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Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization
In this provocative, wide-ranging book, Against the Grain, Richard Manning offers a dramatically revisionist view of recent human evolution, beginning with the vast increase in brain size that set us apart from our primate relatives and brought an accompanying increase in our need for nourishment. For 290,000 years, we managed to meet that need as hunter-gatherers, a state in which Manning believes we were at our most human: at our smartest, strongest, most sensually alive. But our reliance on food made a secure supply deeply attractive, and eventually we embarked upon the agricultural experiment that has been the history of our past 10,000 years.
The evolutionary road is littered with failed experiments, however, and Manning suggests that agriculture as we have practiced it runs against both our grain and nature's. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, biologists, archaeologists, and philosophers, along with his own travels, he argues that not only our ecological ills-overpopulation, erosion, pollution-but our social and emotional malaise are rooted in the devil's bargain we made in our not-so-distant past. And he offers personal, achievable ways we might re-contour the path we have taken to resurrect what is most sustainable and sustaining in our own nature and the planet's.
The evolutionary road is littered with failed experiments, however, and Manning suggests that agriculture as we have practiced it runs against both our grain and nature's. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, biologists, archaeologists, and philosophers, along with his own travels, he argues that not only our ecological ills-overpopulation, erosion, pollution-but our social and emotional malaise are rooted in the devil's bargain we made in our not-so-distant past. And he offers personal, achievable ways we might re-contour the path we have taken to resurrect what is most sustainable and sustaining in our own nature and the planet's.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 68 reviews
March 5, 2013
March 2 to 3, 2013: Coming back to this book after 2.5 years stewing in sustainable agriculture, environmental history, and Deep Ecology, made me realize how impressive Manning's accomplishment with this book was. He fits a vast argument deftly into a relatively short space, giving detailed attention to several major aspects of the issue and drawing really respectfully on a really well-chosen bibliography, books that I have since read many of and that invariably left me much wiser than when I began.
Manning's argument is concentric, moving from the emergence of agriculture at the dawn of the Neolithic inwards to the revolutionary effects of potatoes and sugarcane on European imperialism, then to the shift into industrialized agriculture, and finally into the commodity grain market, its subsidies and its ever more elaborate excuses to use up surplus corn and soybeans. In the process, he takes up the arguments of David Abram in comparing the lifestyles and worldviews of literate and non-literate peoples and the arguments of Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism regarding the coadapted biotic community that helped Europeans conquer much of the world and destroy much of its unique life.
While his arguments dovetail precisely with those of ideologues like Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith, there is something much more relaxed about this book, since Manning never seeks to make an exhortation to action, and he is certainly not restricting his audience to people within a fringe community of radical environmentalists (or vegans, in Lierre's case). He just explores some fascinating big-picture environmental history with a strong edge of Deep Ecology's passion and ecological ecumenicism, and with a stubborn insistence on seeing those who suffer under severe hierarchy.
That paired interest and love without some of the cloying radicalism and near groupthink in the DGR set (a set of ideas I buy into deeply, and respect more than any other politics, but a group of people I sometimes find a bit too much) makes Manning one of my favorite authors. I just love what he sees, what he finds interesting, and how he paints it. His "Grassland" is shaping up to be an even deeper and more lyrical exploration in passionate environmental history.
Nov 7 to 18, 2010: The myth of progress and its poster child, agriculture, form the central blinders of our culture - and, likely, have done so for agricultural civilizations for their entire history. Despite the best efforts of intellectuals like William R. Catton Jr and Jared Diamond to foster an ecological perspective, it is still extremely difficult to expose yourself (especially as an isolated teen) to critical perspectives.
Manning provides the most sweeping, thorough, accessible, and impeccably researched critique of agriculture I've yet encountered. It deals with the material explored in Diamond's essay http://www.scribd.com/doc/2100251/Jar... but explores so much more on top of that.
The book is bookended with discussion of what it means to live in a hunter-gatherer culture or an agricultural one, and specifically how relatively impoverished we are now in comparison. Then the evolutionary and dietary stage is set, and the early development of agriculture is explored. Manning sets out many things I already knew (that agriculture's main social consequence is social inequality, and that agriculture means malnutrition) but also explores things I'dn't been exposed to or thought of yet. For example: that sedentism enabled agriculture, not vice versa; that famine has literally been a constant part of agricultural life in all of its manifestations, anywhere, ever.
The middle section of the book deals with the processing and commodicization of crops. First, he discusses sugar and its role in the Industrial Revolution and triangular trade. Then, another jump ahead takes us to modern American agriculture, defined by processing and its needs: cheap surpluses of inedible corn, soybeans, and wheat.
In short, Manning effectively tackles a huge range of historical problems with agriculture. His writing is clear and journalistic (his sources are treated as though he'd interviewed them, which is a really good style, I think) and his points are all elegantly made and well-grounded. Very much recommended to anyone who's enjoyed Diamond's works, who is interested in the problems of modern ag, or who cares about things.
Reading Schumacher and Catton set me on a road toward what may become my new field: human ecology. Manning's book is a great first step on that official path (Diamond's books were clear antecedents, of course). Its bibliography also seems to be a great list of books on that subject. I look forward to digging into them.
Manning's argument is concentric, moving from the emergence of agriculture at the dawn of the Neolithic inwards to the revolutionary effects of potatoes and sugarcane on European imperialism, then to the shift into industrialized agriculture, and finally into the commodity grain market, its subsidies and its ever more elaborate excuses to use up surplus corn and soybeans. In the process, he takes up the arguments of David Abram in comparing the lifestyles and worldviews of literate and non-literate peoples and the arguments of Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism regarding the coadapted biotic community that helped Europeans conquer much of the world and destroy much of its unique life.
While his arguments dovetail precisely with those of ideologues like Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith, there is something much more relaxed about this book, since Manning never seeks to make an exhortation to action, and he is certainly not restricting his audience to people within a fringe community of radical environmentalists (or vegans, in Lierre's case). He just explores some fascinating big-picture environmental history with a strong edge of Deep Ecology's passion and ecological ecumenicism, and with a stubborn insistence on seeing those who suffer under severe hierarchy.
That paired interest and love without some of the cloying radicalism and near groupthink in the DGR set (a set of ideas I buy into deeply, and respect more than any other politics, but a group of people I sometimes find a bit too much) makes Manning one of my favorite authors. I just love what he sees, what he finds interesting, and how he paints it. His "Grassland" is shaping up to be an even deeper and more lyrical exploration in passionate environmental history.
Nov 7 to 18, 2010: The myth of progress and its poster child, agriculture, form the central blinders of our culture - and, likely, have done so for agricultural civilizations for their entire history. Despite the best efforts of intellectuals like William R. Catton Jr and Jared Diamond to foster an ecological perspective, it is still extremely difficult to expose yourself (especially as an isolated teen) to critical perspectives.
Manning provides the most sweeping, thorough, accessible, and impeccably researched critique of agriculture I've yet encountered. It deals with the material explored in Diamond's essay http://www.scribd.com/doc/2100251/Jar... but explores so much more on top of that.
The book is bookended with discussion of what it means to live in a hunter-gatherer culture or an agricultural one, and specifically how relatively impoverished we are now in comparison. Then the evolutionary and dietary stage is set, and the early development of agriculture is explored. Manning sets out many things I already knew (that agriculture's main social consequence is social inequality, and that agriculture means malnutrition) but also explores things I'dn't been exposed to or thought of yet. For example: that sedentism enabled agriculture, not vice versa; that famine has literally been a constant part of agricultural life in all of its manifestations, anywhere, ever.
The middle section of the book deals with the processing and commodicization of crops. First, he discusses sugar and its role in the Industrial Revolution and triangular trade. Then, another jump ahead takes us to modern American agriculture, defined by processing and its needs: cheap surpluses of inedible corn, soybeans, and wheat.
In short, Manning effectively tackles a huge range of historical problems with agriculture. His writing is clear and journalistic (his sources are treated as though he'd interviewed them, which is a really good style, I think) and his points are all elegantly made and well-grounded. Very much recommended to anyone who's enjoyed Diamond's works, who is interested in the problems of modern ag, or who cares about things.
Reading Schumacher and Catton set me on a road toward what may become my new field: human ecology. Manning's book is a great first step on that official path (Diamond's books were clear antecedents, of course). Its bibliography also seems to be a great list of books on that subject. I look forward to digging into them.
March 22, 2015
Agriculture is one of humankind’s most troublesome experiments, and it is now hopelessly in debt. It has borrowed soil, water, and energy that it can never repay, and never intended to repay — burning up tomorrow to feed today. We know it, we keep doing it, and we have dark hallucinations about feeding billions more. Agriculture has become civilization’s tar baby.
