Food & Civilization: Part 2- The Story of Bread

To tell the story of food and civilization is to tell the story of bread. In my last posting I spoke of The Fertile Crescent located in the ancient Middle East. I spoke about its rich soil, plentiful water, and abundant sunshine, perfect for raising crops and grazing livestock. The history books call it "The Cradle of Civilization" because our recorded history tells us this geographical location was where our hunter/gatherer ancestors first settled and began the practice of cultivating crops that produced grain that in turn was dried, threshed, ground into flour, mixed with water, and baked over a fire into bread. This practice, this process, to this day, is the very heart of our global agricultural system and continues to impact everything from personal health to government foreign policy. Have you ever heard someone refer to a large sum of money as "a lot of bread..."? This is because this simple food and our dependence upon it is so embedded within our subconscious we equate bread with wealth, prosperity, and longevity.

To understand the life of a loaf of bread is to understand many of the environmental, economic, and social challenges facing us today. To make bread you need a flour. To make flour you need a grain. While yes, there are many types of plants which produce a product from which one can make flour. Wheat, millet, corn, oats, chestnuts, potatoes, chick peas, fava beans, rice, and many, many more species both perennial and annual can be used, but the most common is wheat. It is used around the world and for the purposes of this discussion we will be using it ourselves. The most important factor to consider in the farming of wheat is that it is an annual, not a perennial. This means that unlike a tree that can be planted once, it must be planted each year, year after year. This requires tillage. Wheat is cultivated twice a year, in the spring and then again in the fall. This means tilling twice a year. In order to till you must plow.

Remember those expansive grasslands I spoke of? That nutrient-dense, deep top soil was, is, and always will be interdependent on the root structure of those grasses and the constant fertilization from the animals that graze them. Healthy soil has an almost "fluffy" consistency. It is light and aerated, defenseless against the forces of wind and water. The very moment when animals are removed and a plow cuts through those roots the journey towards desertification begins. As the sod is peeled back and the soil laid bare it has no protection against erosion. The constant tilling and replanting without rest or conscious revitalization pulls every last nutrient from the soil until only the rocky, bare, infertile subsoil that cannot hold moisture remains. This in turn shifts the climate because the water needed for evaporation is not there. So there is famine, then war as the starving civilization battles with its well-fed neighbor over the next patch of fertile ground. Or what is worse, they become slaves in exchange for the more powerful nation's care and protection.

Now the reader may say, "Yes, I understand this biological impact on civilization, but isn't it just a result of human greed that kept us from growing enough to share?" Once the ground is tilled and prepared getting a large yield is a long and arduous task. First, those wonderful flocks of birds who followed the herds of ruminants gorge themselves on the newly-sown seed and pull the earthworms and beneficial microbes from the soil. Next, what seed is left takes root and hopefully is not eaten by more animals, destroyed by storms and hail, and because the bird population that kept insects in check is gone the threat of locusts increases. Finally, when this precious plant reaches maturity it must be harvested and stacked in sheaves in the field to dry and cure. It is then that the wheat is threshed, or literally beaten to separate the seed grains from the husk or "chaff". It can be back-breaking work and in the days before heavy machinery it was the most difficult part of the process. The remaining grains are then ground into a powder that we call flour. Anytime you take a raw material and transform it via a labor-intensive process you increase its value and therefore its expense. The population explosion of the 20th century can mostly be attributed to the advent of heavy machinery which facilitated the large-scale cultivation of wheat. It was no longer a precious, locally-produced seed on the threshing floor, but a globally-traded commodity.

There was just one problem, even with the introduction of new machinery the same basic method of carving up the landscape remained the same. The difference was now we could do it bigger, deeper, wider, faster with no recovery to the point that we are losing top soil by the rate of thousands of truckloads per day. The localized, community production model that should never have been scaled up exploded beyond control, and the result is where we are today. The bread problem is on the rise.

Stay tuned for the next chapter in the story of bread.