How Food Made History E-Book

B. W. Higman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 533

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Covering 5,000 years of global history, How Food Made History traces the changing patterns of food production and consumption that have molded economic and social life and contributed fundamentally to the development of government and complex societies.

• Charts the changing technologies that have increased crop yields, enabled the industrial processing and preservation of food, and made transportation possible over great distances
• Considers social attitudes towards food, religious prohibitions, health and nutrition, and the politics of distribution
• Offers a fresh understanding of world history through the discussion of food

Leseprobe

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

Prologue: Questions of choice?

CHAPTER ONE: The Creation of Food Worlds

Making the ancient world food map

The origins of domestication, agriculture, and urbanization

Food worlds at 5000 BP

Seven claims

CHAPTER TWO: Genetics and Geography

Genetic modification, ancient and modern

Prohibitions and taboos

Geographical redistribution

Three claims

CHAPTER THREE: Forest, Farm, Factory

Forest gardens

Crop farming landscapes

Industrialized agriculture

Five claims

CHAPTER FOUR: Hunting, Herding, Fishing

Hunting

Herding

Fishing

Two claims

CHAPTER FIVE: Preservation and Processing

Ancient preservation

Ancient processing

Modern milling

Packaging

Freezing and chilling

Milk, butter, yoghurt, and cheese

Three claims

CHAPTER SIX: Trade

Ancient trades

Modern trades

The global supermarket

Two claims

CHAPTER SEVEN: Cooking, Class, and Consumption

Cooks

Cooking

Eating places

Meals and mealtimes

CHAPTER EIGHT: National, Regional, and Global Cuisines

Cuisine, high and low

The origins of cuisines

Megaregions and pan-ethnicity

Global foods

Three claims and counterclaims

CHAPTER NINE: Eating Well, Eating Badly

Nutrition and diet

Stature

Obesity

Dieting

Denial

Vegetarianism

CHAPTER TEN: Starving

Famine

Famine foods

Survival strategies

Food aid

Impact

Two claims

Conclusion: Cornucopia or Pandora’s Box?

Suggested Further Reading

Index

This edition first published 2012© 2012 B. W. Higman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Higman, B. W., 1943– How food made history / B. W. Higman. – 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-8948-4 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4051-8947-7 (paper)1. Food habits–History. 2. Food–Social aspects–History. I. Title. GT2850.H46 2011 394.1′209–dc23

2011022726

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444344646; Wiley Online Library 9781444344677; ePub 9781444344653; Mobi 9781444344660

Illustrations

Figure 1.1

Sites of early agriculture, c.5000 BP

Figure 1.2

Africa

Figure 1.3

The Middle East and the Mediterranean

Figure 1.4

China and Southeast Asia

Figure 1.5

The Americas

Figure 3.1

Tropical forest, South America

Figure 3.2

Wheat-growing regions, c.1914

Figure 4.1

Diet of hunter-gatherers, by latitude

Figure 4.2

Hunting traps: gazelle and reindeer

Figure 4.3

Traditional log and box beehives, China

Figure 4.4

Shipboard processing of cod fish in the eighteenthcentury

Figure 5.1

Mortar and pestle, and grinding stones

Figure 5.2

Water mills at Barbegal

Figure 5.3

Milking regions of the world, c.1400

Figure 6.1

Evolution of the supermarket cart/trolley

Figure 7.1

Ancient Chinese cooking vessels

Figure 9.1

Diet pyramids

Figure 9.2

Price of sugar in pence per pound in London, c.1200–2010

Figure 10.1

FAO world hunger map, 2010

Preface

Food history has at least two major strands. One is concerned primarily with the history of food itself, often finding its voice in celebration of the joy of preparing and consuming particular foods – raw or cooked – with a strong emphasis on pleasure. The second strand originates more often with social and economic historians whose concerns typically lie elsewhere and show little evidence of the pleasures associated with food. Indeed, the regular fare of this second variety of food history is found in painful problems rather than pleasure, with an emphasis on deprivation and the role of food in conflict, for example, or, alternatively, studies of production and trade located firmly in the “dismal science” of political economy. Alongside these two main streams in the writing of food history are studies emanating from the disciplines of anthropology, archeology, sociology, geography, and psychology. A further, parallel, division exists between the popular celebration of food – exhibited most clearly in the West in the proliferation of television cooking shows, which had their beginnings with James Beard in 1946 – and the predictions of doomsayers, seeing famine and disaster beginning in the global South and spreading globally.

These two central themes, pleasure and pain, coexist in food history but most often run along separate paths. One of my aims is to bring them together, or to make sure at least that the separate routes criss-cross, because fundamentally the division is a false one. A major reason why it is false is simply that food systems are interconnected and codependent, both internally and externally. Contrasting outcomes are frequently merely two sides of the same coin. I believe these connections need to be confronted and the two strands brought together, however uncomfortably, in a single account.

The subject of this book is vast. My objective has been to provide a broad sketch of the history of food but without imagining that this can be achieved in a genuinely comprehensive manner. It is not possible even to mention all the plants and animals that have been important in the food culture of every region and society, in every period, let alone put the development of food cultures in the context of social, economic, and political change. Rather, my method has been to emphasize the truly large-scale and the truly dramatic and significant. This means picking out some periods and places for special attention. As a result, the past 50 years are given a good deal of space, not simply because they are recent and familiar to readers but because they represent a distinctive period in many ways unlike any that went before. The revolutionary transition to agrarian and urban systems that was clearly articulated by 5000 BP (before the present), though far from universal, also receives close attention, as does the fundamental transformation of world food systems that followed the Old World’s discovery of the New. Occasionally, I have focussed on a particular food, because it is especially important or because it represents a type of development. Otherwise, I have selected specific episodes to illustrate the broader trends and processes.

