how? Taking a long-term historical
perspective also provides a new way to illuminate modern debates about food, such as the controversy surrounding genetically
modified organisms, the relationship between food and poverty, the rise of the “local” food movement, the use of crops to
make biofuels, the effectiveness of food as a means of mobilizing political support for various causes, and the best way to
reduce the environmental impact of modern agriculture.

I have seen great surprise expressed in horticultural works at the wonderful skill of gardeners, in having produced such splendid
results from such poor materials; but the art has been simple, and as far as the final result is concerned, has been followed
almost unconsciously. It has consisted in always cultivating the best-known variety, sowing its seeds, and, when a slightly
better variety chanced to appear, selecting it, and so onwards.

What embodies the bounty of nature better than an ear of corn? With a twist of the wrist it is easily plucked from the stalk
with no waste or fuss. It is packed with tasty, nutritious kernels that are larger and more numerous than those of other cereals.
And it is surrounded by a leafy husk that shields it from pests and moisture. Maize appears to be a gift from nature; it even
comes wrapped up. But appearances can be deceptive. A cultivated field of maize, or any other crop, is as man-made as a microchip,
a magazine, or a missile. Much as we like to think of farming as natural, ten thousand years ago it was a new and alien development.
Stone Age hunter-gatherers would have regarded neatly cultivated fields, stretching to the horizon, as a bizarre and unfamiliar
sight. Farmed land is as much a technological landscape as a biological one. And in the grand scheme of human existence, the
technologies in question—domesticated crops—are very recent inventions.

This was a remarkable change for a species that had relied on a nomadic lifestyle based on hunting and gathering for its entire
previous existence. If the 150,000 years since modern humans emerged are likened to one hour, it is only in the last four
and a half minutes that humans began to adopt farming, and agriculture only became the dominant means of providing human subsistence
in the last minute and a half. Humanity’s switch from foraging to farming, from a natural to a technological means of food
production, was recent and sudden.

Though many animals gather and store seeds and other foodstuffs, humans are unique in deliberately cultivating specific crops
and selecting and propagating particular desired characteristics. Like a weaver, a carpenter, or a blacksmith, a farmer creates
useful things that do not occur in nature. This is done using plants and animals that have been modified, or domesticated,
so that they better suit human purposes. They are human creations, carefully crafted tools that are used to produce food in
novel forms, and in far greater quantities than would occur naturally. The significance of their development cannot be overstated,
for they literally made possible the modern world. Three domesticated plants in particular—wheat, rice, and maize—proved to
be most significant. They laid the foundations for civilization and continue to underpin human society to this day.

Maize, more commonly known as corn in America, provides the best illustration that domesticated crops are unquestionably human
creations. The distinction between wild and domesticated plants is not a hard and fast one. Instead, plants occupy a continuum:
from entirely wild plants, to domesticated ones that have had some characteristics modified to suit humans, to entirely domesticated
plants, which can only reproduce with human assistance. Maize falls into the last of these categories. It is the result of
human propagation of a series of random gene tic mutations that transformed it from a simple grass into a bizarre, gigantic
mutant that can no longer survive in the wild. Maize is descended from teosinte, a wild grass indigenous to modern-day Mexico.
The two plants look very different. But just a few genetic mutations, it turns out, were sufficient to transform one into
the other.

The ears, being closer to the ground, end up closer to the nutrient supply and can potentially grow much larger. Once again,
human selection guided this process. As proto-farmers gathered ears of protomaize, they would have given preference to plants
with larger ears; and kernels from those ears would then have been used as seeds. In this way, mutations that resulted in
larger ears with more kernels were propagated, so that the ears grew larger from one generation to the next and became corn
cobs. This can clearly be seen in the archaeological record: At one cave in Mexico, a sequence of cobs has been found, increasing
in length from a half inch to eight inches long. Again, the very trait that made maize attractive to humans made it less viable
in the wild. A plant with a large ear cannot propagate itself from one year to the next, because when the ear falls to the
ground and the kernels sprout, the close proximity of so many kernels competing for the nutrients in the soil prevents any
of them from growing. For the plant to grow, the kernels must be manually separated from the cob and planted a sufficient
distance apart—something only humans can do. As maize ears grew larger, in short, the plant ended up being entirely dependent
on humans for its continued existence.

What started off as an unwitting process of selection eventually became deliberate, as early farmers began to propagate desirable
traits on purpose. By transferring pollen from the tassel of one plant to the silks of another, it was possible to create
new varieties that combined the attributes of their parents. These new varieties had to be kept away from other varieties
to prevent the loss of desirable traits. Genetic analysis suggests that one particular type of teosinte, called Balsas teosinte,
is most likely to have been the progenitor of maize. Further analysis of regional varieties of Balsas teosinte suggests that
maize was originally domesticated in central Mexico, where the modern-day states of Guerrero, México, and Michoacán meet.
From here, maize spread and became a staple food for peoples throughout the Americas: the Aztecs and Maya of Mexico, the Incas
of Peru, and many other tribes and cultures throughout North, South, and Central America.

All of this demonstrates that maize is not a naturally occurring food at all. Its development has been described by one modern
scientist as the most impressive feat of domestication and genetic modification ever undertaken. It is a complex technology,
developed by humans over successive generations to the point where maize was ultimately incapable of surviving on its own
in the wild, but could deliver enough food to sustain entire civilizations.

Maize is merely one of the most extreme examples. The world’s two other major staples, which went on to underpin civilization
in the Near East and Asia respectively, are wheat and rice. They too are the results of human selective prcesses that propagated
desirable mutations to create more convenient and abundant foodstuffs. Like maize, both wheat and rice are cereal grains,
and the key difference between their wild and domesticated forms is that domesticated varieties are “shatterproof.” The grains
are attached to a central axis known as the rachis. As the wild grains ripen the rachis becomes brittle, so that when touched
or blown by the wind it shatters, scattering the grains as seeds. This makes sense from the plant’s perspective, since it
ensures that the grains are only dispersed once they have ripened. But it is very inconvenient from the point of view of humans
who wish to gather them.

In a small proportion of plants, however, a single genetic mutation means the rachis does not become brittle, even when the
seeds ripen. This is called a “tough rachis.” This mutation is undesirable for the plants in question, since they are unable
to disperse their seeds. But it is very helpful for humans gathering wild grains, who are likely to gather a disproportionate
number of tough-rachis mutants as a result. If some of the grains are then planted to produce a crop the following year, the
tough-rachis mutation will be propagated, and every year the proportion of tough-rachis mutants will increase. Archaeologists
have demonstrated in field experiments with wheat that this is exactly what happens. They estimate that plants with tough,
shatterproof rachises would become predominant within about two hundred years—which is roughly how long the domestication
of wheat seems to have taken, according to the archaeological record. (In maize, the cob is in fact a gigantic shatterproof
rachis.)