Richard Manning is among my favorite writers. He slings snappy lines like: “There is no such thing as sustainable agriculture. It does not exist.” Or, “The domestication of wheat was humankind’s greatest mistake.” And he’s the opposite of a raving nutjob. In his book, Against the Grain, he hoses off the thick crust of mythical balderdash and twaddle, and presents us with a clear-eyed history of agriculture, warts and all (especially the warts). Everyone everywhere should read it, and more than once.
Roughly 10,000 years ago, agriculture came into existence in several different locations, independently. These were lands having an abundant supply of wild foods. The residents had no need to roam for their chow, so they settled down and built permanent homes and villages. Over time, with the growing number of mouths, the food supply became strained, and this inspired a habit of seed planting. As usual, nobody foresaw the unintended consequences of a brilliant new trick, and an innocent mistake ended up going viral and ravaging the entire planet. Whoops!
Grains are potent foods, because they are rich in calories, and they can be stored for extended periods of time. Herds of domesticated animals and granaries packed with hoarded seeds came to be perceived as private property, which led to the concept of wealth, and its dark shadow, poverty. Wealth had a habit of snowballing, leading to elites having access to far more resources than the hordes of lowly grunts.
Countless legions of peasants and slaves spent their lives building colossal pyramids, temples, castles, cathedrals, and other monuments to the rich and powerful. “What we are today — civilized, city-bound, overpopulated, literate, organized, wealthy, poor, diseased, conquered, and conquerors — is all rooted in the domestication of plants and animals. The advent of farming re-formed humanity.”
Like mold on an orange, agriculture had a tendency to spread all over. It tended not to “diffuse” from culture to culture, like cell phone technology. More often it spread by “displacement” — swiping the lands of the indigenous people. Evidence suggests that Indo-European farming tribes spread across Europe in a 300-year blitzkrieg, eliminating the salmon-eating wild folks.
Paleontologists study old artifacts. Examining hunter-gatherer skeletons is brutally boring, because these people tended to be remarkably healthy. The bones of farming people are far more interesting. Grain eaters commonly suffered from tooth decay, bone deformities, malnutrition, osteomyelitis, periostitis, intestinal parasites, malaria, yaws, syphilis, leprosy, tuberculosis, anemia, rickets in children, osteomalacia in adults, retarded childhood growth, and short stature among adults.
Hunter-gatherers consumed a wide variety of foods, consequently they were well nourished. In farming villages, poverty was common, and the common diet majored in grain, the cheapest source of calories. The poor in England often lived on bread and water, period. They almost never tasted meat, and milk and cheese were rare luxuries. The Irish poor lived on oat porridge. Later, the poor of England and Ireland switched to potatoes, an even cheaper food.
In twentieth century America, government farm policies drove most small subsistence farms into extinction. Big farmers, with big farms and big machines, got big subsidy checks for growing commodity crops, like corn. We now produce vast quantities of extremely cheap grain. Some of the surplus is exported to other nations, some is made into livestock feed, some is converted into processed foods. The inspiration for writing his book came suddenly, when Manning returned from a trip abroad, and was astonished to observe vast herds of obese Americans. Oh my God! Why?
Through the wonders of food science technology, we are now able to extract the complex carbs in corn, and convert them into simple carbs — sugar. Sugar is the calorie from hell, because it is rapidly metabolized by the body, like spraying gasoline on a fire. Mother Nature includes generous amounts of fiber in fruits and berries, and this slows the rate at which sugar is released to the body. But there is zero fiber in a cheap 44 ounce soda fountain soft drink, and an immense dose of corn sugar. It seems like most processed foods now contain added sugar.
Michael Pollan’s fabulous books encourage readers to have serious doubts about industrial agriculture and processed foods. Manning probes deeper. He leaves us perceiving the entire history of agriculture in a new and vividly unflattering manner. It’s an extremely important issue, and one that’s long overdue for thorough critical analysis.
At this point in the game, we can’t painlessly abandon agriculture, and return to sustainability, so we’ve placed most of our bets on impossible techno miracles (God forbid!). This century is going to provide many powerful lessons on the foolishness of living like stylish Madoffs on stolen resources. As the end of cheap energy deflates the global economy, the shrinking herd will eventually reach a point where we actually can abandon agriculture painlessly. It would be very satisfying to finally break out of our ancient habit of repeating the same old mistakes over and over. Will we kick the habit and joyfully celebrate the extinction of tilling? Hey, this is what big brains are for — learning.
Not surprisingly, at the end of this book, Manning does not provide a cheap, quick, simple solution. He does not foresee a smooth, managed transition to a sustainable future — it’s going to be a mess. He recommends shifting toward foods from perennial plants, like fruits, nuts, and berries — and replacing grain-fed meat with grass-fed. And, of course, nothing close to seven billion people can fit into a happy sustainable future. The healing process will be a vast undertaking: “Not back to the garden, back to the wild.”
Richard Manning is among my favorite writers. He slings snappy lines like: “There is no such thing as sustainable agriculture. It does not exist.” Or, “The domestication of wheat was humankind’s greatest mistake.” And he’s the opposite of a raving nutjob. In his book, Against the Grain, he hoses off the thick crust of mythical balderdash and twaddle, and presents us with a clear-eyed history of agriculture, warts and all (especially the warts). Everyone everywhere should read it, and more than once.
Roughly 10,000 years ago, agriculture came into existence in several different locations, independently. These were lands having an abundant supply of wild foods. The residents had no need to roam for their chow, so they settled down and built permanent homes and villages. Over time, with the growing number of mouths, the food supply became strained, and this inspired a habit of seed planting. As usual, nobody foresaw the unintended consequences of a brilliant new trick, and an innocent mistake ended up going viral and ravaging the entire planet. Whoops!
Grains are potent foods, because they are rich in calories, and they can be stored for extended periods of time. Herds of domesticated animals and granaries packed with hoarded seeds came to be perceived as private property, which led to the concept of wealth, and its dark shadow, poverty. Wealth had a habit of snowballing, leading to elites having access to far more resources than the hordes of lowly grunts.
Countless legions of peasants and slaves spent their lives building colossal pyramids, temples, castles, cathedrals, and other monuments to the rich and powerful. “What we are today — civilized, city-bound, overpopulated, literate, organized, wealthy, poor, diseased, conquered, and conquerors — is all rooted in the domestication of plants and animals. The advent of farming re-formed humanity.”
Like mold on an orange, agriculture had a tendency to spread all over. It tended not to “diffuse” from culture to culture, like cell phone technology. More often it spread by “displacement” — swiping the lands of the indigenous people. Evidence suggests that Indo-European farming tribes spread across Europe in a 300-year blitzkrieg, eliminating the salmon-eating wild folks.
Paleontologists study old artifacts. Examining hunter-gatherer skeletons is brutally boring, because these people tended to be remarkably healthy. The bones of farming people are far more interesting. Grain eaters commonly suffered from tooth decay, bone deformities, malnutrition, osteomyelitis, periostitis, intestinal parasites, malaria, yaws, syphilis, leprosy, tuberculosis, anemia, rickets in children, osteomalacia in adults, retarded childhood growth, and short stature among adults.
Hunter-gatherers consumed a wide variety of foods, consequently they were well nourished. In farming villages, poverty was common, and the common diet majored in grain, the cheapest source of calories. The poor in England often lived on bread and water, period. They almost never tasted meat, and milk and cheese were rare luxuries. The Irish poor lived on oat porridge. Later, the poor of England and Ireland switched to potatoes, an even cheaper food.
In twentieth century America, government farm policies drove most small subsistence farms into extinction. Big farmers, with big farms and big machines, got big subsidy checks for growing commodity crops, like corn. We now produce vast quantities of extremely cheap grain. Some of the surplus is exported to other nations, some is made into livestock feed, some is converted into processed foods. The inspiration for writing his book came suddenly, when Manning returned from a trip abroad, and was astonished to observe vast herds of obese Americans. Oh my God! Why?
Through the wonders of food science technology, we are now able to extract the complex carbs in corn, and convert them into simple carbs — sugar. Sugar is the calorie from hell, because it is rapidly metabolized by the body, like spraying gasoline on a fire. Mother Nature includes generous amounts of fiber in fruits and berries, and this slows the rate at which sugar is released to the body. But there is zero fiber in a cheap 44 ounce soda fountain soft drink, and an immense dose of corn sugar. It seems like most processed foods now contain added sugar.
Michael Pollan’s fabulous books encourage readers to have serious doubts about industrial agriculture and processed foods. Manning probes deeper. He leaves us perceiving the entire history of agriculture in a new and vividly unflattering manner. It’s an extremely important issue, and one that’s long overdue for thorough critical analysis.
