Greg's Reviews > Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization

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.