Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
by Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas

–Reviewed by Erica E. Phillips

Over millennia of human history, great societies have flourished when individuals were freed from the burden of cultivating their own food. Great minds developed new theories in political philosophy, earth sciences, and mathematics; they explored unknown land and extraterrestrial spaces; they sculpted, painted frescoes, and constructed iconic architecture. Steadied by an infrastructure authors Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas call a “food empire,” humanity has leapt forward, grown exponentially. And then – as miraculously as they appeared – these booming empires have, one by one, receded into the annals of history.

Fraser and Rimas narrow down the necessary elements of a food empire to three factors: “farmers need to grow more food than they eat; they need a means of trading it to willing buyers; and they need a way to store it so it doesn’t dissolve into sludge before reaching its economic apotheosis.” Early civilizations like the ancient Sumerians of the Fertile Crescent and the Zhou of China developed systems of farming, irrigation, and transportation that fulfilled these conditions. The renowned Roman Empire and the Qin and Han dynasties peaked later, in the early centuries AD, for the same reasons. Around 900 AD, Europe’s medieval monasteries engineered an extensive transportation network between regions, allowing different areas to specialize in certain foodstuffs and making broader choices available to a growing number of city-dwellers. In each instance, the empires grew more expansive, supported larger urban populations, and grew more vulnerable to inevitable fluctuations in weather, crop failures, and pests.

Early on, Fraser and Rimas delve deeply into the example of Europe’s food empire in the Middle Ages, the first civilization to fully develop and exploit the natural wealth of the wild European countryside. Modeled after the urban center of Marseilles, which developed around a monastery built strategically on the Rhone river, Benedictine communities rose up all over Europe. Each town was anchored by a monastery, the inhabitants of which formed “a nucleus of industry and food production.” These “chapter houses” began to specialize, and traded among each other along networks of roads they built and maintained. Monks researched farming methods and food processing and led the way in an agricultural revolution. “By the 10th century, the monks’ windmills, fairs, and breweries (and dairies, beehives, bakeries, salt pans, and piggeries) had created a landscape where many Europeans no longer had to scratch out a subsistence crop.”

As the authors point out, the High Middle Ages bore strong similarities to our current global food empire. Balanced precariously on the fruits of rich but increasingly overworked land, the agricultural industry continued pushing outward. Today’s agricultural industry has been turned over to an oligarchy of huge businesses that utilize a cocktail of fertilizers, genetically modified organisms, and a massive supply of water to sow sustenance for the growing global population. Much like the coordinated exploits of the Benedictine food production monopoly, today’s producers have left no stone unturned in the search for fertile earth, and consider no scientific method too dangerous.

In the High Middle ages, a series of unfortunate but foreseeable events led to the demise of the food empire. Excessive farming caused severe soil degradation. Wood sources were exhausted and deforestation caused erosion. Prices went up, banks collapsed, and poverty swelled. Then, a sustained period of “meteorological goodwill” came to an end. Heavy rains caused starvation, illness spread, and the year 1347 gave rise to the bubonic plague.

The implications of the historical parallels are obvious if not outright threatening. In the High Middle Ages, at the height of the Roman Empire, in the heyday of ancient Sumerian society, and at several other moments in history, humans have constructed food empires based on three dangerous assumptions: “that the Earth is fertile,” “that the forecast calls for sunny, mild weather, with possible showers,” and “that it’s good business to do one thing well.” Rimas and Fraser’s abundant examples lay bare our self-destructive compulsion to maintain these assumptions.

“There’s a fourth assumption that affects the first three,” they add. “Our food supply, like everything else in our civilization, takes cheap fossil fuels for granted.” Should oil prices rise significantly, should reserves run out, should there be a dry year, or a new strain of indestructible bug-the outcome could be catastrophic.

Fraser and Rimas advocate a system they call “nested bioregionalism” – global and local systems working together to “offset each other’s failings.” Community farms would cultivate a diverse range of products native to each small region, which would provide sustenance for the local population. On the whole, regions would cultivate some bulk quantities of specialized items for global distribution. Each community would consume mostly local products with a few imported items to even out the pressure on the land. And all producers would have to agree to avoid using fossil fuels. The change requires legislation, both within each nation and worldwide, along with a healthy obsession – on every human’s part – over what we eat.

Buy the book: Skylight, Powell’s, Amazon, Borders.

Further reading: Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization by Spencer Wells and The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It by Julian Cribb

*Photo courtesy Reto Fetz.

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American Terroir: Savoring the Flavors of Our Woods, Waters, and Fields
by Rowan Jacobsen

–Reviewed by Christine C. Chen

If foodies have “organic,” “local” and “slow,” then wine-lovers can claim “terroir” as their buzzword. Yet the use of terroir needn’t be so restricted. In American Terroir, James Beard Award-winning author Rowan Jacobsen brings the concept out of the wine cellar and onto the table.

As with so many other things in the gastronomic galaxy, the English-speaking world adopted the term from the French, who had more than just geography and geology in mind when they coined it. Terroir, from the Latin for “earth,” signifies more than “a taste of place.” It also conveys “a partnership between person, plant, and environment to bring something unique into the world.” Terroir is more than just the soil in which the grapes are grown or the village which lends its name to a wine; it’s the fullest, most concentrated expression of a person’s interaction with the land on which he or she lives.

