Contemplating the grain

(Nimue)

The beginning of August brings us festivals associated with grain harvests. It’s an interesting time to think about the role of grain in human history – while it’s unclear whether we took up agriculture for the beer, the bread or both, grains were very much part of our shift away from being hunter gatherers.

I don’t think it’s inevitable that moving to agriculture leads to feudalism and colonialism. At the same time, I don’t think you can have either of those things without the grain. Being able to feed a population fairly cheaply in terms of time and labour frees up people to be soldiers more of the time. It’s more feasible to grow your population with settled agriculture, and grow it in a way that creates a demand for more land.

Going down this route has resulted in impoverished workers who mostly eat grain, and whose efforts support people whose lives are leisurely and whose diets are much richer. You could have grain without such inequality, but I’m not convinced you could have this level of inequality without the grain to underpin it.

As Brendan Myers pointed out in his book on civilization, once you have a grain store, you have a resource that can be owned/guarded by a few people with weapons. That gives you much more scope for power imbalance in your society. Again, it’s not inevitable. Power imbalances on the scale we’ve come to see depend on owning and hoarding, which you can’t do on the same scale when you live a mobile life.

Grain is problematic. These days its grown in industrial ways, using herbicides and pesticides that are clearly a threat to insect populations and to human health. Ploughing releases a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. Grain based diets are narrow, and not optimal for health. We do better when we eat more diversely, and the land does better when we don’t grow massive monocultures.

To radically rethink how we live and move towards sustainability and viability, we’d have to rethink our relationship with grain.