Edward Carr, in his pursuit of Doing Food Security Differently, has taken a leaf out of William Gibson‘s book to declare: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”. Carr is talking specifically about climate change, and rather than anguishing over whether the future can be fed, he asserts that “Farmers in the Global South have already fed the future”.
[M]any [farmers] around the world, have already seen the future – that is, they have already lived through at least one, if not several, seasons like those we expect to become the norm some decades in the future. These farmers survived those seasons, and learned from them, adjusting their expectations and strategies to account for the possibility of recurrence.
Their methods aren’t perfect, but Carr suggests that by relying on local indicators and their knowledge and experience, farmers have weathered some pretty bad years, at the very least staving off catastrophe. And maybe they would best be helped not by an entirely new shiny whizz-bang future but by a better understanding of the indicators they use and how and when they may cease to be useful.
If farmers use the flowering of a particular tree as a signal to plant a crop, then at some point, as climate changes, the signal will come at an inappropriate time, or not at all.
[W]e should be building upon the capacities that already exist. For example, we can plan for the eventual failure of local indicators — we can study the indicators to understand under what conditions their behaviors will change, identify likely timeframes in which such changes are likely to occur, and create of new tools and sources of information that will be there for farmers when their current sources of information no longer work. We should be designing these tools and that information with the farmers, answering the questions they have (as opposed to the questions we want to ask). We should be building on local capacity, not succumbing to crisis narratives that suggest that these farmers have little capacity, either to manage their current environment or to change with the environment.
Our friend Jacob van Etten has been developing the idea of crowdsourcing crop improvement. That, and climate analogues, can preselect varieties for a future climate from a similar climate here and now. Is there also scope for crowdsourcing local indicators that will work in a different place in the future?
The real subject of this picture is not the yellow ear front and centre, but the orange ones in the background. They represent a high-carotene variety that could add to the arsenal of foods targeted at vitamin A deficiency. This orange maize was bred by a backyard breeder who is looking to share the variety with people who could help to take it further. The variety is “particularly suited to 30-36 degrees of latitude,” so any researchers in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere who might be interested in continued development, leave a comment here. The breeder is being supported by Seed Matters, and they’ll be keeping an eye on this post to follow up directly.
The sheer range of things that people consider edible is bewildering. So too the disagreements among people. Your mopane worms turn my stomach. My horsemeat lasagne is an affront to far more than your desire for truth in labelling. So are there any valid generalisations about human diets and appetites and how they came to be? Kristen J. Gremillion, a professor of anthropology at Ohio State University, thinks so. Biological evolution equipped us with the physical and biochemical machinery for processing some kinds of foods and not others. Social and cultural evolution then added layers of adaptability and flexibility. Of course there are differences in the apparatus, most famously perhaps the ability of adults to digest the lactose in milk, but the cultural differences are far more important and make us what we are: consumate omnivores.
Ancestral Appetites is by no means a comprehensive or exhaustive survey, but it is all the more readable and enjoyable for that. This is fine popular science, with none of the excesses that accompany other similar efforts to explore human diet. To begin with Gremillion takes a straightforward chronological approach, but rather than starting a little before the birth of agriculture she takes us right back to the golden age of hominins, as we must learn to call our ancestors who aren’t also ancestors of chimpanzees or gorillas. And she explains how researchers today know what our ancestors ate with much more accuracy than before thanks to vastly improved analytical tools. Things like the ratio of strontium to calcium in the bones, which reveals the balance between plants and meat in the diet, or the prevalence of 13C, an indicator of dryer, hotter conditions, or a much finer understanding of the patterns of tooth wear and tear caused by different foods.
Social evolution and the culture it enables act as a store for the trial and error discoveries societies make. Each generation does not have to repeat the mistakes of its parents, but because this behaviour is learned, it isn’t a trap either. We don’t need to learn afresh, but nor are we constrained to do only what our parents did. We can discover new things to eat, new ways to prepare them, new ways to nourish ourselves; this combination of tradition and innovation is one of the primary factors that enabled humans to spread out around the world. At some stage, of course, it also enabled some bright sparks to start on the road from cultivation to domestication and hunting to husbandry.
At this point Gremillion cleverly switches tack, abandoning chronology in order to examine hunger and abundance, flip sides of the same coin. I warmed to the idea of the social stomach. When we have enough, we feed others, especially if the food is difficult to store or defend. When we lack, we expect others to feed us. Sharing like this shades into the use of food as expressions of power and privilege, another behaviour that is surprisingly ancient. All in all, Ancestral Appetites powerfully conveys the continuity of human foodways. Each band of African hominins presumably shared the same basic diet. As their descendants fanned out across the world, tradition and innovation allowed them to adapt to almost all circumstances.
