Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

by James Suzman

While the volume of food produced for human consumption today is staggering, the number of distinct plant and animal species we routinely consume is not. Despite the fact that in most of the world’s cities, one can now eat cuisine from countries from every continent, only the most cosmopolitan have a diet approaching the diversity of hunter-gatherers living in territories not much larger than a suburb in a modern city. The majority of land under cultivation across the globe is used for the purposes of growing a limited number of high-energy-yielding crops. Nearly two-thirds of it is now used for growing cereals (mainly wheat, maize, rice, and barley). The next largest crop category, accounting for roughly one-tenth of all land under cultivation, is devoted to producing oil-based crops like canola and palm oil for cooking, cosmetics, and other applications. The remaining 30 percent or so of land under cultivation forms a patchwork of pulses, sugar crops, roots and tubers, fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices, teas, coffees, non-food crops like cotton, and also narcotics like coca leaves and tobacco. Part of the reason for the huge tracts of land used for cultivating high-yielding cereals, other than the fact that it provides us with low-cost carbohydrate-rich calories, is that it is needed to fatten domestic animals, which are farmed on roughly 75 percent of all agricultural land, to slaughter-weight as quickly as possible, or assist them to produce prodigious quantities of mi...