That greater variety is the third and arguably the most important factor that ended the Wheat Age: people chose to simply stop growing wheat. In the long-lived Imperial Age, control of the high-output wheat-producing zones was the very definition of success. Reliable food supply directly led to reliable population growth and reliable military expansion. But in the era of the industrialized Order, the strategic calculus changed radically. Global trade softened the imperative of needing to obsess about wheat self-sufficiency.