What I seek to do is explain how the history of food, particularly the choices people made about what to eat and how to produce and consume it, has been a fundamental driver of world history in all its aspects. This is a two-way street, an interactive process. Food is both a central driving force and a central part of life that responds and transforms in turn.

For putting me on the path that led to this book, I thank Diane Kirkby and Tim Rowse. The manuscript was written in the School of History of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. I thank my colleagues for their comments and suggestions and also the students who took my courses on the history of food. Merle Higman read the entire manuscript, more than once.

Prologue: Questions of choice?

Of the many choices we make in our lives, what to eat is perhaps the most enduring and important. Whereas individual human beings can go through life without participating in political acts and without personal liberty and can survive without forming a family or having sex, none of us can go without food. It is the absolute biological necessity of food that makes it so central to cultural history and so inclusive of all peoples in all times. As Brüssow (2007: 20) puts it, “eat” is “the first commandment of the laws of thermodynamics.” Energy cannot be created from nothing; it can only change form. It is food that draws human beings into the web of life. However, unlike other basic human needs driven by biology, the desire to eat can be satisfied in a huge variety of ways, opening the possibility of choice and selectivity, and making the consumption of food a part of culture. It is this necessity and this shared experience that helps make food history so appealing, inducing a kind of intellectual salivation that matches the appeal of reading cookbooks and watching cooking shows.

The question of choice, sometimes called the question of social nutrition, is not the only way of approaching food history but it is perhaps the most fundamental. Tracing the history of choice opens doors on its many consequences and ramifications. Choice affects every one of the major phases of the food system, from acquisition to production, processing, and preservation, to distribution and exchange, and preparation and consumption. Each of these phases is important in itself, with far-reaching consequences for world history, while the different phases can also be articulated in a wide variety of combinations. Thus, any attempt to understand systems of food production and consumption requires close attention to the global pattern of resources and human perceptions, changing patterns of availability and seasonality, the diffusion of plants and animals, human migration and colonization, warfare and domination, as well as social attitudes and religious prohibitions, the concept of taste, health and nutrition, and the politics of distribution. For many people, and for many long periods, the search for food has been a central preoccupation and a vital driver of social, cultural, economic, and political development. Only in very recent times have some societies enjoyed food security and year-long abundance. How this transition came about, and why it occurred in different ways in different regions of the world, is a fundamental question not just for food history but for world history on the grandest scale.

How much choice do we really have? How has the ability to choose changed over the long term? The notion of abstract freedom is at base a dubious assumption to apply to the living of daily life, because humans are creatures of habit. As social beings, we find it difficult to surrender long-held practices and attitudes shared with a community, and difficult to offend or contradict others. Communities and societies quickly build hierarchies of power and command, so that the ability to choose is regularly surrendered to individuals or small groups who take advantage of their authority to make decisions for the population. Further, and more broadly, it can be argued that it is climate and soil that play a determining role in ordering the world, creating patterns of production and consumption that essentially remain intact in spite of the great forces of imperialism, migration and globalization (Becker and Sieber, 2010).

However it may be produced, distributed, and exchanged, food serves as one of the most vital means by which power relations are expressed. Thus, those agents who hold the reins of the political economy, and those who possess the authority to control consumption by law and custom, have great power to shape societies. Such domination is not confined to the power of nation-states but has been exercised also by chiefdoms, warlords, religious institutions, global trading companies, multinational corporations, and social modelers. Further, the hegemonic power derived from the control of food has not been limited to the satisfaction of material, bodily needs, but has also been mediated through ritual and symbolic meals, in which food is deployed as a means of connecting the physical with the spiritual, this world with other universes.

Why do we eat what we eat and why have different cultures and societies at different times eaten other things? These questions put the idea of choice at the center of the narrative and thus open up connections with the broader context and the implications of specific decisions.

A simple model of food choice would look something like the following. People choose first from the environment around them, selecting from the plants and animals that may be ingested directly, fresh, without ill effect, and, hopefully, taste good. Plucking a ripe fruit dangling tantalizingly from a tree, for example, may appear seductive but may equally prove a deadly choice. Deciding to swallow something new represents a vital moment, answering an expectation of pleasure and satisfaction but matched by fear.

This association of pleasure and pain created what Rozin and Rozin (1981: 12) were first to term “the omnivore’s dilemma,” a dilemma which confronts modern humans and affects their willingness to sample unknown foods but was much more threatening for those who were the original testers (Pollan, 2006). Further risky experimentation was essential to demonstrate that some plants and animals have ill effects if consumed fresh but are safe and nutritious once processed in special ways, by squeezing out toxic elements, for example. Cooking, the application of heat, offers the next stage in the chain of choice, making certain plants and animals edible or better tasting, as achieved by the roasting of yam or kangaroo meat, for example. Regardless of particular methods of preparation and cooking, these technologies helped introduce to the human diet plants and animals that would not otherwise have been eaten.

From the thousands of possible plant and animal species that might be eaten by humans, only a small proportion is in fact consumed. A further narrowing is associated with the self-conscious manipulation of nature, through cultivation and management, that privileges certain plants and animals over others. Domestication carries the process to a new stage, through the selection of particular species and varieties, and the selective breeding of seeds and animals. It is a process dominated by choices, whether decisively or less consciously made. This process can be carried to a high level of scientific sophistication, as in genetic modification or superdomestication. On the other hand, knowledge of the foods, plants, and animals natural to the world beyond the boundaries of a particular region or locality creates the potential for choices about what to adopt and adapt, with the outcome generally expanding the locally available range of possible food choices, though sometimes with quite different long-term consequences. All of these choices involve selective acquisition from nature.