Jacobsen explores the concept of food terroir in twelve lively chapters that each focus on a particular food – from the humble apple to the exotic oyster – the environment that creates it, and the people who grow and produce its most prized, sought-after incarnations. “Coax” and “craft” might be better at describing the process. As Jacobsen emphasizes throughout, the creation of such ambrosial food does not require human interference or tinkering, but rather, it requires an awareness of and respect for place, and for the plant or animal. To adopt a one-size-fits-all approach – to produce mass quantities of Red Delicious apples or generic Iowa potatoes – is to ignore the very essence of the food.

Not every plant or animal thrives under the same conditions, even those conditions we tend to think of as ideal – good light and rich soil. There turns out to be a surprising connection between struggle and excellence among plants. Grapevines and sugar maples often produce superior wine and syrup under poor soil conditions, which force the plants and trees to concentrate their scant resources and develop large root systems that can absorb more minerals, and hence more flavor.

This insight has implications for more than just taste. As Jacobsen shows, by understanding how a living thing adapts to a place, we come to understand ourselves as inhabitants as well. It’s difficult to think of the hardy sugar maple without thinking of the hardy people who have carved out a life in harsh northeast climes, and Jacobsen keeps them in mind. But he also knows that American identity is only partly about roots. In describing that most American of fruits – the apple – and its long journey from the mountainous forests of Central Asia to the arid eastern plains of Washington state, Jacobsen writes, “It makes an important point about terroir: Mimicking nature is not always the goal, (as Europe’s winemakers learned long ago). Sometimes, like William Faulkner, a thing achieves its best expression in its native landscape. Sometimes, like Cormac McCarthy, it has to head west to find itself.”

Jacobsen is hardly the first to broach the subject of artisanal and local food, although he might be the most unpretentious. His message is a simple reminder that we should pay attention to where our food comes from, not necessarily from faddish motivations or environmental concerns – although the environment certainly benefits when we buy what’s in season locally. Food simply tastes better, he shows, when it doesn’t come in a shrink-wrapped package shipped from halfway across the world. Jacobsen isn’t concerned with the socioeconomic issues raised by what he calls “good eating.” The accessibility and affordability of such food for the average consumer is beyond the scope of his book. His book is, he writes, a romance about good eating, and what makes eating good, and most of all, a love story about our vast and varied land.

Buy the Book: Skylight, Powell’s, Amazon, Borders

Further Reading: A Geography of Oysters by Rowan Jacobsen and Four Fish by Paul Greenberg.

Christine C. Chen teaches humanities at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico and is also a professional violinist.

*Photo courtesy Alpha.

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Susan Feniger was one of the earliest stars of the Food Network, with her show “Too Hot Tamales.” “We’d start at 6 a.m. and finish at 6 p.m. Then we’d go out and party all night and come back,” Feniger said at her Zócalo panel on celebrity chefdom. The television show brought her business and stop-in-the-street fame. “Someone I had no idea who they were would come up and give me a huge hug,” she said. But she didn’t mind. “In our business, it’s about hospitality and giving back and feeling like you’re having people in your home, even if you don’t know them.” Below, Feniger reveals a bit more about herself.

Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick?

A. Having my Vietnamese coffee or tea with condensed milk – it’s so much sugar.

Q. Who was your childhood hero?

A. Jim Thorpe.

Q. What do you consider to be the greatest simple pleasure?

A. It’s a tie between eating, reading and music.

Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday?

A. With my partner Liz, taking a walk with the dogs before going to work, or sitting in a hot tub with a Vietnamese coffee and condensed milk.

Q. What do you wish you had the nerve to do?

A. I wish I had the nerve, or maybe more like the oomph, to train to do the AIDS ride from San Francisco to L.A. Actually I wish I had the nerve to do it without doing the training.

Q. What music have you listened to today?

A. Laura Nyro and Corinne Bailey Rae.

Q. What is your favorite cocktail?

A. I have many, but I love a vodka soda with lemons from our lemon tree, which have the most incredible flavor. I also love our Tequila Tamarind at Street and our muddled mojitos at Border Grill.

Q. What is your most prized material possession?

A. If I could say my dogs, if they’re possessions, it would be my dogs.

Q. If you were about to be executed, what would you want for your final meal?

A. California avocados with extra virgin olive oil and salt, artichokes with mayonnaise, lime, and cracked black pepper, and a rib eye with tomatoes when they’re in season.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead you would most want to meet for dinner?

A. Nelson Mandela.

To read more about Feniger’s panel, click here.

*Photo by Aaron Salcido.

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Ludovic “Ludo” Lefebvre doesn’t mind fame. In fact, he said at a Zócalo panel on famous chefs, “I’m happy to be a celebrity. Before, it was not very possible for me to cook for everybody.” The veteran chef of L’Orangerie and Bastide now serves his food at more affordable prices at his pop-up restaurant, LudoBites. And while he’s devoted to his art, he admitted, “I’m an actor. Every night I act. People see me at the restaurant, and sometimes I scream, or I’ll take a picture with ladies.” Below, Ludo reveal more about himself.

Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick?

A. Trying to eat less. I eat a lot. Tomorrow I leave for Paris, and I’m going to eat at 25 restaurants, in just two weeks. I love it, but I’m going to gain a lot of weight.

