So… why agriculture?

An Egyptian harvest scene

In our previous post we explored how the last half-millennia of colonialism constructed our contemporary cultures, and food’s role within this. In this post we will look 10,000 years prior to examine how the development of agriculture facilitated this.

For much of human history we subsisted off hunting and gathering, and our survival depended on the sustenance we found around us. Even before agriculture we were shaping our landscapes with ‘forest gardens’, selectively tailoring our environments to grow more of the foods we sought, and less of that we didn’t. Similarly, with slash-and-burn, we used fire in a controlled manner to form clearings that would encourage herbaceous flora to flourish, in turn attracting large fauna which we could hunt.

The slash and burn technique

Instead of the social stratification we know today, hunter-gatherer communities were egalitarian—though this might have been more out of necessity than choice. The hand-to-mouth nature of hunting-gathering left little space for hierarchies; food insecurity upholding equality through the shared goal of survival. Anthropologist Christopher Boehm calls this ‘reverse dominance hierarchy:’ a social agreement disallowing any one person or group from dominating the rest. This dominance through mutualism was a dependence that was necessary to the group’s well-being—what philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau calls “the general will over the will of each.” 

A representation of hunter gatherer life

Sociologist Robert Bellah, in Religion in Human Evolution, links the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers to Marx and Engels ‘primitive communism:’ a gift economy where resources are shared equally depending on need. This concept is itself rooted in the notion of the ‘noble savage’ that was popularised during Europe’s Age of Enlightenment by philosophers such as Rousseau. The ‘noble savage’ romanticised the idea of an uncorrupted non-white ‘other’ who displays an innate moral goodness, in contrast to the sinful despotism of civilisation. Interestingly, this sees parities with the Christian myth of the ‘Fall of Man,’ in which Adam and Eve, having eaten from the tree of knowledge, ‘fall’ from the innocence Eden—a paradise where humans and nature harmoniously coexist—into the social structures we recognise today. 

This is also upheld in the etymology of ‘agriculture’ and ‘culture,’ both of which derive from ‘cultivate,’ which is rooted in the Latin cultura: ‘to grow’. Cultivation is both agriculturally and socially applicable; to be ‘cultivated’ is to show social refinement, and often indicates a more secure socio-economic background. Though the practice of agriculture predates these words by many millennia, it is telling that only through its adoption is the notion of ‘culture’ thought to have come into existence; semantically, farming cultured us. 

An illustration of a Neolithic farming community

In a similar vein, we’re often taught that the Agricultural Revolution ‘liberated’ us from the primitivism of hunting-gathering, yet maybe was more of a conscription. As Ursula Le Guin reminds us in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, hunter-gatherers laboured a mere 12-20 hours per week for their diverse diet. Farmers, by contrast, toiled daily to tend a handful of cultivars. This is archaeologically evidenced by the former's healthy teeth and greater height, showing a clear dietary advantage to the latter. It is thus interesting to question whether agriculture’s food security was worth the cost of the hunter-gatherer’s superior quality of life. This thinking goes against the traditional historical narrative of human progress, for it suggests that we might have been better off in our ‘primitive,’ pre-agricultural state.

This thus begs the question: if settling into sedentism was so unsavoury, why adopt agriculture? One suggestion is of a natural adoption. More selectively tailored environments yielded better forage, offering greater food security, and even surplus. More food begat more population; which begat more labour to grow more food. These proto-farmers became tied to their environments, settling into sedentism. Conversely, it might have been food shortages, not surfeits, that settled us. Over millennia, as hunting improved, human populations grew. Left unchecked, we over-hunted large fauna, and, with less prey to predate, were forced to rely more heavily on gathering. The greater food security of sedentism therefore left us with little choice but to settle. The likelihood is that these are but two of myriad ways in which agriculture developed independently in numerous isolated locations, over several millennia, worldwide. 

A recipe for Sumerian beer

If farming ‘cultured’ us, then cities ‘civilised’ us; ‘civil,’ from Latin civis: ‘citizen;’ being rooted in civitas: ‘city.’ Here, etymology once again suggests a social hierarchy based on a settlement's ability to cultivate. As we have discussed, surplus begat population, which begat more labour. Greater surpluses could divert labour away from the farm, which could then be used to build. In this way, the Sumerians founded the first city in Mesopotamia. Due to innovations in irrigation and cultivation, the Sumerians controlled large grain surpluses, which could be spent developing their settlements. Those in charge of the surplus controlled the population, and became the ruling elite of these new cities. To control their labour, religious notions of reward and punishment were woven into the fabric of society, legitimising its stratification.

This class division is reflected in the bifurcation of Sumerian cuisine into ‘high’ and ‘humble,’ as historian Rachel Laudan explores in Cuisine and Empire. Humble cuisines, prepared by women for their community, focussed on simpler, lower cost preparations that favoured preservation. High cuisines were male-led, depending on servant labour to process extravagant dishes for the elite. So developed a principle of hierarchy that was culturally encoded through the concept of a culinary cosmos. In this, cooking was paramount; purification through processing. Processing was costly: the fuel, labour, and time; resources that were the reserve of the elite. 

Thomas Moore’s Utopia, as referenced by Carolyn Steel in Sitopia

This development of social stratification through diet is seen in the cuisines of multiple ancient cultures. Of cultures, those with the greatest grain surpluses were the most secure. As their cities grew, their societies became more stratified. Larger societies required greater resources, and colonies had to be claimed. As the writer Carolyn Steel suggests in Sitopia, the expansion of empire was usually undertaken to seek arable lands to grow grains. In this way, the history of empire can be understood as the history of agriculture; which is in turn the history of grain; and the history of civilisation; and thus the history of society.