The next stage in the model relates to preservation, processing, and distribution. Being able to stretch food supplies over long periods is important, especially where acquisition and production are highly seasonal or uncertain, with abundance followed by scarcity. Preserved foods not only contribute to improved food security for local communities but also enable exchange and long-distance trade. Spinach grown in India can be frozen and shipped to markets across the world, for example, and, long before the invention of freezing, fish could be made viable by drying, smoking, salting, or pickling. Rapid transport, by steamship or airplane, created trade in exotic fresh fruits, making available bananas and mangoes grown in the tropics and sold in temperate zone markets. Canning had a similar effect but required prior processing. Thus, preservation, processing, and transportation technologies determine choices about what can be consumed out of season, what can be consumed in exotic places (which do not themselves have the conditions necessary to produce an item), and what can be acquired cheaply by trade. The choices made can create very short or very long food-chains.

Choices about distribution depend not only on technologies. Trade and exchange are controlled equally by decisions made about preferred market partners and what we wish to offer and accept. Such choices are often as much about politics and social relations as they are about price. There are many levels of choice here, ranging from distribution between households and local markets, to distribution between nation-states, governed by theories of the benefits of trade and agreements brokered by the World Trade Organization. Individuals may seem to have little choice under some of these arrangements and even at the household level distribution may be quite closely controlled by custom, with rules about who gets the biggest and best portions based on gender, age, and social rank.

Overlapping and adding to some of the choices already introduced to the model, the next stage in the food system relates to preparation. Where people in the past depended on a single basic element, like whale meat among the Inuit or potatoes among the Incas, the possible ways of preparing food were inevitably limited. Where modern systems of supply make available almost any ingredient in any season of the year, the choices appear much greater. Outcomes will depend on particular cooks, whether poor people cooking for themselves at home or chefs employed as professionals in the kitchens of expensive restaurants, and their knowledge and experience. The combination of ingredients in single dishes depends on cooking technologies and fuel, as well as the availability of cooking media: oils, fats, ovens, spit-roasts, and so on. As well as these choices based on knowledge, resources, and technologies, it is necessary to decide whether to do one’s own cooking, to appoint a cook from within the household (typically a wife or mother, or perhaps a servant), or to eat the food cooked by commercial establishments such as restaurants or takeaways.

Finally, choices are made about how to consume food, be it raw or cooked. When to eat and with whom to share. Whether to eat alone or communally, whether to eat inside the house or out, whether to dip from a common pot, and whether to use utensils or the hand. Whether to organize a meal into courses, and how to decide their order. All of these matters may be surrounded by tight social rules and rituals.

Even the simple model outlined here suggests the numerous and multilayered choices that are made by individuals, communities, and states in the process of deciding what to eat. Not only are the choices significant in their direct consequences for the development of global agrarian systems and patterns of trade, but they may also be seen as additive. This is one reason why the trajectory of world history or so-called big history can be seen to speed up as we approach the present. Broadly, we can regard the last 50 years, the time in which we now live, as a unique period of momentous change, equivalent in many ways with the global transformation that occupied the previous 500 years, the centuries since Columbus. These fundamental shifts match changes that had their origins five to ten thousand years ago, derived from the growth of agriculture, urbanism, and writing, which marked the true beginnings of the modern world food system. This rough periodization does not fit every large region of the world equally well, but it can be deployed as a guide to megatrends that not only had implications for food history but were also very often themselves the product of dynamics within the food system itself.

A central feature, and apparent paradox, in the long-term development of world food systems has been a parallel trend toward both uniformity and diversity. On the one hand, modern human migrations and the associated redistribution of plants and animals have given a substantial portion of the world’s people access to a wider range of foods than they knew five or ten thousand years ago. This means that people can now choose between a much extended range of possibilities but, at the same time, their experience is repeated across the globe to a significant extent. It is also repeated across seasons and climatic zones, thanks particularly to rapid and cheap transportation technologies and methods of preservation. There are still significant regional and ethnic variations in food cultures, but many items have come to be naturalized to such an extent that they are no longer thought of as having their origins far away in different places.

REFERENCES

Becker, J. and Sieber, A. (2010) Is the spatial distribution of mankind’s most basic economic traits determined by climate and soil alone? PLoS ONE 5: e10416.

Brüssow, H. (2007) The Quest for Food: The Natural History of Eating. New York: Springer.

Pollan, M. (2006) The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin Books.

Rozin, E. and Rozin, P. (1981) Culinary themes and variations. Natural History 90: 6–14.

CHAPTER ONE

The Creation of Food Worlds

Although the modern food system has come to appear almost normal, many of its fundamental features are in fact very recent. Only recently have people lived in a world in which most food has been consumed by a dominant urban-industrial population, heavily dependent on resources transported over great distances, from quite different environments and regions – the modern world in which “food miles” can add up to a worrying degree. Only in recent times have consumers in some countries come to think of food as a packaged good, to be obtained almost exclusively by purchase, and come to regard anything taken directly from the wild as potentially dangerous.

Only in the past ten thousand years have human beings moved decisively toward living in sedentary settlements, using agricultural, horticultural, and pastoral techniques to produce food from domesticated plants and animals. Over the great length of human history, beginning with the emergence of Homo erectus in Africa two million years ago, some 90 per cent of hominin1 species have lived by hunting and gathering. The experience for anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) is strikingly different, though covering little more than 200 000 years. The greater part of this period belonged to hunter-gatherers, and as late as the time of Columbus fully one-quarter of the world remained hunter-gatherer, but the massive and accelerating growth in population over the past two hundred years placed the weight of numbers within an agricultural realm.

Settled, domesticated life associated with “civilization” comes late in the course of human history, marking a new relationship between people, plants, and animals. The transition became possible only with the end of the last Ice Age, which brought to a close the Pleistocene and ushered in the modern post-glacial epoch, the Holocene, an era of global warming. Sea levels were lower at the Last Glacial Maximum around 20 000 BP (before the present) than at any time over the previous 100 000 years, but then rose rapidly to the modern maximum with the melting of the northern glaciers and ice sheets. These changed environmental conditions enabled not only the transition to agriculture and urban life but also new modes of hunting and gathering. They created the conditions for the transition from a relatively uniform global food system to a world characterized by large-scale regional diversity and strongly contrasted modes of feeding a growing population.

