How important is food to human society?
Outside of the insanely obvious -- without food, we'd all soon become so much human compost -- it turns out that food, especially the availability of it or the lack thereof, has helped determine pretty much every aspect of human history and development.
That's the most fascinating lesson Jared Diamond provides in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies." A professor of geography at UCLA, Diamond starts by asking a question that's probably occurred to many of us at one time or another: Why, given there's no scientific reason to believe any one group or race of people is smarter or more inventive than any other, did human cultures evolve along such different paths? Why, for instance, did Europeans sail to and eventually take over much of North America and Australia, eliminating or displacing those regions' native peoples, rather than the other way around? Why did the earliest civilizations arise where they did?
The answer to all those questions ultimately rests with food. Areas with a diverse and plentiful supply of easily domesticated plants and animals had a built-in advantage over regions with fewer such food sources. Domesticable plants and animals gave rise to agriculture, which enabled people to settle down in farm communities, produce enough food to allow some people to specialize in trades other than food cultivations, build large populations and complex political systems, and eventually develop resistance to animal-origin epidemic diseases like smallpox, measles, tuberculosis and more. Those advantages have cascaded down to present-day societies, explaining why there are still such disparities in wealth and economic development around the globe.
It all comes down to food. And that's why we should keep our food choices not only healthful, but natureal, green and sustainable. Food is culture. Food is life. Food is nature, and so are we. And, as Diamond demonstrated so persuasively in a subsequent book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," when people start messing with nature in ways that can't be sustained, a society's very existence can be threatened.
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