Does knowing what we used to eat shed any light on what we ought to eat? Gremillion agrees that the Paleolithic diet offers health benefits, but it is not the only set of choices to do so, and she sees growing “nostalgia for the Pleistocene” as further evidence that our history has provided us with the creativity and intelligence to optimize nutrition in many, many ways. Some of those choices, however, just don’t make sense, and Gremillion touches on Richard Wrangham’s idea that cooking made us human at least partly to debunk raw food enthusiasts:
“[B]esides ruling out many of the foods that taste buds delight in, a raw food diet eliminates the rewards of cooking as well as the drawbacks. Cooking caught on for a reason; not only is it easier on the teeth and jaws than the tearing and crushing of hard, fibrous and elastic materials, but it has the benefit of breaking down the compounds in food in ways that facilitate the extraction of nutrients.”
That’s Wrangham’s primary point; cooking increases efficiency of eating, and we have to be very well supplied willingly to give that up. Increasingly, though, we are very well supplied. Indeed, the evolutionary argument — that until yesterday it was all but impossible to eat too much fat, sugar or salt — probably explains why our ability to control our appetites for those things is so ill developed. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, and Gremillion welcomes the fact that some of us do limit our intake as support for her basic thesis.
“Paradoxically, our flexibility as a species allows us the freedom to constrain ourselves as individuals in ways our ancestors would probably find incomprehensible.”
If the past is any guide, our ancestral appetites, filtered through biological and social evolution, will keep some of us well fed well into the future; so bring on the mopane worms.
Ancestral Appetites: food in prehistory, by Kristen J. Gremillion, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011 (although I found out about it very recently).
Paperback £17.99 US$27.99 ISBN: 9780521727075
Hardback £50.00 US$88.00 ISBN: 9780521898423
My … hope is that people will eventually stop saying ‘bananas and plantains’. For one thing, it only makes sense is if the meaning of ‘banana’ is restricted to dessert bananas and the meaning of ‘plantain’ extended to all cooking bananas.
This, as you might imagine, is music to my ears. We’ve searched in vain, and often, and fruitlessly ((You see what I did there?)) for some kind of shibboleth to distinguish banana from plantain. There isn’t one. So to have the ProMusa blog standing up to be counted, again, is definitely something to welcome. And that’s not all.
In addition to taking aim at terminological inexactitude, our colleague-in-arms Anne Vezina, the blogger in question, also has a go at numerical fudge, with an attack on the “mythical fourth place ranking” of bananas on some ill-defined metric of global importance. Digging deep into FAOSTAT, she concludes:
Depending on the indicator and the year, bananas usually end up somewhere between the 8th and 10th position after discarding animal products and non-food crop commodities (adding plantains doesn’t change the ranking). But if instead of including all the banana-producing countries, only the least developed ones are considered, adding the values for plantains and bananas moves the duo up to fourth place, behind rice, cassava (instead of wheat) and maize.
Edward Carr’s continuing series on Doing Food Security Differently comes to a real fork in the road. Over and over again, one hears economists say that we have to connect poor farmers to markets, that’s the only way they’ll ever make it out of poverty. Carr points out that
[S]implifying one’s farm to focus on only a few key crops for which there is “comparative advantage”, and then using the proceeds to buy food, clothing, shelter and other necessities, works great when the market for those crops is strong. But what happens when the food you need to buy becomes more dear than the crops you are growing, for example through food price spikes or a shift in markets that leave one’s farm worth only a fraction of what is needed to feed and clothe one’s family?
To which I would add that even without price spikes or a shift in markets, the cash you earn might not be enough to buy back the nutrition you lose by focusing on a few key crops.
Carr’s main point is that the governments under which poor farmers labour are generally unlikely to be able to step in with safety nets when farmers need them. Not that safety nets are the answer, but in changing traditional cropping patterns, you also change traditional safety nets.
If, in coastal Ghana, you are growing maize and cassava as your principal crops, you can sell both in years where the market is good, and you can eat both in years where the market turns on you. I have referred to opting out of markets as temporary deglobalization, where people opt in and out of markets as they gauge their risks and opportunities.
Forcing farmers away from this model … removes the option of turning away from markets and eating the crops in conditions of years where the markets are not favorable. This is even more true when some of that newly reduced crop mix only takes value from sale on global markets (i.e. cocoa) and/or which cannot be eaten (i.e. cotton).