Making the ancient world food map

The creation of unique and separate food worlds occurred in at least two ways. Most obviously, the rising sea levels associated with the melting of the massive glacial caps altered the balance between land and sea. Land which had long been dry and available as a pathway for human and other animals was inundated, creating formidable barriers. The most significant of these barriers was the Bering Sea, which cut off terrestrial movement between Asia and the Americas, thus establishing the basis for long-term independent development in the world’s supercontinents, the so-called Old World of Eurasia and Africa and the New World of the Americas.

The result was two essentially separate food worlds, cut off from one another for millennia. This was something new in world history because, although there had been a series of transitions between glacial and interglacial conditions since the emergence of hominins, it was the first time human beings had been living in all the world’s continents (except Antarctica) and the first time anatomically modern Homo sapiens had experienced such massive changes (Manning, 2006).

The rise in sea levels also created new island and archipelagic environments. In southeastern Asia, the Indonesian archipelago was brought into being and its islands cut off from New Guinea. The northern tip of Australia was separated from New Guinea and to the south Tasmania was similarly divided from the mainland. In the Caribbean, islands such as Cuba and Trinidad were separated from the Central and South American mainland. The possibilities of settlement and colonization by plants and animals became more difficult than they had been when land bridges existed. The animal life of islands, before the coming of humans, exhibited high levels of diversity and endemism, but large mammals, including carnivores, that might have been used for food or motive power were generally rare.

A second, quite different, consequence of the end of the last Ice Age was the warming of the planet, which ultimately created the conditions for revolutionary change in the human exploitation of plants and animals for food, the transition to domestication and agriculture. Early hunter-gatherers typically depended on food resources within a limited territorial range. Their choices were constrained by what was available within that zone. They were food takers rather than food makers. If the resources became depleted, there were good reasons to move on, to look for fresh sites with similar plants and animals or to new places with a different mix of potential foods.

Over millennia, the process of seeking out fresh food resources contributed fundamentally to the migration of people and the first colonization of the world. This initial colonization consisted principally of people finding new sites, empty of people, where they could exploit the available resources, in a manner parallel to the spread of plants and animals into new niches. The entry of people, as well as of plants and animals, changed the ecological balance, and people learned how to manipulate aspects of the ecosystem in order to ensure their supplies of food. However, before domestication, people rarely carried seeds or animals with them in their migrations. Their objective was to exploit whatever existing stock they found in a new region, not to transform it.

Because the initial colonization of the world was achieved by hunter-gatherers, it took a long time to complete. Although human beings with all the skeletal characteristics of their modern descendants, Homo sapiens, inhabited Africa from about 200 000 BP, they did not leave the continent for many millennia. The great migration that spread human beings across the world commenced about 70 000 years ago and continued to 10 000 BP, during which long period resources were often limited by environmental conditions. As in much human migration, people were impelled to move on because they felt that they would starve if they stayed where they were and could only hope that where they went would be a better place. They were pushed rather than pulled. They possessed only limited knowledge about what lay ahead, but observed the movement of animals, much as sea-voyagers later took the flight paths of birds as an indication that land lay ahead unseen, beyond the horizon. These anatomically modern humans out of Africa also encountered populations of archaic Homo species in Eurasia – Neanderthals in Europe and the recently identified “Denisovans” of southern Siberia – with whom they sometimes mated, exchanging genetic material and, no doubt, knowledge (Reich et al., 2010).

So long as the total human population remained small, there was little pressure to move on quickly. Probably, the desire to satisfy curiosity about what lay across the next ridge or river accounted for a good deal of incremental migration, as much as any search for fresh food resources. In the Ice Age, however, the meager potential food resources in many regions meant that meat-eating humans often had little choice but to actively pursue their food when it moved ahead of them. Until the ice sheets and glaciers began to retreat, much of the arctic north was inhospitable and virtually uninhabitable because of the lack of food for animals as well as humans. Thus, the momentous movement of people across the Bering Sea land bridge, from Siberia to Alaska, that initiated the peopling of the Americas, commenced only toward the end of the Ice Age around 15 000 BP when the sea level was 300 ft (90 m) lower than it is today.

Most important in driving the pattern of migration was the fact that the people were hunter-gatherers, not looking for well-watered fertile sites where they could plant introduced crops and raise livestock, but always assessing the survivability of a place in terms of the observed stock of animals and plants that existed naturally in that environment. They devoted energy to digging for roots and tubers, and to the grinding or pounding of these materials using mortar and pestle, but for these omnivorous hunters what made a place attractive was above all the presence of animals which could be efficiently killed, cooked, and consumed. They were dedicated meat-eaters, obtaining more than half their calories from flesh and willing to tackle animals much larger than themselves. It was a dangerous business, with sabre-tooth tigers and other, now extinct, savage beasts competing for the same game.

It has long been claimed that it was the eating of meat that contributed most to the development of Homo erectus, separating human beings from the other primates, with a bigger brain and the capacity to construct language, itself arguably a product of the need for cooperation in early hunting and scavenging and meat distribution within groups (Bickerton, 2009: 121). Alternatively, because there were many hazards to depending on a meat diet, not only from the uncertainty of supply and the fierceness of prey and competitors but also from parasites, it may be that early humans used their new-found tools to dig up the roots and tubers that grew in secure abundance rather than to stalk wild animals or even to scavenge (Eisenstein, 2010). Tubers could have provided the brain boost needed for human development but only if they were first cooked, by roasting or boiling/steaming.

This necessity led recently to the hypothesis advanced by the biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham that cooking, using fire as a tool, is at the center of these developments. Heat transforms meat (and other food) not only by making proteins and starches more digestible, and safer by warding off parasites, but also by increasing the amount of energy it delivers. The virtue of cooking is not a recent discovery. Rather, argues Wrangham (2009: 14), it occurred at the beginning of human evolution with the emergence of Homo erectus and had anatomical consequences, so that we are creatures of our “adapted diet of cooked food, and the results pervade our lives, from our bodies to our minds.” Raw-food diets can prove viable and have modern advocates but cooked food is the norm for almost all humans. It is cooked food that the starving dream of.

