March 2 to 3, 2013: Coming back to this book after 2.5 years stewing in sustainable agriculture, environmental history, and Deep Ecology, made me realize how impressive Manning's accomplishment with this book was. He fits a vast argument deftly into a relatively short space, giving detailed attentio ...more
Agriculture is one of humankind’s most troublesome experiments, and it is now hopelessly in debt. It has borrowed soil, water, and energy that it can never repay, and never intended to repay — burning up tomorrow to feed today. We know it, we keep doing it, and we have dark hallucinations about feed ...more
Agriculture has domesticated humans. This is the argument at the center of Richard Manning's stunning history of food. Written with journalistic flavor, Manning explores the ways that agriculture has diminished human life and threatens the planet itself.
The book begins by exploring the hunter-gather ...more
Reads like a agriculturally focused version of Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel.
On hunting Hunting enlivens the senses like no other experience, giving me a taste of what it must be like to truly see and hear. The human beings who maintain these hyper-refined senses are hunter-gatherers. Their im ...more
I think this book was unfortunately made irrelevant by a similar but better book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, not long after its publication. At least, I assume Omnivore's Dilemma came after, or it's hard to believe Manning would not have quoted Pollan even once. Still a fascinating and alarming read, t ...more
Some of the sociohistorical evidence that Mr. Manning brings up to back how "agriculture has hijacked civilization" are really fascinating and at times shocking. The book exposes the reader to substantial bits and pieces of anecdotes from history from the perspective of how our society has evolved a ...more
I was stunned when I picked up this book. I'd been reading about the history of agricultural societies for a while, and reading between the lines that agriculture has changed our society for the worse. Against the Grain took all of my ideas and solidified them.
For the first half, the book documents the stuff that is wrong with modern corporate export-based agriculture.
After that, it gets more radical and goes all the way back to the beginning of civilization and argues that as we shifted from wandering hunter-gatherers to farmers, we got unhealthy, we sta ...more