Although food production by its very nature includes a latent readiness for political domination and although civilizing culture was from the beginning its own propaganda machine, the changeover involved a monumental struggle. Along the axis from digging stick farming to plow agriculture to fully differentiated irrigation systems, an almost total genocide of gatherers and hunters was necessarily effected.
In domestic mammals (including humans), as a rule, the size of the brain becomes relatively smaller as specimens are produced that devote more energy to growth and less to activity. Placid, infantilized, typified perhaps by the sheep, most domesticated of herd animals; the remarkable inteligence of wild sheep is completely lost in their tamed counterparts. The social relationships between domesticated animals are reduced to the crudest essentials. Non-reproductive parts of the life cycle are minimized, courtship is curtailed, and the animals very capacity to recognise its own species is impaired.
farming created the potential for rapid environmental destruction and the domination over nature soon began to turn the green mantle that covered the birthplaces of civilisation into barren and lifeless areas. “Vast regions have chaged their aspect completely” estimates Zeuner “…always to quasi drier conditions since the beginning of the neolithic.” Deserts now occupy most of the areas where the high civilisations fliurished and there is much historical evidence to suggest these early civilisations inevitably ruined there environment.”
According to Rooney, prehistoric peoples found sustenance in over 1500 species of wild plant, whereas “All civilizations” Wenke reminds us “have been based on the cultivation of one or more of just six plant species: wheat, barley, millet, rice, maize, and potatoes.”
It is a striking truth that over the centuries “the number of different edible foods which are actually eaten,” Pyke points out, “has steadily dwindled.” The worlds population now depends for most of its subsistence on only about 20 genera of plants while their natural strains are replaced by artificial hybrids and the genetic pool of these plants becomes far less varied.
The diversity of food tends to dissapear or flatten out as the proportion of manufactured foods increases. Today the very same articles of diet are distributed worldwide so that an Inuit Eskimo and an African native may soon be eating powdered milk manufactured in Wisconsin or frozen fish sticks from a single factory in Sweden. A few big multinationals such as Unilever, the worlds biggest food production company, preside over a highly integrated service system in which the object is not to nourish or even to feed, but to force an ever increasing consumption of fabricated, processed products upon the world.
The early factories literally mimicked the agricultural model, indicating again that at base all mass production is farming. The natural world is to be broken and forced to work. One thinks of the mid americaln prairies where settlers had to yoke six oxen to plow in order to cut through the soil for the first time. Or a scene from the 1870′s in the Octopus by Frank Norris, in which gang-plows were driven like “a great column of field artillery” across the San Joaquin Valley, cutting 175 at once.
Today, the organic, what is left of it, is fully mechanized under the aegis of a few petrochemical corporations. Their artificial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and near monopoly of the worlds seed stock define a total environment that integrates food production from planting to consumption.
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