Q. Who was your childhood hero?

A. Napoleon.

Q. What do you consider to be the greatest simple pleasure?

A. Just to be alone and to be myself, maybe in the desert, and to just listen.

Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday?

A. In my bed. The restaurant is closed Saturday.

Q. What do you wish you had the nerve to do?

A. Open a restaurant.

Q. When do you feel most creative?

A. When I go to the market, when I have some ingredients, when I shop for spices. I feel creative all the time. My mind is always working.

Q. What is the first dish you mastered?

A. I was very proud, when I was a young chef, to master a terrine of foie gras. That is not easy.

Q. What is your favorite cocktail?

A. I don’t like cocktails. But I did just come back from Hawaii and I drank a lot of Mai Tais.

Q. If you were about to be executed, what would you want for your final meal?

A. Roasted chicken with potatoes, from my grandma.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead you would most like to meet for dinner?

A. Napoleon. I would love to cook for him.

To read more about Lefebvre’s panel, click here.

*Photo by Aaron Salcido.

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Ilan Hall, winner of the second season of Bravo’s hit “Top Chef”, picked Los Angeles to launch his first restaurant, The Gorbals. What’s on the menu? “Bone marrow, organs, stuff that I love that most people would throw away,” Hall said at his Zócalo panel on celebrity chef culture. “No frills, no extra fancy stuff.” The downtown spot, he said, is “just where I wanted to be. I spend most of my time there, as my girlfriend will tell you.” Below, Hall tells us more about himself.

Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick?

A. Smoking.

Q. Who was your childhood hero?

A. It’s a three-way split between my grandfather, my father, and my cousin.

Q. What do you consider to be the greatest simple pleasure?

A. Crispy French fries.

Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday?

A. Getting banh mi with my girlfriend and the dog in Chinatown.

Q. What do you wish you had the nerve to do?

A. I have lots of nerve.

Q. When do you feel most creative?

A. In my kitchen.

Q. What is your favorite cocktail?

A. A gin and tonic. Hendricks.

Q. What is your most prized material possession?

A. My restaurant.

Q. If you were about to be executed, what would you want for your final meal?

A. Crispy French fries.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead you would most like to meet for dinner?

A. Bill Clinton.

To read more about Hall’s panel, click here.

*Photo by Aaron Salcido.

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Paul Greenberg cast his first fishing line before he got to first grade. The author of Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, moving from cottage to cottage on various estates in the wealthy town. “I grew up kind of poor, sort of a ‘Slums of Beverly Hills’ story,” he said. And though his mom  encouraged him to share her interest in birding, Greenberg said, “What got me going, to her chagrin, was going out and catching and eating fish.” While writing Four Fish, fishing transformed from something Greenberg saw as a personal hobby to something bigger – “an issue of the survival of the wild ocean.” Below, Greenberg explains why we eat the fish we eat, how we catch or farm it, and whether it’s risking the oceans.

Q. Why four fish? How did these four become our eating staples?

A. A word about the fish as they are. Anybody who knows anything about fishing who sees salmon, tuna, bass and cod on the cover will say, well, which salmon? Which tuna? Which bass? Which cod? They represent broad categories of fish. Salmon has at least two genuses of fish. Bass has at least four or five different taxonomic families. Common names are misleading when it comes to fish.

But what they represent to me was the kind of flesh archetypes that an average seafood consumer recognizes in the marketplace. There’s this theory I developed over the course of working on this book. Your average person, someone who is intelligent and food conscious, you go into the fish market or a restaurant and you open the menu and you have the expectation of seeing these archetypes to feel like you’re looking at a complete menu. If you want something light and flaky and deep-fry-able, you want cod. You may want a whole fish – something meatier and broil-able – and that’s where you get your bass. In the book I focus on European sea bass, but it might be striped or black sea bass or Chilean sea bass. Then you’re going to want something pink and succulent – that’s salmon, and you might have it smoked or baked, it’s oily enough to withstand baking. And if you want something steaky and meat-like and grill-able, that’s tuna. That’s how the consumer approaches seafood. So why not take a consumer lens and look at the world of the ocean through that lens? It was not a lens I was used to looking through. I came at it as a sportsman. I like the diversity of fish. But I thought I’d look at the flesh we put on our plates, and how we can get it on our plates in an environmentally sustainable way.

There’s another factor in this. I’ve read Michael Pollan, and he very aptly divides up the food system into four meals in Omnivore’s Dilemma. It’s a useful way of approaching a huge topic. Then, when I looked at it more and more, the number four has a certain kind of enchanted quality to it. If you look at early humans, they ate dozens of mammals – muskrats, elks – but in the end, when domestication started about 10,000 years ago, we ended up with four main mammals that we eat – pigs, cows, sheep and goats. And again, if you look at birds, we used to eat many more – snipe, woodcock, everything – but now we’re down to four birds that are our main staples: turkey, chicken, duck and geese. If humanity has this tendency to pare things down, I thought, what are the four fish we could look at?

Each of the four fish also represents different phases of fishing that we’ve gone through over the last few thousand years. Salmon we get home-delivered – they come to our rivers, and were probably some of the first large fish we ate in any great numbers. Then, going out further from shore are the fish we access by net, by small coastal fisheries, so I chose bass for that zone. Further still, when we started having an impact on coastal fish up to the continental shelf about a thousand years ago, that’s how we got into cod in a serious way. Finally, tuna actually cross open oceans and end up in international waters. That’s the latest phase of fishing.