At this point in the game, we can’t painlessly abandon agriculture, and return to sustainability, so we’ve placed most of our bets on impossible techno miracles (God forbid!). This century is going to provide many powerful lessons on the foolishness of living like stylish Madoffs on stolen resources. As the end of cheap energy deflates the global economy, the shrinking herd will eventually reach a point where we actually can abandon agriculture painlessly. It would be very satisfying to finally break out of our ancient habit of repeating the same old mistakes over and over. Will we kick the habit and joyfully celebrate the extinction of tilling? Hey, this is what big brains are for — learning.
Not surprisingly, at the end of this book, Manning does not provide a cheap, quick, simple solution. He does not foresee a smooth, managed transition to a sustainable future — it’s going to be a mess. He recommends shifting toward foods from perennial plants, like fruits, nuts, and berries — and replacing grain-fed meat with grass-fed. And, of course, nothing close to seven billion people can fit into a happy sustainable future. The healing process will be a vast undertaking: “Not back to the garden, back to the wild.”
August 8, 2009
I was a bit unsure what to expect from this book. Manning starts out with some history of agriculture, and conflicts between agricultural and hunter/gatherer type communities and throughout I was rather expecting a Derrick Jensen type conclusion like 'down with agriculture, return to the hunter/gatherer mode'... which didn't come. In fact the conclusion was just a call for more sustainable agriculture, which to me seemed like a weak point to make after all the dissatisfaction with the agricultural system that Manning expressed in the foregoing chapters.
Beyond that, to me, dissonance, the book was okay. Fairly dry, with a lot of facts and figures and names and dates interspersed with sort of poetic personal stories here and there. I also got annoyed by Manning's attitude towards vegetarian/vegan diets. He sees vegetarians, etc. apparently as nothing more than rebellious teens... possibly a bit sissy.
Beyond that, to me, dissonance, the book was okay. Fairly dry, with a lot of facts and figures and names and dates interspersed with sort of poetic personal stories here and there. I also got annoyed by Manning's attitude towards vegetarian/vegan diets. He sees vegetarians, etc. apparently as nothing more than rebellious teens... possibly a bit sissy.
June 20, 2009
Agriculture has domesticated humans. This is the argument at the center of Richard Manning's stunning history of food. Written with journalistic flavor, Manning explores the ways that agriculture has diminished human life and threatens the planet itself.
The book begins by exploring the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, in many ways superior to our own even at the height of industrial capitalism. Hunter-gatherers, it turns out, ate a wider variety of tasty foods, worked far less, and lived much more sensually and connected than "civilized" humans. About 10,000 years ago, certain groups of humans traded all this in for security, namely the ability to stay in one spot and harvest grain to be stored for future food.
What this crop manipulation produced, however, was the first wealth inequality known to the species, as leaders left working the fields to their followers. In time, these stationary and hierarchical societies expanded and conquered/killed their hunter-gatherer neighbors. Soon enough crops like wheat, corn, and rice spread across the globe through violence and disease.
Manning focuses on these three crops because, as he explains, some 2/3 of all calories consumed today originate with them. In the US, corn is especially dominant, made into all kinds of commodities, for example corn syrup which can be found in just about everything we eat now. The dominance of these few grains is a consequence of capitalism, as they lend themselves easily to processing and storage - making them ideal commodities.
But an important plot twist in the story of grain's dominance lies hidden in the open. Farm subsidies, especially in the US and Europe, distort the market to make these crops extremely cheap at the expense of all other nutrition. This has the added effect of enriching a few large agribusiness corporations (like Archer Daniels Midland) that grow or process them from enormous monocrop fields, although at the cost of ruining millions of small farmers all over the world. Our health, and the health of the planet are likewise jeopardized by the overabundance of these few crops produced with massive inputs of oil and chemicals.
Nevertheless, Richard Manning is able to summon the hope at the end of the book that our food system doesn't have to be this way. Finding a distinction between agriculture and "simply growing food", he argues that we can build an economy based on feeding people, and not just accumulating wealth. Organic agriculture, permaculture, intercropping, farmer's markets and co-ops all point in this more just and sustainable direction, and awareness of the superiority of these more human methods has been growing at a phenomenal rate.
If we can nourish ourselves by reconnecting with the land and our sensual natures, perhaps we can also heal society and the planet. Against the Grain is a big step in educating us for that effort. Highly recommended.
The book begins by exploring the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, in many ways superior to our own even at the height of industrial capitalism. Hunter-gatherers, it turns out, ate a wider variety of tasty foods, worked far less, and lived much more sensually and connected than "civilized" humans. About 10,000 years ago, certain groups of humans traded all this in for security, namely the ability to stay in one spot and harvest grain to be stored for future food.
What this crop manipulation produced, however, was the first wealth inequality known to the species, as leaders left working the fields to their followers. In time, these stationary and hierarchical societies expanded and conquered/killed their hunter-gatherer neighbors. Soon enough crops like wheat, corn, and rice spread across the globe through violence and disease.
Manning focuses on these three crops because, as he explains, some 2/3 of all calories consumed today originate with them. In the US, corn is especially dominant, made into all kinds of commodities, for example corn syrup which can be found in just about everything we eat now. The dominance of these few grains is a consequence of capitalism, as they lend themselves easily to processing and storage - making them ideal commodities.
But an important plot twist in the story of grain's dominance lies hidden in the open. Farm subsidies, especially in the US and Europe, distort the market to make these crops extremely cheap at the expense of all other nutrition. This has the added effect of enriching a few large agribusiness corporations (like Archer Daniels Midland) that grow or process them from enormous monocrop fields, although at the cost of ruining millions of small farmers all over the world. Our health, and the health of the planet are likewise jeopardized by the overabundance of these few crops produced with massive inputs of oil and chemicals.
Nevertheless, Richard Manning is able to summon the hope at the end of the book that our food system doesn't have to be this way. Finding a distinction between agriculture and "simply growing food", he argues that we can build an economy based on feeding people, and not just accumulating wealth. Organic agriculture, permaculture, intercropping, farmer's markets and co-ops all point in this more just and sustainable direction, and awareness of the superiority of these more human methods has been growing at a phenomenal rate.
If we can nourish ourselves by reconnecting with the land and our sensual natures, perhaps we can also heal society and the planet. Against the Grain is a big step in educating us for that effort. Highly recommended.
September 10, 2017
Some of the sociohistorical evidence that Mr. Manning brings up to back how "agriculture has hijacked civilization" are really fascinating and at times shocking. The book exposes the reader to substantial bits and pieces of anecdotes from history from the perspective of how our society has evolved and will continue to evolve around agriculture; the aim of which is to benefit the few whose goal is to accumulate wealth, inevitably at the expense of the masses. Observing the world, I can't but help agreeing with Mr. Manning, when he writes, "The political system cannot be counted on to reform agriculture because any political system is a creation of agriculture, a coevolved entity. The major forces that shaped and shape our world -- disease, imperialism, colonialism, slavery, trade, wealth -- all are a part of the culture agriculture evolved." In terms of readability, I had some difficulty reading through the book because topics seemed to jump from one to another rather abruptly. Also some of the conclusions that the author draws seemed rather exaggerated. I agree with one previous reader who thought that Mr. Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma was a better written book on this topic of how we source our food and its impact on society and our health. Nevertheless, this book may be a worthwhile read for those interested in the sociohisotrical observations.
July 17, 2011
I was stunned when I picked up this book. I'd been reading about the history of agricultural societies for a while, and reading between the lines that agriculture has changed our society for the worse. Against the Grain took all of my ideas and solidified them.
I had two disappointments with the book. First, there's a big section in the middle about the evils of modern agriculture --- I found that really boring since I've read a lot about that before, but it was essential to the book if you haven't pondered those questions before. More importantly, though, I felt like the ending was extraordinarily weak. The book will make you believe that agriculture as we practice it is bad, but his solutions are not well thought out --- mainstream organic food, in my opinion, is only a small step better than the traditional agriculture it mimics.
On the other hand, the book is very short and easy to read --- a relief after plodding through the equally enlightening but far too long Guns, Germs, and Steel.
I had two disappointments with the book. First, there's a big section in the middle about the evils of modern agriculture --- I found that really boring since I've read a lot about that before, but it was essential to the book if you haven't pondered those questions before. More importantly, though, I felt like the ending was extraordinarily weak. The book will make you believe that agriculture as we practice it is bad, but his solutions are not well thought out --- mainstream organic food, in my opinion, is only a small step better than the traditional agriculture it mimics.
On the other hand, the book is very short and easy to read --- a relief after plodding through the equally enlightening but far too long Guns, Germs, and Steel.