Fire was not only essential to cooking; it served as the most important tool of early transitions toward the manipulation of the environment and the behavior of wild animals within these ecosystems, practiced as early as 50 000 BP in southern Africa and Australia (Wrangham and Carmody, 2010). Down to about 10 000 BP, however, the essential cultures of hunting and gathering, fire and cooking, were effectively universal, and for this reason contributed little to the making of a diversified and regionalized ancient world food map. Until the end of the Ice Age, the pattern was essentially the same everywhere, though nuanced in terms of the specific plants and animals that were consumed in direct response to the biodiversity and environment of particular regions. This was not a closely interconnected world but one in which relatively isolated small communities existed within their particular ecological niches. It was the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, beginning around ten thousand years ago, and based on domestication and cultivation, that represented a true revolution in the global pattern of food systems.

The origins of domestication, agriculture, and urbanization

By 10 000 BP Homo sapiens had effectively settled in most regions of the world. Of the continental landmasses, the major exceptions were Antarctica, the coldest parts of the Arctic, and the icy northern two-thirds of mainland Eurasia. The peopling of these regions depended on the development of effective technologies for the hunting of large mammals, as well as more effective clothing and shelter. Antarctica never became attractive. Many islands also remained unsettled, particularly those of the Caribbean and the Pacific, because they were not stepping-stones to other places and lay beyond the accessible horizon. The islands of Remote Oceania, making up most of the Pacific, remained uninhabited even at 5000 BP, their peopling delayed by the need to develop ocean-crossing technologies and navigational skills. The food resources of such distant, isolated islands was impossible to predict and potentially hazardous.

Movement out of Africa into the tropical zones of Asia was relatively rapid once it began, with people settled all the way to Australia by 50 000 BP or earlier. The migration followed the water’s edge around the tropical rim of the Indian Ocean and its often dense borderline of bamboo, subsisting on fish, crustaceans, and plant food, and into the mainland and islands of eastern and southeastern Asia, as far as New Guinea. It was the warmer, southern regions of mainland Asia and the islands of southeastern Asia that were most densely peopled and it was there that the transformation of food production occurred first. Early migrations of Homo sapiens out of Africa to parts of eastern Europe proved fragile, and the establishment of a permanent population, interacting with other varieties of Homo, was not firmly established throughout Europe until about 30 000 BP. The human settlement of the Americas also moved rapidly once it was begun, around 15 000 BP, spreading speedily down the western spine before spilling out into the eastern vastness.

Hunter-gatherers moved conservatively, unwilling to risk more than necessary in a world still clothed in thick forest and grassland, in which lurked wild animals and unknown potentially deadly plants. Even where human beings had lived for millennia, the density of population remained sparse in 10 000 BP. The total for the world was not much more than five million. There seemed to be plenty of food for these few people. It had only to be collected or killed.

Five thousand years on, the world’s population was ten times larger, reaching about 50 million by 5000 BP. The rapid acceleration that occurred in these millennia was not evenly spread across the world, however, but confined largely to those few regions where domestication provided the foundation for an agricultural revolution, in fewer than ten independent sites known across the globe. It was this revolution that made possible the new mode of sedentary living and the beginnings of an urban revolution and a completely new system of food supply. Even though the first farming technologies were crude and domestication limited, together these innovations were able to support as much as 100 times the population that hunting-gathering could efficiently feed. The origins of the agricultural revolution are disputed but generally attributed to the impact of changing combinations of complex interactions between overpopulation, overexploitation, settlement patterns, climate change, and temporary climate reversals (Dow, Reed and Olewiler, 2009; Barker, 2006; Bellwood, 2005; Cohen, 1977).

Whatever the causes of the agricultural and urban revolutions, a key feature of the transformation was that they occurred independently at a widely separated series of sites spread across the world rather than diffusing from a single cultural hearth. This strongly suggests that the transformation was rooted in fundamental changes in the relationship between human beings and the natural world, associated with the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene. It is equally clear that the new ways of obtaining food did not quickly dominate everywhere and that not all peoples embraced the new ways, even when they became aware of these practices. This is an historical understanding not always shared by earlier interpretations of the transition. Indeed, the scholar who invented the central terms of the debate, the Australian archeologist V. G. Childe, thought of the Neolithic Revolution and the Urban Revolution as confined largely to Southwest Asia and the Nile valley.

Childe’s achievement, first set out in his book Man Makes Himself (1936), was to shift the study of prehistory away from the previously dominant three-age system with its emphasis on inorganic materials and tools – the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages – to a way of thinking about the past that introduced organic materials, particularly people and their food, as central drivers of change. The Neolithic Revolution – literally the New Stone Age, contrasted to the Old Stone Age of the Pleistocene – did not completely escape the traditional model but Childe used the term to distinguish its peoples from the “food gatherers” who had come before. He argued that this revolution transformed human economy by giving people control over their food supply. The Urban Revolution depended on the availability of surpluses and a diversified agriculture that could cope with seasonal variations in cropping patterns.

These changes were closely connected with innovations in knowledge and technology – from the plow to irrigation, writing and numeric notation, magic and religion – which Childe considered more significant than anything that had come before or was to come after. His revolutions were effectively complete by 5000 BP. Scholars have come to call Childe’s Neolithic Revolution an Agricultural Revolution, which better identifies the core of his concept and points to its organic and biological underpinnings, but the fundamentals of his ideas remain secure and ensure a central role for food in long-term human development. The transition is undoubtedly one of the great turning points in history.