Q. How did we come to eat so much seafood?

A. It’s certainly a trend. The per capita seafood consumption has nearly doubled in the last half century. The world catch has gone up markedly.

I think a big part of it was World War II, and the rise of a sort of post-war, petrochemically-driven seafaring economy. Certainly the appearance of cheap oil has let fishing expand to places it couldn’t have. World War II was instrumental in launching new technology like SONAR, which helps us map the bottom of the sea and identify individual schools of fish. The other thing that comes out of petrochemical era is polymers woven into fishing nets. During the 1960s and 1970s, Asian countries developed huge drift nets, which relatively recently were made illegal on the high seas. Some of these nets were many miles long. Without petrochemical advances you couldn’t have made a net that way, it would have been too heavy.

Also after World War II, though this hasn’t been fully documented, much of Europe and large parts of Asia and Oceania were devastated from the war. They needed some way to get calories on the table. Wild fish were probably in better shape after the war. Fish were part of how we clawed our way to viability after the war.

The second part of the story is the discovery of omega-3 fatty acids, which helps vascular tissue remain pliant. It’s a heart healthy component of the diet. That made a lot of people in developed countries look at fish as this healthy alternative to beef or even chicken, just in terms of protein per unit of mass. There’s low fat in most fish, so it’s less artery-clogging than beef. That fueled demand.

It’s hard to say whether it was health or technology that really pushed up demand though. It’s a little bit of a chicken and egg question.

Q. How does fish farming compare to land-based agriculture in terms of environmental damage?

A. There’s a scientist at the University of Washington, Ray Hilborn, who did a recent study comparing fishing to terrestrial agriculture. He found that fishing was better and more environmentally friendly, actually. In terms of raw damage to the environment, what’s the biodiversity of a cornfield? Zero or one. It’s one species. But fishing, while you might cause depletion or elimination of a type of fish, a marine ecosystem has so much more biodiversity than a field.

It’s important to start thinking about fisheries in the context of food production. As far as fish farming versus agriculture, there are many things to recommend fish farming over land-based systems of animal husbandry. Fish have the potential to be extremely efficient farm animals. There are a lot of ways terrestrial animals spend energy that fish don’t have to spend. Land animals are warm-blooded, so they have to warm their bodies. They have to stand against gravity. Fish float and are cold-blooded, and they can convert feed into flesh in a more efficient way.

But look at the context of where we are in human civilization – there are no more wild animals in the context of farming when we farm animals on land. We’ve gotten rid of a huge number of deer, elk, bison that might have been on the plain at the same time as the cattle. What that means is you don’t have to worry about the interaction of cattle with wild animals. You don’t have to worry about disease from cow to bison. With fish farming, most of it today unfortunately still occurs in a wild context. Salmon, for example, you tend to farm in the same environment where wild salmon prosper. You have these viral infections that can jump ship from farm to wild. You also have issues were pestilent materials come out of farming operations – uneaten feed pellets, excretions. If you don’t practice proper husbandry, you end up screwing the habitat for farm fish and wild fish.

Q. What’s the status of environmental regulation around the world to make sure we farm fish properly?

A. It’s a case-by-case and region-by-region basis. For instance there was a disease that first appeared in Chile and spread around the world through Norway, through the Bay of Fundy and Atlantic Canada. It’s infectious salmon anemia, which causes massive crop loss. The provincial government of New Brunswick introduced a management plan, mandating the rotation of crops.

The U.S. actually doesn’t do a lot of fish farming, because a lot of states don’t allow it. This has been a big battle in the environmental world, where aquaculturists make the argument that farming fish will reduce pressure on wild stock, and environmentalists say it damages the environment and causes a net loss. What’s happening in effect is that the U.S. has outsourced the problem. Eighty percent of our seafood is imported at this point. We have good fishing regulations in this country, but this doesn’t stop us from importing fish caught using questionable practices. It doesn’t stop us from importing farmed fish, which may not be the best environmental practice. We do limit importation of aquacultural products that use certain chemicals, but there’s not a whole heck of a lot we do to make sure that environmentally clean products get into the fish market in the first place.

Q. In Four Fish you discuss the concept of the next seafood. What should we be eating?

A. I make the argument that this word seafood is kind of a cruel word, in that it lumps all of these wild animals together into this category: here’s a bunch of stuff from the ocean that we eat. What I recommend is, if we’re going to continue to eat wild fish, we need to change the way we think about them. We need to think about them as game rather than industrial products. That’s one side of the equation. What I’d like to see is an emerging seafood market where wild fish are much more valued. It’s the equivalent in a way of grass-fed beef. We should eat less of it per meal, and value it more, and it should cost us more. The way we’ve been treating it has not been fair from an ecological and ethical viewpoint.

On the flip side, I had a very interesting conversation in Vietnam a couple years ago with an aquaculture scientist. He fought in the war and remained a dyed-in-the-wool communist. Looking ahead to the future he said there will be two kinds of fish – these valuable, prized, expensive fish, and farmed fish that are run-of-the-mill, not spectacular on the plate, but do the job of feeding people. The four fish aren’t necessarily those fish. By and large the future seafood, the fish I think can stand up to industrial husbandry and serve a larger economic role, they tend to be tropical fish like tilapia, catfish, another Brazilian fish called pacu. Tropical fish tend to be much more feed-efficient. They grow faster in warmer weather. They’re often freshwater rather than marine. I’m not sure why that’s so but it’s often the case. They’re more blue-collar fish overall. They’re more herbivorous than carnivorous.