September 16, 2015
Reads like a agriculturally focused version of Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel.
On hunting
Hunting enlivens the senses like no other experience, giving me a taste of what it must be like to truly see and hear.
The human beings who maintain these hyper-refined senses are hunter-gatherers. Their impressive powers of perception have been noted and detailed by just about every student of hunter-gatherer groups. It is not only that they sense more than the rest of us do, but that they do so in a qualitatively different fashion. (synaesthesia, overlapping of senses. Think feeling a color)
Fly-fishing is simply a means for contemplating rivers.
Gamboling about plain and forest, hunting and living off the land is fun. Farming is not. That's all one needs to know to begin a rethinking of the issue. The fundamental question was properly phrased by Colin Tudge of the London School of Economics: "The real problem, then, is not to explain why some people were slow to adopt agriculture but why anybody took it up at all, when it is so obviously beastly."
Which came first? Civilisation or agriculture?
To ratchet up farming would require a significant level of human disturbance. That is, it would require that people congregate in settlements, places where their activity would disturb land, and more important, where people would stay long enough to plant and harvest. Sedentism was a precondition of agriculture. This flies directly in the face of the just-so story that suggests it was the efficiency of agriculture that made settlement possible.
Because of the permanent occupation of land, it became important to establish a family's claim on the land, and veneration of ancestors was a part of that process.
The availability of soft foods meant children could be weaned earlier, at one year instead of four. Women then could turn out the masses of children that would grow up to build pyramids and mounds.
On famine (and other aspects of life after civilisation):
Throughout history famine has been concentrated at population centers, Given this pattern, it is difficult to see agriculture as the antidote to hunger. In fact, the pattern suggests the opposite. Famine was the mark of a maturing agricultural society, the very badge of civilization.
Simply put, the population explosion that agriculture allows creates the need for expansion, as it has since the first wheat-beef people hit the European plain. A society, however, also can settle the problem with famine.
Population explosion generates the need to grow more food, but agriculture is the cause of that population explosion, and agriculture creates government. The hierarchical, specialized societies that agriculture builds are wholly dependent on the smooth operation of their infrastructure, on stability, on transportation. Dams must be built, canals must flow, roads must be maintained, and government must be established to order those tasks. Government leaders emerge from the social hierarchy that agriculture's wealth makes possible.
Poverty, government, and famine are coevolved species, every bit as integral to catastrophic agriculture as wheat, bluegrass, smallpox, and brown rats.
And sugar was a remarkably efficient food, producing the most calories per acre of any crop. An acre of sugar will produce the same number of calories as four acres of potatoes, twelve of wheat, or 135 devoted to raising beef.
There is a fundamental tension inherent in civilized economies, one that intensifies as they develop. Farming, pyramid building, and industrialism above all require a huge pool of cheap labor. But that pool must be fed. We have seen that famine, disease, and simple malnourishment can come to the rescue of an overtaxed economy by correcting periodic population imbalances. In this light, famine, poverty, and disease are useful institutions, which is perhaps why Christ was so certain they would always be with us. The more trumpeted tool for this task, though, is efficiency, a favorite word of economists. In this mind-set, food is no longer a pleasure, an aesthetic experience, a bearer of culture and tradition. It is not cuisine but calories. The efficiency of sugar fit nicely with the ascendant dehumanization that was British industrialism.
Like famine, malnutrition promotes infant mortality and suppresses the birthrate, biasing the population toward working adults.
On agriculture today
(After the agricultural revolution) Before, farming had been uniquely autonomous of industry, because machines couldn't make food, only nature could. All of a sudden, machines were integral to the process.
However, the business of directly supporting prices with cash payments to farmers didn't emerge in force until the Great Depression. These payments were intended to keep food cheap, to keep farmers on the land, to diversify the crop base, and, above all, to be temporary. They have succeeded only in the first goal.
Irrigation now accounts for 70 percent of the freshwater used by humans.
American farmers have always grown commodities in surplus. Our country is almost unique in having never known famine. Even during the worst of the breadlines in the Great Depression, there was surplus grain.
Expecting farmers to respond to market signals now is a bit like expecting an alcoholic to order the herbal tea at an open bar. This is the legacy of subsidy. Governments, including Mexico's, got in the business of making nitrogen cheap, and farmers lapped it up, but it created a welfare state. Emblematic of that state is a deep-seated irrationality that ignores cause and effect.
We hide grain surpluses in foreign aid, but the more traditional way of hiding corn is in livestock.
The original purpose of the USDA (department of agriculture)'s food pyramid was to encourage consumption of the surplus grain and meat that was being produced.
For instance, the raising of swine for food was banned in the Middle East, as, more recently, was coffee use among Mormons, because omnivorous swine ate scarce protein, and coffee, which had to be imported in nineteenth-century Utah, took a heavy toll on resources. That is, the taboos were used to enforce a social good not rooted in avoiding toxins. Taboos could be useful, but just as often they were used to divide people.
The central strategy of the chains is to dumb down every operation, to process food and freeze it at centralized factories so that it can be thawed and served at restaurants by unskilled labor. As a consequence, there are no unionized McDonald's, and the average wage of fast-food workers is now the lowest of any sector in the United States, including migrant farm workers.
A thirty-two-ounce soda and a tank of gas is America distilled to its seminal fluids. (sugar syrup and oil)
What now?
The political system cannot be counted on to reform agriculture because any political system is a creation of agriculture, a coevolved entity. The major forces that shaped and shape our world - disease, imperialism, colonialism, slavery, trade, wealth - all are a part of the culture agriculture evolved. We carry evidence of its disease in our bones and blood, of its pollutants in our cells, as surely as those ten-thousand-year-old skeletons of farmers are deformed and decayed by the very same infectious diseases, stoop labor, and exploitation. Just as surely, agriculture dug the tunnel of our vision.
There is a distinction to be made between what I have called agriculture and simply growing food. Call the latter farming, a distinction that still has its problems, though it will serve for a first cut. The difference is that the goal of agriculture is not feeding people; it is the accumulation of wealth.
It is generally understood that companion planting (or intercropping) of various species causes the phenomenon of overyielding, in which each plant produces more than it would if grown alone. However, with the row cropping and mechanical harvest of monoculture, this is not a practical system of agriculture on any sort of scale, so fertilizer substitutes for intercropping. Mundt, however, tried to obtain overyielding by planting together not different crops, but different varieties of rice, which could be uniformly harvested by machine. It worked spectacularly. This sort of research will not come out of a corporation, simply because the results don't require anyone to buy something. A farmer buys as much seed as usual, probably less fertilizer. The solution is simple, elegant, and cheap; but for suppliers, unprofitable. (Large areas of unexplored terrain (due to the profit seeking motive not seeing purpose in pursuing them)
On hunting
Hunting enlivens the senses like no other experience, giving me a taste of what it must be like to truly see and hear.
The human beings who maintain these hyper-refined senses are hunter-gatherers. Their impressive powers of perception have been noted and detailed by just about every student of hunter-gatherer groups. It is not only that they sense more than the rest of us do, but that they do so in a qualitatively different fashion. (synaesthesia, overlapping of senses. Think feeling a color)
Fly-fishing is simply a means for contemplating rivers.
Gamboling about plain and forest, hunting and living off the land is fun. Farming is not. That's all one needs to know to begin a rethinking of the issue. The fundamental question was properly phrased by Colin Tudge of the London School of Economics: "The real problem, then, is not to explain why some people were slow to adopt agriculture but why anybody took it up at all, when it is so obviously beastly."
Which came first? Civilisation or agriculture?
To ratchet up farming would require a significant level of human disturbance. That is, it would require that people congregate in settlements, places where their activity would disturb land, and more important, where people would stay long enough to plant and harvest. Sedentism was a precondition of agriculture. This flies directly in the face of the just-so story that suggests it was the efficiency of agriculture that made settlement possible.
Because of the permanent occupation of land, it became important to establish a family's claim on the land, and veneration of ancestors was a part of that process.
The availability of soft foods meant children could be weaned earlier, at one year instead of four. Women then could turn out the masses of children that would grow up to build pyramids and mounds.
On famine (and other aspects of life after civilisation):
Throughout history famine has been concentrated at population centers, Given this pattern, it is difficult to see agriculture as the antidote to hunger. In fact, the pattern suggests the opposite. Famine was the mark of a maturing agricultural society, the very badge of civilization.
Simply put, the population explosion that agriculture allows creates the need for expansion, as it has since the first wheat-beef people hit the European plain. A society, however, also can settle the problem with famine.
