The next time you drink a Coke, take a second to
consider that you’re suckling from the teat of evil. The
culprit is not, despite what you’ve been taught to think, a
soft-drink-peddling Fortune 500 company, but agriculture itself.
And Richard Manning goes after it with a vengeance in his book
Against the Grain: How Agriculture has Hijacked
Civilization.
For about 10,000 years, since
humans first toyed with agriculture, we followed a pretty simple
formula: To grow more food, we plowed up more land and planted it.
Then, in the 1960s, we ran out of land to plow up.
The
solution was decidedly unnatural: We engineered massive irrigation
projects to farm water from the mountains, and began cooking up
petroleum- and phosphate-based fertilizers to plump up crop yields
and keep the boom going. That, writes Manning, spread “the
footprint of farming to mine, sterilize, and dewater the rest of
the land … We no longer grow crops just on land; we have
plowed up the biosphere.”
But that’s only what
agriculture did to the planet, to say nothing of what it’s
doing to us. Take corn as an example. As the 20th century wore on,
Americans were growing so much corn that we began disposing of the
majority by feeding it to cattle. But even cattle couldn’t
eat it all.
“What the situation required,” writes
Manning, “was a new idea that would treat us all like livestock.”
That idea? Convert the surplus corn into high-fructose
corn syrup, use it to make Coke, or PowerBars, or Newman’s
Own spaghetti sauce (start reading product-ingredient lists, and
you’ll find it everywhere), and pack it away in people.
It’s only now that the apparent costs of this practice
— widespread obesity and a rise in diabetes — are
becoming widely recognized.
So what, besides fertilizer
and cheap water, fuels the surplus-driven juggernaut that
agriculture has become? Government subsidies, and a little grease
from corn-processing giants like Archer Daniels Midland.
“The endurance of those subsidies, year after year, through
Republican and Democratic administrations alike, is the prima facie
evidence that farming has evolved its own inertia, independent of
human needs,” Manning writes. Then he delivers the kicker:
“Humanity’s role is not to shape agriculture to its needs;
rather, it is humanity’s job to figure out how to pay for and
dispose of all of that grain that agriculture chooses to grow.”
While much of Manning’s thesis was worked out by
agriculture’s revisionist-history crowd years ago, this book
will make you think differently about your next trip to the grocery
store.
Against the Grain: How
Agriculture has Hijacked Civilization Richard
Manning
240 pages, hardcover $24.
North Point Press, 2004.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline How agriculture ate the earth.
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