Tilapia you can raise on algae. That’s not how they’re currently farmed – they’re fed with soy and corn and fishmeal. They’re used by poorer farmers as a polycultural crop – the fish eats waste and algae, and provides protein as well. Tilapia is a development fish, promoted a lot by the Peace Corps. They were found in Africa to be this great fish, fast growing, able to survive in a number of different environments. There are tilapia all over the world, but Africa’s key species from the Nile and Mozambique are the most common, and they were exported to Indonesia, to South America. They serve a dual role – they’re used in small artisanal ways for local farmers, and farmed in large-scale operations to serve a first-world market.

Q. How bad is the state of fish and the oceans today?

A. Sometimes the media and even my publishers like to push this gloom-and-doom message, the end of wild fish. What I think is important to remember is that the annual global catch is around 90 million tons of seafood a year. That’s the equivalent of the weight of the human population of China. It seems like a lot. But it’s amazing that in this day and age the ocean is able to produce that much wild food without our having to do anything about boosting production. There’s a frequent distortion in the media that gives the impression that wild fish are about to become extinct, which is far from the case. What’s happening now is the early signs of the loss of the global abundance of wild fish. We don’t want to get to the point of having to go on safari to see these fish. We want to live in an atmosphere of abundance. But we have a relationship with fish that’s disrespectful but useful economically. If we don’t establish a good relationship, we’ll just run roughshod over them and eliminate ocean life as we know it. I don’t want people to come away from this book thinking it’s apocalypse time. It’s time to do some major rethinking so that we don’t have an apocalypse.

*Photo courtesy Thomas Quine.

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Spencer Wells, a geneticist and anthropologist, had studied the genetics of indigenous human populations for years when, after working on the PBS documentary about the Y chromosome, “The Journey of Man,” he found a home at National Geographic. “They said, ‘This is fascinating stuff. Now that you’re done with the film, what would you like to do next?’ It’s a great question to be asked,” said Wells, who is now the “Explorer-in-Residence” for the magazine. His work took him around the world and ultimately toward writing Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, which, as he discusses below, argues that the switch to agriculture 10,000 years ago is the root of many a modern problem, from obesity to religious fundamentalism to social anxiety.

Q. What did you learn from the time you spent in hunter-gatherer societies?

A. As a relatively affluent, middle-class American going to visit these people who have virtually nothing, the first thing that strikes you is, how can they live like this? They must be so unhappy. But as you spend more time with them, you unwind from the Google and mobile-filled world and you realize they’re incredibly happy and have a wonderful lifestyle, though it’s increasingly under threat. Left to their own devices, they would be completely fulfilled. So you have to ask, why is everyone in the world today an agriculturalist? Ninety-nine point nine percent of us rely on agriculture rather than hunting and gathering. That led me to do some research, to ask, what led to that transition, and what effects did that transition have on us, physically and mentally? The early agricultural populations were less healthy than hunter-gatherers, so why did their way of life lose out?

It’s because with agriculture, you can grow more people, even if they’re not happier or healthier. That set in motion a lot of forces that I trace in the rest of the book.

Q. When did the transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture happen, and what effect did it have on humans?

A. Around 10,000 years ago. The world was coming out of from the last Ice Age, conditions were improving, the world was warming up and the human population started to expand somewhat in certain locations. People started to specialize in gathering particular grain species – wheat and barley in the Middle East, rice in China and India, corn in Mexico. They started to settle down into villages. Then an ice dam melted in North America. The water of Lake Aggasiz, which had been created by the melting of the Laurentide ice sheet, was released into the North Atlantic.  This killed the Gulf Stream, which brings warm water into the North Atlantic. It plunged western Eurasia back into Ice Age-like conditions, but population density had by that point increased beyond the ice age carrying capacity. So people had to innovate, and the innovation was agriculture.

We survived. It made complete sense at the time to develop agriculture. The sting in the tail was that as population density increased, we overhunted the animals we survived on. So we had to domesticate some species. Most major infectious diseases that afflict humans were introduced then, from these domesticated animals. There was also a shift in the human diet away from a diverse gathered group of plants. Hunter-gatherers in the Middle East were eating over 150 plant species – fruits, nuts, berries, tubers as well as grains. Once they made the transition to agriculture, it went down to about eight plant species, with most calories coming from wheat and barley. Even today, 60 percent of the world’s calories come from wheat, rice and corn. Consumption of starch and simple sugars increased, and there was a massive increase in cavities right away, no matter where the population was – the Middle East, Asia, the Americas. As soon as people transitioned to agriculture, cavities quintupled. It’s an early sign that we were maladapted to the new way of life. That continues today – the obesity epidemic is an extension of that.

Q. Why did we evolve this way if it seems to have been bad for us?

A. Evolution is all about reproduction. In a Darwinian sense, agriculture was real winner. It produced more people. But of course, it’s not just about making more people, it’s a question of choosing the lifestyle that’s right for us. We’re still in the course of adapting to this radical cultural shift. For instance lactase, the gene that codes for the enzyme that digests lactose, the sugar in milk.  Certain populations that  domesticated sheep, goats, and cattle, and started drinking milk beyond childhood were selected to retain that ability.  As a result, most Europeans today have it. You can see evidence of this sort of culturally-driven selection in the human genome.

