MarkBefore known civilisations and recorded history, people were eating all sorts of foods, from walrus meat to the roots of desert plants but not at the same time. What each human ate depended on what they could catch or gather, depending on where they were.
As agriculture was popping into a few sharp minds in the fertile crescent and in parts of China around 12,000 years ago, humanity had extended itself to just about all parts of the globe. Although in most areas, populations were sparse, including North America, where the first modern humans arrived between 6,000–13,000 years ago.
Even in these early times, humans had an extraordinary ability to adapt to different environments and essentially moved through the world and populated most places. On an evolutionary timeframe, this mass expansion through hunting and gathering was recent and successful.
Hunting was not always with spears and arrows.
More often than not, freshwater and marine shellfish were a primary source of protein. People often camped next to water sources and relied on edible plants of various types in season. The capture of fire and cooking was a boon, as were various techniques to store and preserve food, including fermentation.
At this time in prehistory, all the estimates have the global population of H. sapiens at less than 10 million individuals. Humans were widely spread, and, in any one place, we were few.
Humans have done what most other organisms fail to do, adapt to just about every environment on the planet through a flexible diet, cooking, and general technical agility.
Food was still a constraint and had to be taken or gathered in whatever way worked. The specifics we will never know for sure, but we do know that early humans had a wide range of diets across the entire species. What is not so clear is whether or not that wide range of diets persisted within groups or indeed with individuals; it’s quite possible that many groups just ate the same things most of the time.
Rather than labour through the story of the invention of agriculture and what happened to food up to and through historical time, let’s skip to today.
Today’s diet
In mature economies, most people have access to a diverse diet no matter where they live.
In western supermarkets, you can purchase foods from all around the world in both fresh and prepared forms. Most modern cities offer restaurants from all the major global cuisines and many lesser-known ones. There are thousands of different products available, meaning there is no limit to the range of a person’s diet. The raw materials for cooking and preparing any number of dishes are there, as are the celebrity chefs and cookbooks to tell you how to go about it.
Diversity is an option. In reality, most individuals have a fairly narrow diet. We know what we like, and we choose and stick with that. This means there are people on all sorts of specialist diets. We’ve got people on the Big Mac diet, the nacho diet, the snack food diet, keto, Atkinsons and Uncle Tom Cobly’s and a lot of people consuming way more than they need.
There is tremendous diversity, not least because people can retain their cultural affiliations to diet irrespective of where they live around the world. The strong connection between food and culture has also increased dietary availability and what humanity eats.
We began with a very diverse diet and again with a global supply chain and eclectic communities in the aggregate we have a very diverse diet.
So nothing to see here.
Where does the diversity of diet come from?
The diversity of the human diet before the invention of agriculture was a direct response to the available resources in the environment.
Humans learnt how to use a wide range of different food types in all the different habitats that they arrived in. And even when it looked extreme, it was still possible to persist and create a culture around a single source, walrus meat, for example.
The collective diversity of the human diet before agriculture was a response to the diversity of available foods in the environment.
Modern agriculture, through industrialisation and intensification, delivers the bulk of our calorific content via a handful of crops (rice, wheat, sugarcane and corn) and the bulk of our protein and nutrient content in a handful of livestock types (cattle, pigs, goats and chicken).
We have essentially simplified the resource base.
Diversity in the diet comes from a handful of primary ingredients processed and mixed into a wide range of different food types. A typical grocery store in the US contains 4,000 items that list corn ingredients on the label.
Suppose you are fortunate enough to have a high-quality Italian patisserie anywhere nearby. In that case, you will put on a few pounds and be delighted at the prospect, but if you look at the delicious array of cakes and sweet delights on display, a large proportion of them have choux pastry and lemon cream of one sort or another. In other words, lemons, sugar and wheat, key ingredients of Italian cuisine, are present in various varieties.
This diversity from a handful of core ingredients has any number of consequences. And the fortunate billion or so people who can shop in a supermarket still see the diversity of diet because there are products of all different shapes and sizes everywhere.
What the modern diet lacks is the diversity of raw ingredients. In terms of raw materials and sources, modern diets are bland.
What sustainably FED suggests
Diversity of diet is a great example of how scale influences an outcome.
Any one individual could have a narrow or varied diet but even the most adventurous gastronome will only eat a fraction of the foods available in an average supermarket or eaten by all the members of a local community.
Despite the logic of this proportionality, westerners are exposed to a huge variety of foods. Few realise that these foods—tens of thousands of products—are processed and packaged from a narrow range of ingredients.
Modern agricultural systems are monocultures in the fields and relative monocultures across the food system. They are short on variety for food types, genetic diversity and diversity of sources.
Globally the human food system relies on just a handful of key plants and animals.
We suggest a pause here.
Diet is a hugely complex matter which is why we put it into our triumvirate of food—ecology—diet.
As individuals, it messes with our physiology, psychology and well-being. In the aggregate, our collective diet has narrowed from its pre-agriculture diversity.
This could make a mess too.
Hero image from photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash
Add comment