Population explosion generates the need to grow more food, but agriculture is the cause of that population explosion, and agriculture creates government. The hierarchical, specialized societies that agriculture builds are wholly dependent on the smooth operation of their infrastructure, on stability, on transportation. Dams must be built, canals must flow, roads must be maintained, and government must be established to order those tasks. Government leaders emerge from the social hierarchy that agriculture's wealth makes possible.
Poverty, government, and famine are coevolved species, every bit as integral to catastrophic agriculture as wheat, bluegrass, smallpox, and brown rats.
And sugar was a remarkably efficient food, producing the most calories per acre of any crop. An acre of sugar will produce the same number of calories as four acres of potatoes, twelve of wheat, or 135 devoted to raising beef.
There is a fundamental tension inherent in civilized economies, one that intensifies as they develop. Farming, pyramid building, and industrialism above all require a huge pool of cheap labor. But that pool must be fed. We have seen that famine, disease, and simple malnourishment can come to the rescue of an overtaxed economy by correcting periodic population imbalances. In this light, famine, poverty, and disease are useful institutions, which is perhaps why Christ was so certain they would always be with us. The more trumpeted tool for this task, though, is efficiency, a favorite word of economists. In this mind-set, food is no longer a pleasure, an aesthetic experience, a bearer of culture and tradition. It is not cuisine but calories. The efficiency of sugar fit nicely with the ascendant dehumanization that was British industrialism.
Like famine, malnutrition promotes infant mortality and suppresses the birthrate, biasing the population toward working adults.
On agriculture today
(After the agricultural revolution) Before, farming had been uniquely autonomous of industry, because machines couldn't make food, only nature could. All of a sudden, machines were integral to the process.
However, the business of directly supporting prices with cash payments to farmers didn't emerge in force until the Great Depression. These payments were intended to keep food cheap, to keep farmers on the land, to diversify the crop base, and, above all, to be temporary. They have succeeded only in the first goal.
Irrigation now accounts for 70 percent of the freshwater used by humans.
American farmers have always grown commodities in surplus. Our country is almost unique in having never known famine. Even during the worst of the breadlines in the Great Depression, there was surplus grain.
Expecting farmers to respond to market signals now is a bit like expecting an alcoholic to order the herbal tea at an open bar. This is the legacy of subsidy. Governments, including Mexico's, got in the business of making nitrogen cheap, and farmers lapped it up, but it created a welfare state. Emblematic of that state is a deep-seated irrationality that ignores cause and effect.
We hide grain surpluses in foreign aid, but the more traditional way of hiding corn is in livestock.
The original purpose of the USDA (department of agriculture)'s food pyramid was to encourage consumption of the surplus grain and meat that was being produced.
For instance, the raising of swine for food was banned in the Middle East, as, more recently, was coffee use among Mormons, because omnivorous swine ate scarce protein, and coffee, which had to be imported in nineteenth-century Utah, took a heavy toll on resources. That is, the taboos were used to enforce a social good not rooted in avoiding toxins. Taboos could be useful, but just as often they were used to divide people.
The central strategy of the chains is to dumb down every operation, to process food and freeze it at centralized factories so that it can be thawed and served at restaurants by unskilled labor. As a consequence, there are no unionized McDonald's, and the average wage of fast-food workers is now the lowest of any sector in the United States, including migrant farm workers.
A thirty-two-ounce soda and a tank of gas is America distilled to its seminal fluids. (sugar syrup and oil)
What now?
The political system cannot be counted on to reform agriculture because any political system is a creation of agriculture, a coevolved entity. The major forces that shaped and shape our world - disease, imperialism, colonialism, slavery, trade, wealth - all are a part of the culture agriculture evolved. We carry evidence of its disease in our bones and blood, of its pollutants in our cells, as surely as those ten-thousand-year-old skeletons of farmers are deformed and decayed by the very same infectious diseases, stoop labor, and exploitation. Just as surely, agriculture dug the tunnel of our vision.
There is a distinction to be made between what I have called agriculture and simply growing food. Call the latter farming, a distinction that still has its problems, though it will serve for a first cut. The difference is that the goal of agriculture is not feeding people; it is the accumulation of wealth.
It is generally understood that companion planting (or intercropping) of various species causes the phenomenon of overyielding, in which each plant produces more than it would if grown alone. However, with the row cropping and mechanical harvest of monoculture, this is not a practical system of agriculture on any sort of scale, so fertilizer substitutes for intercropping. Mundt, however, tried to obtain overyielding by planting together not different crops, but different varieties of rice, which could be uniformly harvested by machine. It worked spectacularly. This sort of research will not come out of a corporation, simply because the results don't require anyone to buy something. A farmer buys as much seed as usual, probably less fertilizer. The solution is simple, elegant, and cheap; but for suppliers, unprofitable. (Large areas of unexplored terrain (due to the profit seeking motive not seeing purpose in pursuing them)
January 1, 2020
One day soon I'll give this the full review it deserves.
December 25, 2010
This book consists of two halves: a history of the world and a political polemic. For almost all of our existence as a species, humans have been hunters, fishers and gatherers. People have been eating parts of hundreds of plant species; if some were deficient in some nutrients, others compensated for this. Agriculture meant switching to the cultivation of a small number of annual grasses (wheat, barley, rice in Eurasia, maize in the Americas) for which the grain constitutes a large part of their biomass; they are weeds, grasses that thrive in disrupted environments, rapidly reproducing before grasses adapted for more stable environments squeeze them out. Cultivating them meant periodically disrupting the environment - hard agricultural labor. Relying on a few productive crops instead of hundreds available to the hunters-gatherers meant famine when the crops failed due to a disease (as in Ireland in the 1840s) or a pest. Cereals are not very nutritious food, and gruel is a much worse baby food than mother's milk; skeletons of farmers show that they were much sicker than hunters-gatherers (but there were many more of the former). Agriculture spread slowly through Europe in the Neolithic and Bronze Age; agricultural productivity increased in the Middle Ages through introduction of such technologies as the horse collar. Yet before mid-twentieth century, agricultural expansion was extensive: colonizing the Americas and Australasia (pushing away the natives) through Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign. By 1960, the world has almost run out of arable land, yet there were 3 billion people in it, and tens of millions more were born each year; Paul Ehrlich and other environmental alarmists were predicting famine. This did not happen because of the Green Revolution. Dwarf varieties of wheat and rice have a higher percentage of biomass stored in the grains than non-dwarf ones. Also, if you grow non-dwarf varieties of cereals with too much fertilizer, the plant would "lodge": the seeds would be too heavy for the stem to support, and the plant would topple; with dwarf varieties the maximum amount of fertilizer is much greater. Dwarf wheat, which took over 70% of all the planted area by the turn of the century (as well as dwarf rice and hybrid maize), allowed the 6 billions to be fed, but it required far more fertilizer than manure and crop rotation could provide. Artificial fertilizer production skyrocketed to the point where half of all nitrogen fixed on planet Earth comes from human-made artificial fertilizers and half from the rest of the biosphere. The new agriculture also relies heavily on irrigation and pesticides and therefore on outside energy and fossil fuels.
The second half of the book attacks many targets in modern agriculture and the food business, concentrating on the United States. Agribusiness companies such as Archer Daniel Midlands enjoy oligopsony when dealing with farmers (but do not take over the fields, since farmers exploit themselves much harder than the company would be allowed to exploit them). Government subsidies of farmers translate into profits for ADM, a dollar in profit for each $11 in subsidies; the ADM executive interviewed by Manning calls this situation socialism. The USDA is more concerned with getting rid of surplus commodities than with better nutrition of the populace; it periodically republishes its food pyramid depending on which commodities have a surplus. Sugar from Central America-grown sugar cane costs less than maize-derived high-fructose syrup, which in turn costs less than sugar from U.S.-grown sugar cane; thus a sugar tariff benefits not only domestic sugar growers, but also ADM. Most maize grown in the United States is not eaten directly by humans; it is either fed to domestic animals or processed; the fertilizer runs off into the Mississippi river and into the Gulf of Mexico, where it kills fish and shrimp; thus, high-quality protein is sacrificed for the sake of low-quality protein and fat (though Manning gives no numbers). As in Victorian England, the poor eat too much nutritionally poor fast food and sugar; unlike Victorian England, they are increasingly obese and diabetic. Manning argues for "counteragriculture": variety of crops, variety of food, locally grown food, minimizing ecological damage; he also praises hunting. He writes admiringly about some organic farmer who is getting high yields, and about Chez Panisse, an organic restaurant in Berkeley (the student co-op where I lived in 1995 had a cookbook from it, I think; some members of the co-op also grew another agricultural commodity, one of America's biggest cash crops, though they did it in an industrialized way).
