An Edible History of Humanity Read Online Free Page A

animal domestication are really just the modern, scientific version
     of these ancient and strikingly similar creation myths from around the world. Today, we would say that the abandonment of
     hunting and gathering, the domestication of plants and animals, and the adoption of a settled lifestyle based on farming put
     mankind on the road to the modern world, and that those earliest farmers were the first modern, “civilized” humans. Admittedly,
     this is a rather less colorful account than those provided by the various creation myths. But given that the domestication
     of certain key cereal crops was an essential step toward the emergence of civilization, there is no doubt that these ancient
     tales contain far more than just a grain of truth.

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    THE ROOTS OF MODERNITY
    Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.
    —GENESIS 3:17
    AN AGRICULTURAL MYSTERY
    The mechanism by which plants and animals were domesticated may be understood, but that does little to explain the motivations
     of the people in question. Quite why humans switched from hunting and gathering to farming is one of the oldest, most complex,
     and most important questions in human history. It is mysterious because the switch made people significantly worse off, from
     a nutritional perspective and in many other ways. Indeed, one anthropologist has described the adoption of farming as “the
     worst mistake in the history of the human race.”
    Compared with farming, being a hunter-gatherer was much more fun. Modern anthropologists who have spent time with surviving
     hunter-gatherer groups report that even in the marginal areas where they are now forced to live, gathering food only accounts
     for a small proportion of their time—far less than would be required to produce the same quantity of food via farming. The
     !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari, for example, typically spend twelve to nineteen hours a week collecting food, and the Hazda
     nomads of Tanzania spend less than fourteen hours. That leaves a lot of time free for leisure activities, socializing, and
     so on. When asked by an anthropologist why his people had not adopted farming, one Bushman replied, “Why should we plant,
     when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?” (Mongongo fruits and nuts, which comprise around half the !Kung diet,
     are gathered from wild stands of trees and are abundant even when no effort is made to propagate them.) In effect, hunter-gatherers
     work two days a week and have five-day weekends.
    The hunter-gatherer lifestyle in preagricultural times, in less marginal environments, would probably have been even more
     pleasant. It used to be thought that the switch to farming gave people more time to devote to artistic pursuits, the development
     of new crafts and technologies, and so on. Farming, in this view, was a liberation from the anxious hand-to-mouth existence
     of the hunter-gatherer. But in fact the opposite turns out to be true. Farming is more productive in the sense that it produces
     more food per unit of land: a group of twenty-five people can subsist by farming on a mere twenty-five acres, a much smaller
     area than the tens of thousands of acres they would need to subsist by hunting and gathering. But farming is less productive
     when measured by the amount of food produced per hour of labor. It is, in other words, much harder work.
    Surely this effort was worthwhile if it meant that people no longer needed to worry about malnutrition or starvation? So you
     might think. Yet hunter-gatherers actually seem to have been much healthier than the earliest farmers. According to the archaeological
     evidence, farmers were more likely than hunter-gatherers to suffer from dental-enamel hypoplasia—a characteristic horizontal
     striping of the teeth that indicates nutritional stress. Farming results in a less varied and less balanced diet than hunting
     and gathering does. Bushmen eat around