Food & Civilization: Part 1

"Agriculture... is the first in utility, and ought to be the first in respect." -Thomas Jefferson to David Williams, 1803. ME 10:429

I have yet to meet any human being who did not depend on food on a daily basis to survive. We can look as far back in recorded history as the sands of time will let us and the core of the story will always be how mankind has eaten its way across the landscape. We refer to our ancestors as "hunters" and "gatherers". Our religious cosmology and iconography is filled with and shaped by the cycle of life and death, the changing seasons which provided the sustenance that filled our bellies century after century. The gods and goddesses were believed by the ancient world to each play a role in the production of food. Baal "The Green Man", Bacchus "God of Wine", Ceres "Goddess of Grain", Hath-or "The Mother Cow" who nurtured mankind with her milk, and on it went to Saturn, Osiris, Shiva, Isis, even Jesus Christ is called "The Branch" and spoke of seed time and harvest. Even our cultural celebrations revolve around the agricultural cycle; Easter Sunday, Christmas, Halloween, almost every Celtic holiday, and we haven't even worked our way across the Asian continent and the indigenous populations of Australia, the southern Pacific, and South America. The sciences and the practice of medicine have all sprung from botany, biology, and chemistry in our ceaseless effort to understand our relationship to nature and unlock its mysteries of death and rebirth. Even mathematics finds it root in our need to conceptualize such wonders as the Golden Ratio and the harmonious patterns of sound, light, and color created as the planet makes its way around the sun. The simple fact is that Mother Nature provides every last atom of nutrition that is needed by these furnaces within our bellies and will continue to do so for eons to come. She gives of herself willingly and does so with great abundance if we can but speak her language of template and pattern, and reproduce said patterns using all we have been given for the good of mankind. When we at last acknowledge and embrace that connection and responsibility... when we recognize that just as our history is inextricably linked to the land and the soil and our relationship to it, and so too is our future, we will heal so many of the seeming impossible ills that plague our civilization today.

6,000 years ago the geographic area of the planet now in the greatest turmoil, the Middle East, was known as "The Fertile Crescent". A rich, diverse ecosystem of snow-capped mountains filled with springs, streams, and rivers that deposited mineral-rich soils on to the alluvial plain below. From that plain grew up grasses grazed by antelope, deer, and hundreds of other species of ruminant herbivore. The soil grew deep and rich by the dense, daily movement of these herds, their constant trampling and manuring followed by flocks of birds, nature's clean-up crew, that would then pick and scratch through the waste eating the fly larvae and undigested seeds. The birds, in their turn, then supplied their own manure dense in microbial bacteria that assisted in the processing of methane gas into sugars which in turn fed a vast, living network of fungi that acted as nature's Internet many millennia before the first computer. The soil was rich and alive. Across these rolling grasslands were stands of oak and acacia, the mountainsides covered with the "Cedars of Lebanon". Historians tell us that lions were hunted as far north as Italy and Turkey. This is an interesting fact often lost on the non-agricultural mind. The health of an ecosystem is measured by the presence and frequency of species at the top of the food chain. The presence of lions, tigers, jaguars, panthers, cheetahs, etc indicates there is food for all, and plenty to be had. But it was not just the Middle East. The broad grasslands of the Serengeti in Africa, the Great Plains of North America, the Savannas of California, Australia, and the Mediterranean, the Pampas of South America, and the Steppes which span from the Ukraine all the way to Mongolia, they all shared this intense pattern of disturbance and rest which resulted in foot after foot of black, rich, nutrient-dense soil perfect for the growth of grain for making bread. When the most adventurous of American settlers pushed through the dense forests of the Ohio River valley and onto the Great Plains they said they could tie the grass in knots above the horse's saddles. When they plowed they found roots 50 feet deep.

Oh, the plow! Marvelous in its use, yet destructive in its power. The primary objective of agriculture up until the 20th century was to sustain the population, period. To declare that religion is responsible for war is grossly inaccurate from a historical perspective. Religious wars are a relatively new phenomena that came about with the Crusades. The real root of armed conflict was land dispute. They have better land for farming than we do and we're running out of ours so we should take theirs, that was the basic premise. The basic process went like this... 1. Cut down the forest, 2. Burn the debris, 3. Let the livestock overgraze it, 4. Plow it up, 6. Plant it, 7. Harvest then plant it again, and finally 8. Continue to do so until that fertile topsoil we just described washed into the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, Danube, Yangtze, Ganges, and countless others until it reached the ocean floor. So on it went on every continent up to the dust bowls of The Great Depression, and now the logging of the Amazonian rain forest and the palm oil fields of Southeast Asia. You can make the argument that this system is driven by greed, and in our day it certainly is, but for centuries this destruction by food production was simply pushed forward by the need to survive and based on a lack of scientific understanding of soil biology.

Today we can move faster, cut deeper, and farming as we conventionally understand it is more akin to mining minerals than food production as tractors, combines, sprayers, brush hogs, cultivators, and harvesters squeeze every last shred of nutrient from the soil. Instead of cooking a meal we "nuke" it in our microwave. We have pineapples shipped from Costa Rica, beef from Australia, tomatoes from Mexico... as we widen the gap between ourselves and the very core, the very foundation of any civilization... the solid, thriving agrarian economy. We keep plunging forward using outdated methods combined with bigger and more effective equipment and the best analogy I can think of is that of two countries at war. Fighting the same war for centuries as each population gets smaller and smaller, yet their weapons get bigger, stronger, and more deadly until one day soon there will be nothing left.

We are at a crossroads. There is a huge movement afoot. Ironically within the dark grey storm clouds of military industrial research and the often misunderstood field of aerospace design we have groundbreaking technologies that make it possible to mimic patterns in nature in a harmonious and powerful way. With the internet the brick and mortar supermarket is becoming obsolete. A new generation of farmers are coming and we have the answer, a real way to revolutionize the food system on a global level. For the first time in history we have the biological training, the chemical research, the physical technology, and even the business acumen to not only rebuild, but to produce more abundant, nutrient-dense food than the planet has ever seen. What is deeper and stronger than all of this is that within each of them is a reverence, a resurgence of the ancient understanding that the priesthood had as they gave thanks to the Deity that what a man sows that shall he also reap.

Stand by for Part 2...