The second half of the book attacks many targets in modern agriculture and the food business, concentrating on the United States. Agribusiness companies such as Archer Daniel Midlands enjoy oligopsony when dealing with farmers (but do not take over the fields, since farmers exploit themselves much harder than the company would be allowed to exploit them). Government subsidies of farmers translate into profits for ADM, a dollar in profit for each $11 in subsidies; the ADM executive interviewed by Manning calls this situation socialism. The USDA is more concerned with getting rid of surplus commodities than with better nutrition of the populace; it periodically republishes its food pyramid depending on which commodities have a surplus. Sugar from Central America-grown sugar cane costs less than maize-derived high-fructose syrup, which in turn costs less than sugar from U.S.-grown sugar cane; thus a sugar tariff benefits not only domestic sugar growers, but also ADM. Most maize grown in the United States is not eaten directly by humans; it is either fed to domestic animals or processed; the fertilizer runs off into the Mississippi river and into the Gulf of Mexico, where it kills fish and shrimp; thus, high-quality protein is sacrificed for the sake of low-quality protein and fat (though Manning gives no numbers). As in Victorian England, the poor eat too much nutritionally poor fast food and sugar; unlike Victorian England, they are increasingly obese and diabetic. Manning argues for "counteragriculture": variety of crops, variety of food, locally grown food, minimizing ecological damage; he also praises hunting. He writes admiringly about some organic farmer who is getting high yields, and about Chez Panisse, an organic restaurant in Berkeley (the student co-op where I lived in 1995 had a cookbook from it, I think; some members of the co-op also grew another agricultural commodity, one of America's biggest cash crops, though they did it in an industrialized way).
March 4, 2015
I think this book was unfortunately made irrelevant by a similar but better book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, not long after its publication. At least, I assume Omnivore's Dilemma came after, or it's hard to believe Manning would not have quoted Pollan even once. Still a fascinating and alarming read, though. It touched some issues that the Omnivore's Dilemma didn't include, like the tremendous toll of shrimp farming on important mangrove habitats.
Manning's perspective was interesting. Like Pollan, he thinks it's correct to say that the grain grasses domesticated humans. This leads Manning down an interesting thought experiment at the end. Manning believes (or believed) that we could never expect politics to help us fix agriculture, because civilization and politics have co-evolved with grains and agriculture. He believes the very notion of "progress" is unique to agricultural, "civilized" people. Indeed, what would progress mean to a hunter-gatherer, if not more, easier, and tastier food?
Manning may be out on a limb here, but I'll follow him a bit, because he says the one true thing that most other people seem to be avoiding. That true thing is that if we're morally bound to feed and protect every baby that's born as a result of a reproductive accident, then we're dead before we start. The only hope that the world can avoid mass starvation and disease is by reducing the number of people that the earth needs to support. I can appreciate why he kept his thoughts on this subject to less than a paragraph, though--any time someone talks about the possibility that the world is or may someday be overpopulated, an ignorant horde of nutcases bethinks themselves to incite a class war over "population control" or a religious war over contraception. But he did manage to say it, so I give him credit.
Manning's perspective was interesting. Like Pollan, he thinks it's correct to say that the grain grasses domesticated humans. This leads Manning down an interesting thought experiment at the end. Manning believes (or believed) that we could never expect politics to help us fix agriculture, because civilization and politics have co-evolved with grains and agriculture. He believes the very notion of "progress" is unique to agricultural, "civilized" people. Indeed, what would progress mean to a hunter-gatherer, if not more, easier, and tastier food?
Manning may be out on a limb here, but I'll follow him a bit, because he says the one true thing that most other people seem to be avoiding. That true thing is that if we're morally bound to feed and protect every baby that's born as a result of a reproductive accident, then we're dead before we start. The only hope that the world can avoid mass starvation and disease is by reducing the number of people that the earth needs to support. I can appreciate why he kept his thoughts on this subject to less than a paragraph, though--any time someone talks about the possibility that the world is or may someday be overpopulated, an ignorant horde of nutcases bethinks themselves to incite a class war over "population control" or a religious war over contraception. But he did manage to say it, so I give him credit.
December 25, 2019
If you have ever seen Supersize Me, then this will feel very familiar. It wasn't a bad read but I was expecting... more. I was hoping it was going to go more into genetic diversity of crops, which it touches on briefly but drifts around through different aspects. It's a good introduction into the history of agriculture that most aren't aware of and a good stepping stone for building a groundwork for further research for those that are interested in this field. However, for someone like myself who has read or been taught a lot about the shifts in ag and how it has affected the way that we eat then this will be mostly a recap.
September 20, 2012
For the first half, the book documents the stuff that is wrong with modern corporate export-based agriculture.
After that, it gets more radical and goes all the way back to the beginning of civilization and argues that as we shifted from wandering hunter-gatherers to farmers, we got unhealthy, we started enslaving each other, and creating an aristocracy.
Lots of good facts, but he didn't sell me on the last part.
After that, it gets more radical and goes all the way back to the beginning of civilization and argues that as we shifted from wandering hunter-gatherers to farmers, we got unhealthy, we started enslaving each other, and creating an aristocracy.
Lots of good facts, but he didn't sell me on the last part.
May 23, 2008
and now i am terrified of corn syrup...
July 9, 2024
From day 1 Agriculture has been a catastrophe (Richard Manning Interview):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lXqe...
Learn about the evolution of farming from Richard Manning, author of "Against the Grain." In it, Manning explains the beginning stages of agriculture and the effects it has had on society.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQCyk...
"Agriculture has always required a subsidy, which is the human-caused disturbance of natural systems, in order to flourish . Its bias toward catastrophe must be maintained with human energy and motion toward the frontier, forever simplifying and subverting natural systems." --Richard Manning, "Against the Grain"
"Industrial agriculture considers the countryside as a factory. Capital buys machinery and 'inputs' like fertilizer and pesticides. Farmers are, more appropriately regarded as conduits, not recipients, of federal money, to the point that chemical suppliers, machinery manufacturers, and bankers have become the staunchest backers of the farm subsidy program." --idem
"ADM doesn't deal in food, it deals in commodities; thus it is wholly dependent on the system of federal subsidies that has converted American agriculture to one big commodity factory." --idem
"Our ability to dispose of surplus, and farming's ability to extend its footprint into our bodies, expanded and matured, aided directly and indirectly by the government. The foreign front opened with a law called PL480, which was passed in 1954 and still exists. It allows for the dumping of grain in the developing world, ostensibly as a relief effort, but as has been demonstrated time and again, this cheap grain serves as a burden to development, not only bankrupting local farmers but providing a resource for parasitical governments." --Richard Manning, Against the Grain
"Cheap corn made cheap sugar, which became the common denominator of fast food, appearing in everything from 'special sauces' to hamburger rolls. As the trend has evolved, and as consumers have been trained, though, fast-food firms have become less subtle, putting only the merest facade of food in its sugar. Now sugar needs only the addition of water and flavoring to become marketable: soda is the high profit item of the fast-food business, a fact that has also benefited convenience stores."
"...[T]he goal of agriculture is not feeding people; it is the accumulation of wealth. What agriculture grows is not food but commodities, grain not to eat but to store, trade and process." --idem
"Agriculture dehumanized us by satisfying the most dangerous of human impulses --the drive to ensure the security of the future. In this way we were tamed." --idem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lXqe...
Learn about the evolution of farming from Richard Manning, author of "Against the Grain." In it, Manning explains the beginning stages of agriculture and the effects it has had on society.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQCyk...
"Agriculture has always required a subsidy, which is the human-caused disturbance of natural systems, in order to flourish . Its bias toward catastrophe must be maintained with human energy and motion toward the frontier, forever simplifying and subverting natural systems." --Richard Manning, "Against the Grain"
"Industrial agriculture considers the countryside as a factory. Capital buys machinery and 'inputs' like fertilizer and pesticides. Farmers are, more appropriately regarded as conduits, not recipients, of federal money, to the point that chemical suppliers, machinery manufacturers, and bankers have become the staunchest backers of the farm subsidy program." --idem
"ADM doesn't deal in food, it deals in commodities; thus it is wholly dependent on the system of federal subsidies that has converted American agriculture to one big commodity factory." --idem
"Our ability to dispose of surplus, and farming's ability to extend its footprint into our bodies, expanded and matured, aided directly and indirectly by the government. The foreign front opened with a law called PL480, which was passed in 1954 and still exists. It allows for the dumping of grain in the developing world, ostensibly as a relief effort, but as has been demonstrated time and again, this cheap grain serves as a burden to development, not only bankrupting local farmers but providing a resource for parasitical governments." --Richard Manning, Against the Grain
"Cheap corn made cheap sugar, which became the common denominator of fast food, appearing in everything from 'special sauces' to hamburger rolls. As the trend has evolved, and as consumers have been trained, though, fast-food firms have become less subtle, putting only the merest facade of food in its sugar. Now sugar needs only the addition of water and flavoring to become marketable: soda is the high profit item of the fast-food business, a fact that has also benefited convenience stores."