Research over the past half-century, particularly the use of new techniques for establishing ancient chronologies and tracing genetic heritages, has enabled a richer, more nuanced and more diverse view of the past than Childe’s model was capable of capturing. Not only is it accepted that there were multiple, independent Agricultural and Urban Revolutions scattered around the world but it is also now recognized that the very meaning of “agriculture” and of “farming” need to be freshly conceptualized. Similarly, the notion that hunter-gatherers can be defined in simple opposition, by their merely not being farmers, has been challenged.

Most definitions of hunter-gatherer or forager societies refer to the distinctiveness of their patterns of subsistence, notably their hunting of wild animals, their collecting of wild plants, and their fishing, all without control over the reproduction of these food resources and without recourse to domestication. However, between the hunter-gatherer peoples who depended exclusively on wild plants and animals, at one extreme, and those farmers who relied heavily on the managed production of domesticated species at the other, there existed a vast and varied population that picked and chose from resource and technology options in ways that are not neatly classified and are hard to map. The existence of this middle group demonstrates that there is nothing fundamentally incompatible about foraging and farming, and that the transition from one to the other need not be swift and sure. Low-level food production can exist with or without domesticated plants and animals, and with or without the application of land management technologies such as fire (Smith, 2001).

Figure 1.1 Sites of early agriculture, circa 5000 BP.

Thus, rather than seeing a sharp break between hunting/gathering and agriculture, it is possible to conceive a continuum, stretching from strict forms of hunting and collecting from nature all the way to the mechanized industrial agriculture of domesticated plants and animals. Along this continuum, the manipulation of soil, water, and microclimate is gradually intensified but the nature of the choices made about what to eat and what to grow remain essentially the same. Change might be extended over generations or even millennia. Thus, it can be argued that the behavior of those hunters and gatherers who did not invent or adopt agriculture was not unaffected by the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene but simply took different forms. In some cases they went only part of the way toward domestication. Some embraced the agrarian way of life only to reject it. But every choice, every selection, of what to consume from nature and what to avoid had its genetic consequences and its impact on the dispersion of plants and animals.

The outcome of these changes was a world of contrasting regions of food production and consumption, setting up the potential in the long term for exchange as well as competition and conflict for territory and resources. Previously, there had been significant contrasts between regions in terms of the particular foods that were consumed, since they all depended on what was available locally, but modes of exploitation had been more uniform. Now, there were contrasts not only in what was consumed as food but also in how it was produced, distributed, and prepared. It was a revolutionary and long-lasting difference but one observed only by those who lived in a few widely scattered sites. Those who looked on from the perspective of hunting and gathering were not always impressed by what they saw, thinking the life of the farmer much inferior to their own in terms of the amount of time and effort required to produce foods which were no better than third-rate. Vast regions of the world remained dominated by peoples more or less happy to depend on hunting, fishing, and gathering.

Food worlds at 5000 BP

The map of global food systems in about 5000 BP was more complex than any that had gone before but displayed no more than scattered suggestions of what it might become (Figure 1.1). It was characterized by “islands” of agriculture, either beacons lighting the way or alternatively vulnerable experiments that might falter and fade, in the midst of a still overwhelming world of hunter-gatherer economies. The domestication of the most important crop plants, including rice, wheat, and maize, was already almost at an end, completed within the years between 10 000 BP and 4000 BP. However, the proportion of the world’s population living in urban places at 5000 BP was small and none of these settlements was individually substantial in modern terms. Not all of them would survive. What would happen next was far from a foregone conclusion.

Although in 5000 BP vast regions of North and South America still waited for their transitions, as did much of mainland and island Asia, and most of sub-Saharan Africa, Australasia, and the Pacific, the world food map was much more diverse than it had been five thousand years before. The transition to agriculture probably occurred first in Southwest Asia by 10 000 BP and from there diffused to the Indus valley of what is now Pakistan by 9000 BP, Greece by 8500 BP, and to the lower Nile by 7000 BP. The initial spread of agriculture into eastern and central Europe, around 8000 BP, followed the migration of people from Southwest Asia. Widely separated, but strikingly contemporaneous, independent examples of the shift occurred in New Guinea (10 000–7000 BP), Central Mexico (by 9000 BP), China (8500 BP), and northern South America (7000 BP). Almost all of Europe made the transition by 5000 BP, as did several additional regions in mainland eastern and southeastern Asia (Putterman, 2008: 745–6; Denham, 2007: 16).

Beyond the boundaries of those few scattered cultures that embraced the Agricultural and Urban Revolutions in the fullest degree, hunter-gatherers experimented with new ways of finding their food and at least implicitly faced hard decisions about whether to continue in the old paths or to adopt elements of sedentism and the hard labor of cultivation. Generally, people could make these decisions on their own terms. With the exception of some special cases, this was not a time of great empires or military conquest. Nor was it a time of powerful state systems or organized religion. People found their gods among the plants and animals with whom they shared the world. Although in some places, for example Central Europe, the first farmers were not descended from local hunter-gatherer populations but rather from people who had immigrated in the early Holocene, it is not clear how far this may have involved invasive colonization (Bramanti et al., 2009).

In some cases, there is evidence that first farmers expanded their populations and spread into nearby regions, imposing their genes, languages and cultures on hunter-gatherer communities, but cultural diffusion and a process of gradual absorption of farming and food systems seems to have been more important in the long term. Rather than being forced to adopt or participate in any particular system of resource exploitation, in ways that would dominate much of the history of the world in the millennia to come, most people had to base these decisions on their perceptions of the environments in which they lived and their relationship to other living things. They were relatively free to make their choices on the basis of their local knowledge, including the observation of farmers and town-dwellers if such communities existed within their range.

