Isn’t Farming More Significant than Food Processing for Human History?
Quick Answer: No
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, humans lost the ability to do well on a raw diet. From then on they had to cook (here used as shorthand for prepare or process) the raw materials they acquired whether by hunting and gathering or by farming.
This spectrum of technologies involved in food preparation have been a necessary condition for farming, cities, and states, have freed up human energy for activities other than acquiring, eating, and digesting food, and have been an essential component of differential economic and social development.
Background
Last night as I broke my weekend social media fast, I was staggered to find a thousand-visitor spike to a nearly two-year-old blog “Was the Agricultural Revolution a Terrible Mistake? Not if You Take Food Processing Into Account” as well as dozens of notifications on Twitter. That’s what happens, I discover, when Steven Pinker, linguist, best-selling author, and public intellectual, posts a link to your blog post.
Pinker linked to add additional weight to William Buckner’s critique of the agriculture-as-disaster crowd, “Romanticizing the Hunter-Gatherer.” I am keen to read it. So must be many others, I discover, because it’s impossible to get on to the site, 504 errors coming back at every try.
For now, then, I will content myself with replying to the question that has come up several times in the Twitter discussion.
When the shift to farming, for better or worse, was so important in human history, why do I go on and on about food processing?
Let me give three reasons (with apologies to readers who’ve heard me on this before).
One. Food processing a necessary condition for farming
It’s all to easy to assume that the order in which we now acquire food–farming then processing–is also the order in which farming first originated–that is, farming then almost as an afterthought processing the grains.
Nothing could be further from the case. Processing came first, then farming.
For simplicity, let’s just say that at the core of the transition to farming were the grains, some that are still familiar to everyone, such as wheat, rice, and maize, and others that are now less well known. They weren’t the only things people farmed. They were however the most important and they still are.
Grains, protected by several layers of tough coverings, and even when these have been removed, hard and almost impossible to chew, are indigestible until they have been prepared into some kind of food. Just try eating an ear of wheat.
No one is going to go to the trouble of deliberately sowing, weeding, and harvesting grains unless you know how to turn them into food.
This is not just my hare-brained idea. Archaeologists are finding more and more cases of peoples who were processing grains (or other starches) thousands of years before farming.*
Two. Food processing crucial to digestible, nutritious, and non-toxic food
Not only does processing make it possible to eat grains, it makes them better to eat: more nutritious and, as a nice bonus, tastier.**
Processed (cooked) food meant humans had to spend less energy on chewing and digesting, which are very energy intensive, and more energy to spend on all kinds of other activities, that is ‘culture.’
The downside was that processing and cooking took energy. Those who did not cook and process were the elite. I don’t need to elaborate.
Three. Food processing crucial to relative economic and social development of different societies
There are five ways to make plants and animals edible by humans (that is to process and cook them). Raw materials can be subjected to heat and cold, chemicals, microorganisms, knives and pestles, and breeding. As examples, consider cooking, nixtamalization, fermenting, grinding, and breeding. All these go way back, most before agriculture and usually a sequence of more than one of them is required.
All of them required human energy in one way or another.
Mechanical processing of grains was one of the most energy intensive.
For wheat, twenty laborious steps post-harvest were required before pounding or grinding.*** Pounding and grinding for a family are likely to have taken another 4 or 5 hours a day, day after day after day as long as simple (horizontal) grindstones were used. That’s before the flour is then made into some kind of bread.
As many as one in five active adults were required to spend most of their time and energy grinding grains.
Any farming society that could reduce the energy spent processing grains freed up lots of human energy for other economic activities.
This freeing of human energy from processing has to be considered on a par (or more) with the freeing of human energy from farming.
In a Word: The History of Processing Needs to Be Taken as Seriously as the History of Farming
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I’m not going to give lots of references because I discuss these issues at some length in my book, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (2013).
* For example, one of the first of these studies was Dolores R. Piperno et al, “Processing of Wild Cereal Grain in the Upper Paleolithic…” Nature, 430, (2004), 670-73.
** For what processing does, see Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking (2004), particularly chapter 9. For thoughts on the history of cooking, particularly outsourcing the hard work of chewing and digestion to those who cooked, see Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009). (You do not have to accept his dating to find much of interest). I differ from Wrangham in taking a much broader view of what cooking involves.
**An old, but still excellent source on preliminary processing is Gordon Hillman, “Traditional Husbandry and Processing of Archaic Cereals in Modern Times: Part I: The Glume Wheats,” Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 1 (1984), 114-52.