Q. What other modern problems came about because of our transition to agriculture – what were the mental impacts in particular?

A. There is some mental fallout. The predicted ideal human group size is around 150 people, according to the British evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. That’s what the neocortex, which governs the ability to form social relationships, can handle. He predicted we should be living in groups no larger than 150. It remains an important figure – it’s the size of army companies, the size of traditional Hutterite farming communities in Canada (they are a bit like the Amish). Once you go beyond 150, the group fissions. If a group size exceeds 150 people, you need to create some sort of bureaucracy, a government, because otherwise you can’t keep track of all the social relationships.

Today, we’re living in cities with thousands and millions of people. But we’re actually disconnected from most of them. Imagine you’re in an elevator – you’re not chatting with anybody, you’re checking your Blackberry, perhaps, or staring at the floor numbers. You’re crowded, but disconnected. I argue that this creates unease.

We actually do see rising rates of mental illness. The World Health Organization predicted that by 2020, mental illness will be the second leading cause of death and disability after heart disease. Antidepressants are the most widely-prescribed class of drugs today. As I say in the book, for the first time in human history, we have to drug ourselves to feel normal. We used to do it, with shamans, for instance, to get out of the normal state of existence, to enter a mystical trance.  Now we do it to make it through the day.

Q. You discuss in Pandora’s Seed how fundamentalism can be traced back to these problems as well – can you elaborate?

A. Most think only of Islamic fundamentalism, but there is also Christian fundamentalism, particularly in the U.S. I argue that both are the product of the last 50 years or so, and are in part due to a sense that some people have that they’ve lost their purpose, a religious purpose, the overarching sense of what is ethical, in all-out race to create novelty and material wealth. Religious fundamentalism is perhaps a backlash against that, along with the increasingly secular world we live in. It’s an effort to go back to an earlier time, where mythos – received truths and traditions – was more important than logos, than rational thought.

Q. How can we repair some of these problems?

A. It’s not going to be easy – we have a lot of crises facing us in the 21st century.  We should, I argue, take some cues from surviving hunter-gatherers, and our distant ancestors, and try to want less. Look at the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, for instance. There are proximal causes to that – errors made by BP, perhaps coupled with a lack of regulation and oversight. But ultimately, the root cause is that we all need cheap gasoline. We as a society are ultimately to blame. Everyone is ringing their hands about climate change and so on, but really, part of the solution is simply to learn to want less – to live more efficiently, recognizing that there are limits to our previously unchecked growth.

Q. Is that enough, given that the problem seems part of our genes?

A. That is something that needs to underlie everything else we do. We also need to come up with better, cleaner sources of energy, pursue material wealth less, and develop better farming methods. I think all of that comes down to wanting less. What’s going to happen over the next half century, for the first time in 70,000 years, is we will be living in a population that’s no longer growing. The UN is predicting around 9.5 billion people by mid-century. That’s a lot of people, especially people who want to live the way the average American lives today. It’s simply untenable to imagine that. I think for all of us to survive, we have to get by on less and be more efficient with the resources we use.

Q. Are you optimistic about our ability to change in this way?

A. There is hope – that’s why I called it Pandora’s Seed. The myth of Pandora is that she opens the box, and all these plagues for humanity fly out. But she claps down the lid and saves hope. Hope lies in our remarkable ability to innovate. It’s what saved us time and time again throughout history. I think it’s going to allow us to create solutions, once we see the consequences of what we’re doing. We are fairly short-sighted as a species. But we’re at a point in our social evolution where we need to think longer-term in order to see the true costs, the unintended consequences of our actions.

*Photo of Spencer Wells by David Evans. Photo of wheat courtesy bernat….

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Mark Gold is President of the environmental group Heal the Bay, and was Executive Director from 1994 to 2006. Gold created Heal the Bay’s Beach Report Card, and has authored or co-authored numerous California coastal protection, water quality and environmental education bills. Below, Gold takes our In The Green Room Q&A.

Q. What’s the last habit you tried to kick?

A. Eating hamburgers. Aren’t you going to ask how it went? I did it.

Q. Who was your childhood hero?

A. Jacques Cousteau.

Q. What do you consider to be the greatest simple pleasure?

A. Going to a Dodger game.

Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday?

A. Running on the beach.

Q. What is the last book you read?

A. Dorothy Green’s Managing Water: Avoiding Crisis in California.

Q. What do you wish you had the nerve to do?

A. Move somewhere else.

Q. What is your favorite word?

A. My least favorite’s pollution, I can tell you that.

Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?

A. This is the one I’ve got and I make the most of it.

Q. What is your most prized material possession?

A. Photos of my family.

Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?

A. Kenya.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead that you would most like to meet for dinner?

A. Obama.

To read about Gold’s panel on whether we’re running out of seafood, click here.

*Photo by Aaron Salcido.