Hunter-gatherer peoples occupied the widest range of environments. Their food sources and their technologies varied in direct response to differences in the environments in which they found themselves or chose to inhabit by migration and colonization. For individual groups and communities, choice was effectively bounded by their immediate environmental sites and by the biodiversity of those sites. The world beyond those boundaries was typically hostile and its resources potentially hazardous. Thus, the hunter-gatherer peoples of 5000 BP could do no better than choose to eat from what lived around them, whatever those resources might be. In doing so, human beings proved themselves highly adaptable omnivores, selecting from widely different ranges of foods in different places. However, in spite of these strong contrasts, hunter-gatherers lived according to a relatively uniform set of principles, in a pact with nature which was both respectful and fearful. A central feature of hunter-gatherer societies in 5000 BP was the eating of meat. In some regions, where plants could not prosper, meat-eating was a necessity. This was most obviously the case where climatic extremes of heat and cold, and wet and dry, created deserts and ice fields, which were parsimonious in their supply of edible plant life suited to the human digestive system but supported a relative bounty of land and sea animals.

What exactly did people choose to eat around 5000 BP? In part, the contrasts around the world reflected differences in a population’s location along the tangled continuum that stretched from strict foraging to strict agriculture, but they also had to do with geographical location, rooted in local differences in biodiversity and topography, climate and soil. There were limits to the range of environments in which Homo sapiens could survive, but beyond the extremes people seemed able to find food almost everywhere on earth. The species proved highly adaptable. The plants and animals which made up the food of human beings were significantly less adaptable, flourishing in some environmental niches but not in others. Further, their dispersal by diffusion was less universal than that of humans.

Africa

Within Africa, the birthplace of Homo sapiens, people diffused first from their original home in the continent’s eastern and southern grassland ecosystems to occupy the great zone of savanna stretching from Ethiopia to Senegal (Figure 1.2). The region was, however, subject to some of the most extreme fluctuations in climate experienced anywhere during the Holocene. Hunter-gatherers prospered on the grassy savannas from about 9000 BP, until severe aridification drove the early pastoral peoples from most parts of the Saharan desert around 6000 BP, often for as long as a thousand years. New groups of humans began to enter the region around 5000 BP, taking advantage of lakeside sites that offered fish, clams, and crocodiles that could be used to supplement the now scarce land animals.

Figure 1.2 Africa.

Away from the lakes, there was intensified herding of domesticated cattle, and of domesticated sheep and goats introduced from the Levant which did better under drought by more efficiently exploiting the diminished vegetation, for a more diversified diet. The rapid desertification of the Sahara around 5000 BP made livestock increasingly important, by providing a relatively dependable supply of milk and meat, and perhaps blood. At the same time, the expanding mobile pastoralist peoples pushed into moister grassland regions to the south and east, and continued to practice hunting and gathering, including the collection of fruits, tubers, and wild grains (Barham and Mitchell, 2008: 359–62; Shaw et al., 1993; Phillipson, 1985: 113–47). Here then was a perfect example of the continuum from foraging to farming, of the long-term coexistence of pastoralists and foragers, and of the potential for exchange between food producers.

These forces of change led to an expansion of food production systems into sub-Saharan Africa, which eventually saw the combination of herding with cultivated crops come to occupy almost the entire continent. This system was not derived from the experience of Egypt, which had the advantage of unusual ecological conditions. The domestication and cultivation of grain crops to the south exploited different plants, all of them indigenous, such as pearl millet and sorghum. Much of this process did not begin until about 4000 BP, and active cultivation rather than the occasional collecting of seed took even longer. Dating of the transition to farming throughout the rainforest remains poorly understood. The range of combinations of systems of food production and acquisition were complex, with the potential for repeated independent invention. It is most likely that sub-Saharan Africa, throughout the equatorial rainforest and beyond, remained the domain of hunters and gatherers.

At 5000 BP, the sole example of settled, agricultural society in Africa was that found on the lower Nile. Small villages of farming people had appeared first in the delta two thousand year before, cultivating barley and emmer wheat, with granaries for storage, and keeping domesticated cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs, but still practicing fishing and hunting, and foraging wild plant food. These settlements expanded substantially during the long period down to the unification of the Egyptian state and the establishment of the first of the numbered Egyptian dynasties, with their pharaohs and deities, in about 5000 BP. It was at this time that a new crop complex was introduced to Egypt, combining wheat, barley, and legumes. Oxen were harnessed for the first time, to pull plows through the wet, heavy soil, but much of the tillage continued to be the work of hand-hoes. This crop-combination was successful in the conditions of the lower Nile, where the annual flood washed away excess salts and fertilized the fields, but it failed to spread much further, even where irrigation was attempted, as for example at oases in the Sahara and in the uplands of Ethiopia and Eritrea (Wenke, 2009: 56–65).

In ancient Egypt, wheat and barley were used to bake bread and brew a thick, dark beer, but sometimes the grains were boiled whole or made into a kind of porridge, or roughly ground and baked as flat pancakes. These cereal foods were eaten together with legumes, such as peas and beans, and vegetables, including onions, garlic, leeks, lettuce, radishes, and melons. The meat of pigs was relatively common but the consumption of beef depended on wealth. Camels were used neither for transport nor food at this time. Fish, including the Nile perch, tilapia, and catfish, were plentiful, especially in the delta but also taken from ponds and preserved by drying and salting. Birds, including pigeon, quail, duck, and geese, were abundant in the delta and often domesticated, serving to recycle household waste and producing eggs as well as meat. Goats were equally useful as recyclers, providing both milk and meat, while pigs were valued strictly for their flesh. Salt was readily available but other seasonings and herbs were more limited. Small birds were sometimes eaten raw, for breakfast. Fruit came from orchards. Some of this fruit, including both dates and grapes, was used to make sweet wine, laid down to age in pottery jars.

Figure 1.3 The Middle East and the Mediterranean.