Rachel, I just read Buckner’s critique and find it interesting, but not persuasive against the attack that James Scott makes in _Against the Grain_ contra the ‘benefits’ of grain-based city-states. Buckner mentions Scott, but does not in any sense discuss him. Scott’s book is brilliant, and well worth a read. He argues that fire is the single-most important development in human history because 1) it allowed us to cook our food; and 2) it gave us a means to manage land for our own purposes, esp. sedentary (but not city-based) crop management. I think Scott would be quite open to your claim about the importance of food processing, as am I. (I’m a wine guy, so I know the crucial significance of fermentation processes to human survival!)
Hi George, Good to hear from you. I think I saw Buckner say somewhere that his prime target was not Scott. I have read Scott’s book and reluctantly have to differ with your opinion. I have many concerns, among them why he announces what he is saying as news when this line of thought goes back half a century. Most important, though, is that he regards the adoption of the grains as either a mystery or as the heavy hand of the state. I disagree with both. Stay posted!
Indeed, indeed. I laugh now at the vague notions I use to have about hunter gatherers (mental snapshots of women with baskets, oh, I guess, happily picking berries, and men with bows and arrows, roaming around out there, la-de-da paleo…) For a while now I have been at work on a book about the Trans-Pecos, a place impossible to survive in back when without not only hunting and gathering foods, but intense food processing– mainly roasting the starchy root of the sotol, meat jerking, and pounding and grinding seeds and certain types of beans. Throughout the region there are holes worn into the rocks outside cave shelters, some of the holes very deep, from what must have been years and years of pounding and grinding.
Indeed, Catherine. I was down at the Witte recently where the Trans-Pecos exhibit stresses the varied diet of the inhabitants. I just kept thinking of the work of digging up those sotol roots out of the rock hard soil. And that was just the beginning.
Rachel, your reply to Catherine hits upon the crucial feature of ‘hunter-gather’ food regimes: they are extremely *varied*, both by season and by geography. Animal sources migrate seasonally; agricultural products ripen at various times in various locations; and so on. These cultures had enormous local knowledge in order to make a living in their landscapes.
I take it you think this is a good thing. And may be it is. But why? Because a varied diet is intrinsically more nutritious? more secure? more tasty? I don’t deny the local knowledge though I very much doubt that vanished with farming which also depends on local knowledge.
Yes, yes, and yes to your three question marks. : ) I seriously farmed (if 14 acres of grapevines is ‘serious farming’!) for fifteen years. It’s hard work, even growing something you thoroughly enjoy. With monoculture there are ghastly risks that any farmer runs on a daily basis during the growing season, diseases always threatening, climate–you can lose a couple of acres of grapes or grain in seconds in a hailstorm–always a menace, not to mention getting robbed by bad guys. Monoculture is inherently insecure. It’s nutritionally sketchy, as well. And, finally, eating gruel day in and day doesn’t sound appealing to my (admittedly modern) tastebuds.
Settled hunting and gathering has its crucial issues, but so does monoculture farming. I’ve done the latter, but not the former, so I don’t know which I’d prefer, personally. I suspect it’s what you’re used to.
But why is the choice monoculture versus hunting and gathering?
From what I understand (and you probably know this better than I, so this is basically my IMHO), the early grain-based cultures–and maybe even Peru’s potato+bean (?)–were basically monocultures of wheat, corn, rice, etc. These were pretty much–again as I understand–industrial operations, esp. in Egypt.
I don’t know when polyculture, e.g., like that exhibited in the Midi and Provence in recent centuries, came along. But even those sorst of quite diverse, dispersed crops were susceptible to horrible phyto-epidemics. I see no reason why ancient grain-based cultures wouldn’t have been.
On the other hand, sedentary hunter-gatherers [don’t we have a better term for these sorts of organizations??] would have been harvesting from wild populations of, e.g., grains and fruits (even nuts, for example, walnuts along the Silk Road) which are intrinsically better adapted to diseases and pests.
Well, Scott claims they were monocultures. I have so much to say on this. I am not sure monocultures are such bad things. I am not sure just how monocultural these early states were. I’m not sure that wild populations are intrinsically better adapted (elm disease, oak blight). Will plough all through this in the coming weeks.
Oh, I’d forgotten that Scott claimed that–I got that idea years ago, I *think* from an article in Scientific American, of all things. And I take your point that wild populations aren’t necessarily better equipped to survive pests. (But what I’m worried about now are olives: there are no wild populations to find PD-resistant genes in, as there are for grapes; we might be stuck with GMO as the only defense. Bananas are another worry… ugh)
I’ll be interestedly awaiting your further comments! Have a fine holiday in Austin!!
And to you too in the snowy north.