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Our strong appetites for every fish from tuna and salmon to orange roughy and monkfish are upsetting ocean ecosystems and polluting the seas, as Jonathan Gold discussed at a Zócalo event. We asked five food lovers — Kogi Chef Roy Choi, photographer Charlie Grosso, Teenage Glutster Javier Cabral, Eater LA’s Kat Odell, and Artbites’ Maite Gomez-Rejón — to tell us: What is the cruelest food you’ve ever eaten? Read their answers below.

What’s so cruel about killing a goat?

Whale meat is the new black. Or is it the appearance of being sympathetic that’s the new black?

When I was in college everybody wore Amnesty International T-shirts and had World Wildlife Federation and Greenpeace stickers but they hung out at pet stores, ate bologna, and went to the zoo. Everybody was against Apartheid yet they clutched their purses when I and my homies from the hood would roll up.

We can eat cows and pigs and chickens and turn a blind eye. But foie gras and whales are cruel? What about all the senseless turkeys we kill for Thanksgiving, our national holiday that glorifies the myth of the Puritan warm heart? Rattlesnakes and alligators and buffalo to be hip. Ducks, crabs, lobsters, tuna, sea bass, lamb, baby cows, squab, quail, trout, elk – these are all beautiful creatures yet we eat them and kill them in abundance.

I’ve killed a goat with my own two hands. I chased him around a dirt field in the desert, wrestled him to the ground, got him in a head lock, looked him in the eye, and slit his throat. We hung him, skinned him, drained his blood, gutted him, butchered him into primals, then sub-primals. We packed him up and took him across the border to Mexicali where we made birria, the most delicious birria.

This was not a cruel moment for me. It was seven in the morning and I learned about the spirituality of cooking and what my responsibility is as a chef. I did not kill this goat out of haste or carelessness. This was a tradition that my dishwasher Salvador’s family has been doing for many generations and he trusted me enough to show me. I had to dig deep to see how special this animal was to the cycle of life and when I looked in his eyes I took his spirit and he became a part of me.

This may sound cruel, but it is not.  It is only cruel because it makes you cringe. What is cruel is killing animals on mass-production levels. What is cruel is being numb to the destruction of life.

Buddhist philosophy extols the virtue of living without hurting other forms of life. I try to live that way. I don’t step on spiders or deliberately run over people on the street in my car.

I am making steps each day as a chef to try and serve more vegetables and buy the most humanely raised meat that I can. It is hard, but it is not impossible.

I killed a goat. But that is not the cruelest thing. The cruelest thing is a Chicken McNugget.

–Roy Choi is the chef of Kogi.

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Better to eat than to waste

A favorite dish at any Chinese banquette is the shark fin soup. I have eaten plenty of it, year in, year out. Ever since I was young, I knew it was a delicacy. It was special because we didn’t see it often and there was always a bit of ceremony when it is served. I often thought it was just called “Shark Fin” soup and the bits of stringy gelatinous strands were just made out of some unknown matter. After all, Chinese cuisine is filled with imaginative names for various foods. The tapioca balls in the ever-so-popular Boba tea were called “Frog Eggs” when I was young. Frog legs were called “Field Chicken,” and given how much it does taste like chicken, I really believed that it was some form of free-range bird.

It was not until I was much older that I realized that Shark Fin is not a euphemism for anything. Shark fin actually is the fin of a shark. Then at some cousin’s wedding banquet one day, I discovered that the sharks are often caught, their fins cut off, and then released back into the water to meet their untimely ends. I think I was appalled. Yet I believe I finished my portion of the soup that night.

What trumps cruelty-free in the Chinese mind is the waste-not mentality – especially when your grandparents left everything behind in 1949 and porridge is usually what is for lunch. I am certain that I have had shark fin soup since that fateful day when I learned of the shark’s sad end. However, as most of my relatives are now married and my life veers in a direction where Chinese banquettes are few and far between, it has been quite a few years since I have had any shark fins.

Would I eat it again? I think I would. Not because I have no compassion for the shark but because not consuming my bowl of soup in a banquette of a hundred would not have stirred the consciences of the restaurant or the other guests. The only conscience that would be disturbed by my meager objection would be my own – at the fact that I wasted good, clean, edible food.

–Charlie Grosso is a photographer whose latest exhibit is Wok the Dog.

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Is it cruel if the prawn is drunk?

As if I don’t get this question asked enough by my fast-food fueled classmates and homies as soon as they discover my food-oriented ways!

It was during my innocent early years of food blogging. I had just turned 18. A select group of food bloggers were called up for this British Television series. The theme was the “Seven Deadly Sins” and this particular episode was for “gluttony”.

And it was television drama at its finest! They portrayed us as some sort of food fetishists who would only eat raw food, and I’m not talking about raw vegan food. We went to a seafood restaurant out in Rowland Heights. There were some native Chinese speakers among us who had heard about their “off the menu” items. And when the dishes came, I think I knew why they were strictly off the menu.

The first dish was “Drunken Shrimp”, where a brimming bucket-full of kicking and screaming prawns were drowned in a pool of potent rice wine. They were done as soon as they were drunk and plastered. You would fetch one of the less-twitchy ones, break its head off, peel off its sticky shell, eat the sweet fresh meat, then suck its brains out like you were sucking a double-wide boba straw. But! Nothing is really cruel when you’re drunk right?

