A Principle to eat by
For better or for worse, deciding what to eat has been a big question throughout my adult life. In the past, I was vegetarian like many others that aim to minimise the suffering caused by their food. I came to question this however the more I read about hunter-gatherers and human evolution. I thought the argument for animal foods being a crucial part of how we became human was extremely strong. Moreover, I found it intriguing how cultures that lived from hunting rather than farming tended to live much more harmonious lives, both with their environments and each other. This was true even though their diets often consisted of mostly meat and fish while the farmers ate mostly plants.
What was it about hunting and gathering that promoted that conservation ethic and why did this often change when people transitioned to agriculture?
What does this mean for how we should strive to eat today? Here are my thoughts.
I wanted to write this blog because I recently picked up Colin Turnbull’s famous ethnography of the Mbuti pygmies of the Ituri rainforest; ‘The Forest People’ which encapsulates beautifully the differences I want to focus on. Colin spent a lot of time in the forest with the Pygmies but he also experienced life in the nearby villages of their farming neighbours.
He wrote of the villagers:
‘They speak of the world beyond the plantations as being a fearful place, full of malevolent spirits and not fit for anyone to live in except animals and BaMbuti, which is what they call the pygmies. The villagers, some Bantu and some Sudanic, keep to their plantations and seldom go into the forest unless it is absolutely necessary. For them, it is a place of evil. They are outsiders.’
For the pygmies on the other hand:
‘It is their world, and in return for their affection and trust it supplies them with all their needs. They do not have to cut the forest down to build plantations, for they know how to hunt the game of the forest and gather the wild fruits that grow in abundance there, though hidden to outsiders.’
The farmers fear the rainforest, the hunter-gatherers are a part of it. The farmers must cut it down to feed themselves whereas the pygmies take from the forest in a way that allows the ecosystem to live on.
What can we learn from this account? My view is that it gives us an ideal principle from which we can aim to eat;
‘Wherever possible, eat from ecosystems rather than eating the ecosystems themselves.’
That means eating foods that allow the ecosystem they come from to continue in the future. If I eat deer and acorns, the woodland remains. If I want to grow wheat there, I have to chop down the trees and clear the land. I have to ‘eat’ the woodland. In a few years of growing wheat, the soil is degraded and I have to chop down more forest to grow what I need. If my population is growing then this happens at an ever-increasing rate. Soon I must travel to whole new regions to find land to cultivate and the only forests left are in remote areas too difficult to clear and plough.
This is the tragedy of annual agriculture which underpins our global food system. Almost everything we eat comes from this type of farming. Not only wheat but barley, oats, rice, corn, rapeseed, sunflowers, lentils, chickpeas and even vegetables grown at scale require the same treatment of the land. These, along with many others are annual plants that require full sun and bare soil to grow. In natural ecosystems, these conditions often arise due to disturbances like flooding or the rooting of wild boar which provide habitat for wild annuals that germinate, grow, flower, and set seed all in one season. They contribute to the overall biodiversity of the ecosystem. The problem comes when humans create those conditions at scale and extract the harvest from the land year after year, degrading the soil and preventing the development of more complex and diverse ecosystems. Coupled with population growth that often accompanies cultures living on annual crops, people are forced to move on and settle new lands. It is no coincidence that the word colonialism is etymologically linked to the Latin word ‘colere’ which means to till or cultivate.
Industrialisation has now produced a beast of a food system that produces enormous quantities of crops, far beyond the global populations’ capacity to consume them. The surplus is funneled into brutal factory farms to produce cheap meat, or turned into strange new ultra-processed ingredients like vegetable oils (really seed oils) and high-fructose corn syrup. These are all ways of repackaging the same few crops that are the cheapest to grow like wheat, corn, and soy while making us eat more and more of our diet from them. This allows the huge companies that dominate the global food system to line their pockets feeding us cheap, addictive fodder that damages our health and the world’s ecosystems.
For most of us, it is almost impossible to eat without buying into this system. As much as I hate it, I certainly still do. So this isn’t a blog about personal responsibility. The people who are worst off, both globally and in the UK are often the ones most likely to be consuming these foods. I simply want to draw people’s attention to the underlying problem behind this deep injustice that has so effectively severed our relationship with the natural world.
However, the first step towards change is understanding the problem. Only then can we find real solutions. So what would we eat in a world where human and ecosystem health flourishes?
A lot of wild food hopefully. Animals and fish hunted sustainably alongside wild plants and fungi harvested with reciprocity. We could also look to different ways of farming like cattle and sheep raised exclusively on pasture and agroforestry. These approaches are often called regenerative agriculture although the label agriculture doesn’t sit well with me here. I believe the term can’t meaningfully be separated from the cultivation of annual crops but that’s a whole other rabbit hole that we’ll avoid for now.
I would encourage anyone who can to eat as much as they can from those three sources. You’ll be able to eat knowing that your food is promoting the health of the natural world and you’ll likely feel better for it yourself.
My hope with Primal Gift is to make it easier for people to source wild food that they don’t have the time or ability to harvest themselves.
Some of you may be thinking ‘That sounds great but surely we can’t feed everyone on wild food and pasture-raised animals? The truth is I have no idea if it’s possible and neither does anyone else because there’s no way of knowing exactly how much wild food there would be if we restored ecosystems at scale.
What we do know is that agriculture can’t feed the world. Or rather it can’t for very long. Annual agriculture is unsustainable because it progressively degrades the soil. With the use of fertilisers, cover crops, and crop rotations this process may be delayed but this can only last so long if the population continues increasing. Depleted soils, a growing population, and more unpredictable weather sound like a recipe for disaster to me.
I think I’ll take my chances with venison and acorn stew.
References:
Keith, L. (2011). The Vegetarian Myth (16pt Large Print Edition).
Manning, R. (2004). Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilisation. 1st ed. North Point Press.
Scott, J.C. (2017). Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Yale University Press.
Turnbull, C.M. (2015). The forest people. London: The Bodley Head.
Title Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/danielmennerich/8038869589 (Daniel Mennerich, Flickr)