Eurasia

The two most influential transitions to the new modes of food production, precursors of what was to happen in Egypt, occurred independently in Southwest Asia and China. It is significant that the first and best-known of these transitions occurred at the interface of Africa with Eurasia, running through the narrow Levantine corridor to the west of the Syrian Desert and curving in an arc through the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys (modern Iraq) to form the so-called Fertile Crescent (Figure 1.3). The transition did not simply mark the movement of humans out of Africa into a new environment but had to wait many millennia for the climate change, and the short-lived climate reversals, of the early Holocene. It was here that wheat and barley were domesticated from wild cereal varieties, and sheep and goats brought into the fold, in some of the earliest domestications (Brown et al., 2009: 103–9). Not only was this small region of southwestern Asia significant for its agricultural revolution; it also formed the focus of influential cultural movements and saw the birth of some of the world’s great religions, each with its particular food rituals and taboos.

By 5000 BP the people of the Fertile Crescent had added domesticated legumes such as lentils, broad beans, peas, and chickpeas to wheat, barley, and rye, and pigs and cattle to the sheep and goats. Technologies were developed to store grains and meat, to help provide food throughout the year. Animals were exploited in new ways, notably by harnessing them to provide motive power in the work of agriculture, increasing productivity through their capacity to pull heavy plows, and by using their manure as fertilizer. Cows, goats, and sheep were also milked, providing new food products, such as cheese, ghee, and yoghurt. These new ways of using animals in the food system not only were important within the agricultural zone of Southwest Asia but also enabled the development of efficient nomadic pastoral economies which spread beyond the region into the Russian steppes, where agriculture did not follow (Kohl, 2007:158–66).

Figure 1.4 China and Southeast Asia.

Irrigation and drainage systems enabled the intensive settlement of fertile lowland valleys, where the first urbanized states of Mesopotamia were created. Grains were ground to make flour, and bread was baked. Pottery was used to make storage jars and to cook over fires and in clay-baked ovens. Most cooking involved boiling, steaming, roasting, or baking, effectively extending the range of what was palatable. Fermentation, in ceramic jars, was used to make beer and wine and domesticated olives were cured to make oil. Orchard fruits, such as date, fig, pomegranate, and apple, also became common around 5000 BP. By this time, domesticated animals had largely supplanted their wild relatives and the collecting of wild grain was no longer a profitable use of time. The food system of southwestern Asia had taken on a familiar character. A cuisine, a gastronomy, was taking form.

The second most significant center of domestication and agricultural transition was in China, where rice was domesticated by about 9000 BP on the Yangtze River (Figure 1.4). By 5000 BP large-scale wet-rice farming was firmly established and had spread recently into southern and southwestern China and to Taiwan (Chi and Hung, 2010; Zheng et al., 2009). This development was associated with substantial human migration and population growth. New fields were opened up by the burning of marshes and the reclamation of land, and the soil was tilled using wooden spades and harvested with sickles made of bone. Plows, drawn by water buffalo, were not known. In the north, millet varieties were domesticated on the Yellow River by 8000 BP, and these found their way south, where they joined rice and tubers (yams and taro), and a long list of vegetables from leeks to lotus roots (Bettinger, Barton and Morgan, 2010).

Hunting, fishing, and gathering remained important in China, particularly in the Yangtze valley and in marginal areas, including for buffalo, deer, rhinoceros, elephant, alligator, and tortoise; carp; waterfowl such as cormorant, egret, duck, and heron; and wild fruits such as peaches, plums, acorns, and nuts (Jing, Flad and Yunbing, 2008). It was an eclectic mix of foods. These activities remained vital throughout mainland and island southeastern Asia, where tropical environments offered an abundance and the tubers were much more important in the diet. Cattle, sheep, and goats were domesticated, valued for their meat and fat, not their milk. Rice cultivation, associated with domesticated and transportable animals, notably pigs, had already made a firm imprint but remained to gain regional hegemony. As in Mesopotamia, a cuisine was still in the making, lacking texts and cookbooks.

Outside these two influential centers, southwestern Asia and China, new food production systems emerged through diffusion and, to some degree, local invention. The spread of the “Neolithic package,” made up of cereals, cattle, pigs, and sheep, was sometimes the work of farmer-colonists but more often the result of adoption and adaptation, with many discontinuities where the package was not initially accepted in whole or in part (Barker, 2006: 364–6). This pattern of acculturation was true of most of Europe, where the elements of the package were all exotics with their roots in a semi-arid region and required time to acclimatize to an ecosystem barely recovered from deglaciation. Farming began spreading along the Mediterranean coastline by about 7500 BP, adjusting fairly easily. On the other hand, although domesticated cereal crops and cattle had reached as far as Scandinavia by 5000 BP, hunting and gathering remained economically and culturally important.

To the east, a shifting frontier developed between the cultures of wheat and the cultures of rice. Caught in the middle, generally unawares, early sedentary hunter-gatherers across much of Asia exploited wild plants and animals but shifted slowly into small-scale horticulture and rudimentary herding. At 5000 BP the Indus valley was on the verge of urbanism, with an elaborated agriculture of millet and wheat, together with an awareness of rice that was still to develop in water-fed cultivation (Wright, 2010). Similarly, rice was still finding its place in much of the Indian subcontinent, including the Ganges valley. Regions to the north demonstrated a growing commitment to pastoralism and varieties of mixed farming.

Korea and Japan were both following the Chinese path by 5000 BP, though with greater emphasis on fish and shellfish. In the rainforests of mainland and island southeastern Asia, which had been connected landmasses in the Last Glacial Maximum, minimal manipulation by hunter-gatherers was sufficient to enhance the productivity of plants such as bananas, sago, pandanus, swamp taro, and wild rice. These were gathered while meat was obtained from wild cattle and water buffalo, deer, rhinoceros, turtles, tortoises, crabs, fish, and shellfish. By 5000 BP, when the present-day coastline was already clearly demarcated, wet-rice farming was just beginning to get a foothold, in the islands as well as the mainland of southeastern Asia. A number of significant early domestications occurred in the region, however, notably the chicken from the wild red junglefowl nearly ten thousand years ago (Sawai et al., 2010).