Which brings me to what I think is the most inhumane thing I’ve ever eaten in my entire eating career: live lobster sashimi. This dish made full use of those murky lobster tanks that are synonymous with seafood Chinese restaurants. The chosen lobsters were brought to our table for our approval, taken to the back of the house for five minutes at most, then brought back to the table, severed in half and facing each other. Not to mention still pinching with all their translucent flesh scooped out and served on their dislocated tails, all ready for our top-of-the-food-chain chow down. Their beady eyes followed our chopstick ends and they attempted to defend themselves one last time as we nonchalantly reached over for their ultra-fresh sinewy flesh.

None of us really got paid for anything, but we ended up scoring a several thousand dollar sushi meal at a prestigious sushi restaurant. And that was good enough for me!

–Javier Cabral is the Teenage Glutster.

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Like butter

Hm, good question! Cruelest, well, certainly veal and foie gras can be filed under cruel foods. What a lot of people don’t know about me is that I was a vegetarian for seven years in high school and part of college, simply because I didn’t believe in eating animals. However, toward the end of college I decided I wanted a career in food and that there was no way I could write about food and not eat meat. So, right now I eat anything and everything, though when I am not at a restaurant I do tend to gravitate to veggies. Since I eat out so frequently for work, I eat a lot of foie gras and I do have to say I love it. There are more humane ways to produce foie that have been mostly explored in France, and it’s a shame that people in the U.S. don’t consider this alternative method (save for Dan Barber at Blue Hill). Every time I eat foie, I do feel a tinge of guilt about what I am eating, but I also feel as though it’s my duty as a food editor to eat everything. To me, foie is like this savory, unctuous butter, it simply melts in your mouth and easily fancies up simple crostini. Some of the best foie I’ve had has been at WD-50 in NYC, I love Bouchon’s tub (that jar is huge!) of foie, I’ve had good foie at Cut, oh and I just love the foie gras cotton candy lollipops at The Bazaar.

–Kat Odell is editor of Eater LA.

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Crueler than Annie Hall

The cruelest food I’ve ever eaten is live lobster at Sanuki No Sato, housed in an obscure strip mall in Gardena. Did I mention the lobster was live, as in alive? When my friends and I somewhat nervously placed our order I romantically imagined the famous lobster scene from “Annie Hall” being reenacted in the kitchen. Always game for trying new foods – especially those that will give me a good story to tell – I was anxious for our lobster’s arrival. When it came to the table it was enormously regal, its eyes staring straight at us, antennas moving as if pleading for help, its now useless armor cut open revealing perfectly sliced flesh. Lobster sashimi. In my head, Diane Keaton screamed.

I was at once horrified and couldn’t get my chopsticks ready fast enough to dig in. It tasted of the essence of the sea, in all its bountiful glory. It was… fresh.

Did I feel guilty trying it? Yes. Would I try it again? I don’t think I’d want to look into those teeny tiny black eyes again but if presented sliced and on a plate, sure. Does that make me a horrible person, or a mere honest human full of contradictions? I wonder what Alvy Singer would think.

–Maite Gomez-Rejón teaches art and culinary history through ARTBITES.

*Photo of Roy Choi by Aaron Salcido. Photos courtesy Charlie Grosso, Javier Cabral, Kat Odell, and Maite Gomez-Rejón. Photo of lobster courtesy Dalboz17.

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Darra Goldstein is Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Russian at Williams College and Founding Editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. She has published numerous books and articles on literature, culture, art, and cuisine, and is the author of four cookbooks. Below, she tells us a little bit about herself.

Q. What is the best gift you have ever received?

A. In Moscow, during the Soviet days, when things were difficult, I went to the communal apartment of a man who had no money at all. From underneath his makeshift bed, he pulled out a huge gallon jar of mushrooms that he had salted. He opened those, fried some potatoes in tons of butter, added some raw garlic and a shot of vodka. It was a beautiful gift from the Russian soil and from the heart.

Q. What was the last thing that inspired you?

A. Taryn Simon’s photograph of the contraband from customs [in the Getty’s Tasteful Pictures exhibit]. It made me think about doing illicit things, which is always inspiring. It made me think about artistic composition, about beautiful bright colors, about cadavers because it almost seemed like an operating room.

Q. When do you feel most creative?

A. When I’m walking in the woods.

Q. If you could be anyone in history, who would you be?

A. There is someone who I would both like to be and am also terrified to contemplate being because her life ended up so tragic – the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. She had this enormous talent and beauty, and she was creating something new and lived at an exciting time. But of course under Stalin her life was really horrible. I can’t say that I really want to inhabit her life, but to have that talent and wisdom and to create such beautiful poetry.

Q. What is your favorite thing about Los Angeles?

A. The sun. I’m starved for the sun.

Q. What is the best advice you have ever received?

A. Que sera sera.

Q. How did you get into trouble as a child?

A. I really hated broccoli when I was a kid. I remember taking some broccoli, putting it in a napkin, opening the front door because the cat needed to get in, and throwing the broccoli outside. It was, of course, discovered.

Q. What is your greatest extravagance?

A. Caviar, though I only eat sustainably raised roe. It’s still pretty extravagant.

Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a Saturday?

A. This is really sad, but, at my desk.

Q. What do you wish you had the nerve to do?

A. Skydive.

Q. If you were about to be executed, what would you want for your final meal?

A. A loaf of the most perfect bread with beautiful unsalted butter.

To read more about Goldstein’s panel on food photography, click here.

*Photo by Sarah Rivera.

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