"...[T]he goal of agriculture is not feeding people; it is the accumulation of wealth. What agriculture grows is not food but commodities, grain not to eat but to store, trade and process." --idem
"Agriculture dehumanized us by satisfying the most dangerous of human impulses --the drive to ensure the security of the future. In this way we were tamed." --idem
December 6, 2023
This is a fascinating history of the development of agriculture. The usual discussion explains the "huge" advantages of this advancement in the development of settled communities, towns and cities, purportedly setting the scene for cultural and material growth. This is true of course, but there is a darker side.
Hunting/gathering people lived in egalitarian groups, sharing trade goods, foods and crafts. Their diets typically had great variety and foraging and hunting require movement, skill, and knowledge of surrounding plants and animals and their habits. They lived in small bands and were relatively free of infectious diseases.
Settled communities , on the other hand, required a stratified society, mostly year-round physical labor-plowing, planting, maintaining, harvesting, grinding food and storing food.
Anthropology and history have shown that the health status of settled farmers declined significantly from their hunting and gathering forbears. Bones show shorted stature, there is increased evidence of infectious diseases and the stresses of hard physical work.
These changes were not evident in the upper/ruling classes.
From the beginning, agriculture was expansionist, overrunning native peoples and species and eventually driving colonialism.
Today's mega-farms (big-ag) has produced high carbohydrate, sugar heavy (think high-fructose corn syrup), highly processed diets that are very unhealthy, undermining fitness, sensory alertness and egalitarianism. It is also wrecking the environment through monoculture, pesticides, herbicides and irrigation.
Manning suggests that we can personally and collectively make some sustaining changes by supporting small farmers, local produce. Eat less meat and try to eliminate highly processed "convenience foods".
Support policies that support smaller farms and limit the power of huge food brokers like ADM (Archer Daniels Midland).
This is a thought-provoking book and a reminder that consumers can actually make a difference, in the health of themselves and their families, and beyond.
Hunting/gathering people lived in egalitarian groups, sharing trade goods, foods and crafts. Their diets typically had great variety and foraging and hunting require movement, skill, and knowledge of surrounding plants and animals and their habits. They lived in small bands and were relatively free of infectious diseases.
Settled communities , on the other hand, required a stratified society, mostly year-round physical labor-plowing, planting, maintaining, harvesting, grinding food and storing food.
Anthropology and history have shown that the health status of settled farmers declined significantly from their hunting and gathering forbears. Bones show shorted stature, there is increased evidence of infectious diseases and the stresses of hard physical work.
These changes were not evident in the upper/ruling classes.
From the beginning, agriculture was expansionist, overrunning native peoples and species and eventually driving colonialism.
Today's mega-farms (big-ag) has produced high carbohydrate, sugar heavy (think high-fructose corn syrup), highly processed diets that are very unhealthy, undermining fitness, sensory alertness and egalitarianism. It is also wrecking the environment through monoculture, pesticides, herbicides and irrigation.
Manning suggests that we can personally and collectively make some sustaining changes by supporting small farmers, local produce. Eat less meat and try to eliminate highly processed "convenience foods".
Support policies that support smaller farms and limit the power of huge food brokers like ADM (Archer Daniels Midland).
This is a thought-provoking book and a reminder that consumers can actually make a difference, in the health of themselves and their families, and beyond.
October 21, 2024
Manning's book is a thoughtful review of the layered, complex interaction between agriculture and the hunter/gatherer in human history. Mobile humans who had herds or subsisted on the land and lived outside of the direct influence of agriculturally-based civilizations were not evolutionarily backward or stupid. In fact, the agriculturalists could not have survived without them. They usually lived longer, healthier lives than those who lived in cities. They often supported themselves through superior military prowess and might. A fun, illuminating work that brings to mind both the (mythical) closeness and conflict between Cain and Abel.
August 6, 2019
Love this book. From someone who didn't know all that much about agriculture, I can't stress enough what an enjoyable and informative read this was. A fascinating mix of anthropology, archeology, history, politics, economics, and science. Read this while listening to the audio book version of Jared Diamond's Collapse. Great pairing. I'd also suggest watching Kip Andersen's documentaries Cowspiracy and What the Health?
January 7, 2018
Interesting explorations of the impacts of agriculture on our civilization, but the case seems a bit overstated. It will definitely enlighten readers to the negative unintended consequences of our society, but they are not the only factors in our current dilemmas.
November 13, 2020
This book is worth a reread, goes through a good bit of history, development of allergies, the farm industry as a whole, even the a psychology of people’s eating habits and how food bonds us together.
July 19, 2022
I finished it.
That’s all I got.
This book honestly just read like someone who is sticking his nose up at poor people who have no choice in what they eat half the time.
That’s all I got.
This book honestly just read like someone who is sticking his nose up at poor people who have no choice in what they eat half the time.
January 7, 2024
This book was super helpful for my undergraduate research and I thought it made a really complex topic digestible and engaging.
October 9, 2013
This book was an eye opener. I expected another tome on the benefits of eating like our ancestors, another book against eating grains and processed foods. It was, but only a little. Manning makes a very good case that agriculture grew up as a means of creating wealth and for one group to dominate another, who then became the poor.
Manning postulates that some people gave up nomadic living to settle near river mouths where migratory fish and shellfish gave them year round access to food. This enabled them to accumulate wealth. This wealth gave them the power to dominate their neighbors and then force them to take up the drudgery of farming. Once that trick was performed, the rich and powerful began to expand their reach, not by teaching their neighbors how to farm, but by conquering them and forcing them to farm and reaping the benefits and acquiring still more wealth and power.
This system came to predominate and still continues today. Big Agribusinesses don't grow food, they grow commodities and grow rich off processing them and turning them into food-like substances they can sell to the rest of us and enrich themselves even more. They also rig the game through a network of subsidies and the welfare state so they can never lose their dominant position of power and wealth.
Manning proposes a return to the growth of real food rather than commodities. A many and varied form of what he calls permaculture that takes care of the land and grows wholesome, nutritious food to feed people and make them healthy rather then just grow commodities that enrich the few and enslave the rest of us.
Manning postulates that some people gave up nomadic living to settle near river mouths where migratory fish and shellfish gave them year round access to food. This enabled them to accumulate wealth. This wealth gave them the power to dominate their neighbors and then force them to take up the drudgery of farming. Once that trick was performed, the rich and powerful began to expand their reach, not by teaching their neighbors how to farm, but by conquering them and forcing them to farm and reaping the benefits and acquiring still more wealth and power.
This system came to predominate and still continues today. Big Agribusinesses don't grow food, they grow commodities and grow rich off processing them and turning them into food-like substances they can sell to the rest of us and enrich themselves even more. They also rig the game through a network of subsidies and the welfare state so they can never lose their dominant position of power and wealth.
Manning proposes a return to the growth of real food rather than commodities. A many and varied form of what he calls permaculture that takes care of the land and grows wholesome, nutritious food to feed people and make them healthy rather then just grow commodities that enrich the few and enslave the rest of us.
May 4, 2016
In terms of 'real' reading, May was a fairly fat month. I'm not sure why, but that was also true last year: after a quiet April, May exploded. It helped that a lot of the reads were on the shorter side, with some energetic authors, especially Jim Kunstler and Joel Salatin. I'm apparently doing a series on food at the moment; something about the explosion of color in the produce isle in late spring brings out my inner foodie. I've just finished Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization, which isn't quite what I was expecting. The author's primary contention is that agriculture isn't about producing food, it's about the accumulation of wealth. Considering the health disparities between hunter-gatherers, who had a broad diet, and agriculturalists who subsisted on grains (leading to malnutrition, stunted growth, and early death), early agriculture didn't feed people fully so much as it kept workers alive so they could continue working to enrich the plantation owners. Also, monocultures and processed foods suck. These were the author's chief contentions, but they weren't developed in any thorough, systematic way; the book was more a collection of musings than an argument. A recurring theme was that of sensualism; in the author's view, agriculture keeps us from experiencing life fully, both because hunting enlivens the senses in a way that farming and buying food don't, and because farming is a dull, monotonous, body-killing lifestyle that only succeeded through imperialism, both military and ecological
July 13, 2016
This is an extremely good revisionist history of agriculture and its promises. Manning goes into deep and thorough criticism of the notion that agriculture advanced the human condition. He makes a convincing case that agriculture destroyed the former diversity of the human diet, thus condemning most of the species to malnutrition for the past ten thousand years. Despite recent technological and social advances, agriculture continues to fail to provide adequate nourishment for most of the planet, while depleting the planet's resources at an unprecedented rate.
A major problem though, is that the explanation for why agriculture came to be was a little too pat. The story of the invention of agriculture is nowhere near as settled as Manning makes it out to be. Some archaeologists believe that the sedentary lifestyle demanded by agriculture potentially had its root in some form of organized religion. And considering the entire book is about how agriculture was a terrible idea that depletes the planet and is an injustice machine, calling for merely better forms of agriculture without addressing why these better forms are supposed to avoid the two pitfalls is a little weak. I don't blame Manning for not having better answers, not at all, but the book remains unsatisfying.
A major problem though, is that the explanation for why agriculture came to be was a little too pat. The story of the invention of agriculture is nowhere near as settled as Manning makes it out to be. Some archaeologists believe that the sedentary lifestyle demanded by agriculture potentially had its root in some form of organized religion. And considering the entire book is about how agriculture was a terrible idea that depletes the planet and is an injustice machine, calling for merely better forms of agriculture without addressing why these better forms are supposed to avoid the two pitfalls is a little weak. I don't blame Manning for not having better answers, not at all, but the book remains unsatisfying.
March 24, 2024
Wow, what a rush. I stumbled across this by coincidence and was so fascinated that I read it on google books a few pages at the time, before it cut me off and I had to switch devices to read a few more pages. The dude is quite far left, but he is still anti-grain. That combination normally doesn't go together. I'm normally not particularly impressed by that kind of 'green' stuff, but this kept me glued to it. His later interviews are sad, he became the typical anti-human malthusian. But this book, written over a decade ago, he is almost enlightened. I'm glad he wrote the book back when he did.
Might have missed a few pages here and there. Will definitely re-read it if I can get my hands on a copy.
Re-read half of it properly in early 2024.
Unlike much environmentalism, his concerns are largely accurate. It is just so refreshing to read an environmental lamentation that is true for a change. It's almost pleasurable. The greens normally don't admit the real problems, because it would hurt their holy cow: grain agriculture. So all fake environmental problems are to protect this holy cow. Nitrogen runoff is a problem. Grass fed is the solution.
Might have missed a few pages here and there. Will definitely re-read it if I can get my hands on a copy.
Re-read half of it properly in early 2024.
Unlike much environmentalism, his concerns are largely accurate. It is just so refreshing to read an environmental lamentation that is true for a change. It's almost pleasurable. The greens normally don't admit the real problems, because it would hurt their holy cow: grain agriculture. So all fake environmental problems are to protect this holy cow. Nitrogen runoff is a problem. Grass fed is the solution.
August 14, 2007
although the topic to pull in the reader is agriculture, the underlining message is one of straight up purification from thousands of years of cultural brainwashing the minds of minions of just about any sedentary civilization around.
Danning convincingly argues that playing around in field and forest, plucking ripe fruit off the tree, hunting your own evening meal in sacred sacrament, enjoying sexual interplay and other leisure games against the backdrop of an egalitarian foraging, nomadic lifestyle is a lot more fun and healthy than the path some of our forebarers chose when embracing agriculture et al about 10,000 years ago.
Furthermore, he points out that a critical look at the products of agricultural civilization reveals that this settling lifestyle may actually be the overarching cause of just about any major social, economical and ecological problems we face today.
Read it if you're willing to reexamine assumptions you may have carried around since you took your first step into kindergarten!
Danning convincingly argues that playing around in field and forest, plucking ripe fruit off the tree, hunting your own evening meal in sacred sacrament, enjoying sexual interplay and other leisure games against the backdrop of an egalitarian foraging, nomadic lifestyle is a lot more fun and healthy than the path some of our forebarers chose when embracing agriculture et al about 10,000 years ago.
Furthermore, he points out that a critical look at the products of agricultural civilization reveals that this settling lifestyle may actually be the overarching cause of just about any major social, economical and ecological problems we face today.
Read it if you're willing to reexamine assumptions you may have carried around since you took your first step into kindergarten!
Read
February 18, 2014Against the Grain is different, its engaging and the information is presented rather that repeated ad nausium. It doesn't in any way make me feel as if the author thinks I'm stupid or ignorant. Just the facts with a bit of story thrown in.
The only problem is- This book really makes the case that humans are just naturally kind of ... bad.
It is really nice to see how humans really are part of our ecosystem and to realize that if it hadn't have been us one or another of the spices living would have formed a larger brain like us and would probably been just as hard on the natural world as we are.
What is not so nice is to realize that as a species we are unlikely to change and be better about how we treat each other or how we treat our planet.
What was also interesting to read bout is how species de-evolve after a point. Look at Koalas. They have a huge skull but they have bitty brains... this is because they used to have the brain to fill the skull but they didn't use it, and they lost it.
The only problem is- This book really makes the case that humans are just naturally kind of ... bad.
It is really nice to see how humans really are part of our ecosystem and to realize that if it hadn't have been us one or another of the spices living would have formed a larger brain like us and would probably been just as hard on the natural world as we are.
What is not so nice is to realize that as a species we are unlikely to change and be better about how we treat each other or how we treat our planet.
What was also interesting to read bout is how species de-evolve after a point. Look at Koalas. They have a huge skull but they have bitty brains... this is because they used to have the brain to fill the skull but they didn't use it, and they lost it.
March 15, 2015
An extremely interesting volume on agriculture and farming through the ages and around the world, and how the advent of industrial agriculture - the transformation of agricultural into a business supplying inputs to the manufacture of food/commodities - was a negative for mankind. He has many interesting ideas contrasting the way food was grown, hunted in prehistoric times vs. agriculture today. This book contains a wealth of interesting information about food, is a pleasure to read - but I'm not sure in the end if I agree with his thesis. I doubt if temperate-zone agriculture can return to an earlier era. Yes, the industrialization of food production isn't perfect - far from it - but I don't see how else enough food can be supplied to feed an ever-expanding world population. If there is "mass production" of humans - which is basically what has happened vis-a-vis global population, and humans are living longer lives, then there has to be "mass production" of food.
May 5, 2008
This book turned me into a farmer.
Richard Manning examines the history of grain agriculture from primitive societies up to present day. He posits that primitive hunter gathers moved to a grain agriculture in order to secure food sources during times of conflict, but in doing so they sacrificed their autonomy and varied diet.
Manning also takes a close look at our present agriculture system. He exposes the flaws of relying on a brittle monoculture system based around the use of cheap petrochemicals. And, he looks at how the commodification of corn, wheat, and rice has turned made our agriculture system into a bloated and inefficient oligarchy.
Manning advocates a return to small farming and the creation of food rather than commodities. He calls for a return to ecosystem perspectives applied to farming- ie permaculture.
Richard Manning examines the history of grain agriculture from primitive societies up to present day. He posits that primitive hunter gathers moved to a grain agriculture in order to secure food sources during times of conflict, but in doing so they sacrificed their autonomy and varied diet.
Manning also takes a close look at our present agriculture system. He exposes the flaws of relying on a brittle monoculture system based around the use of cheap petrochemicals. And, he looks at how the commodification of corn, wheat, and rice has turned made our agriculture system into a bloated and inefficient oligarchy.
Manning advocates a return to small farming and the creation of food rather than commodities. He calls for a return to ecosystem perspectives applied to farming- ie permaculture.
June 16, 2010
Themes: food, culture, agriculture and farming, evolution, sociology, poverty, family, human nature
This one sure didn't impress me at first - see message 76 - but it was ultimately worth reading. Manning ranged far and wide in his condemnation of agriculture. From mankind's origin as hunter-gatherers, to the widespread problem of poverty and malnutrition, to modern agribusiness and how it is ruining the ecology of the earth as a whole, he gave me a lot to think about. I really knew almost nothing about the history of farm policy in the United States, so I found that part informative and even startling. Overall, it was a rather depressing look at how our planet is doomed. I did resolve to try harder to eat locally grown and produced food. 3 stars.
This one sure didn't impress me at first - see message 76 - but it was ultimately worth reading. Manning ranged far and wide in his condemnation of agriculture. From mankind's origin as hunter-gatherers, to the widespread problem of poverty and malnutrition, to modern agribusiness and how it is ruining the ecology of the earth as a whole, he gave me a lot to think about. I really knew almost nothing about the history of farm policy in the United States, so I found that part informative and even startling. Overall, it was a rather depressing look at how our planet is doomed. I did resolve to try harder to eat locally grown and produced food. 3 stars.
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