The Rise and Fall of Food Empires

Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
by Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas

Reviewed by Erica E. Phillips

Empires of FoodOver millennia of human history, great societies have flourished when individuals were freed from the burden of cultivating their own food. Great minds developed new theories in political philosophy, earth sciences, and mathematics; they explored unknown land and extraterrestrial spaces; they sculpted, painted frescoes, and constructed iconic architecture. Steadied by an infrastructure authors Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas call a “food empire,” humanity has leapt forward, grown exponentially. And then – as miraculously as they appeared – these booming empires have, one by one, receded into the annals of history.

Fraser and Rimas narrow down the necessary elements of a food empire to three factors: “farmers need to grow more food than they eat; they need a means of trading it to willing buyers; and they need a way to store it so it doesn’t dissolve into sludge before reaching its economic apotheosis.” Early civilizations like the ancient Sumerians of the Fertile Crescent and the Zhou of China developed systems of farming, irrigation, and transportation that fulfilled these conditions. The renowned Roman Empire and the Qin and Han dynasties peaked later, in the early centuries AD, for the same reasons. Around 900 AD, Europe’s medieval monasteries engineered an extensive transportation network between regions, allowing different areas to specialize in certain foodstuffs and making broader choices available to a growing number of city-dwellers. In each instance, the empires grew more expansive, supported larger urban populations, and grew more vulnerable to inevitable fluctuations in weather, crop failures, and pests.

Early on, Fraser and Rimas delve deeply into the example of Europe’s food empire in the Middle Ages, the first civilization to fully develop and exploit the natural wealth of the wild European countryside. Modeled after the urban center of Marseilles, which developed around a monastery built strategically on the Rhone river, Benedictine communities rose up all over Europe. Each town was anchored by a monastery, the inhabitants of which formed “a nucleus of industry and food production.” These “chapter houses” began to specialize, and traded among each other along networks of roads they built and maintained. Monks researched farming methods and food processing and led the way in an agricultural revolution. “By the 10th century, the monks’ windmills, fairs, and breweries (and dairies, beehives, bakeries, salt pans, and piggeries) had created a landscape where many Europeans no longer had to scratch out a subsistence crop.”

As the authors point out, the High Middle Ages bore strong similarities to our current global food empire. Balanced precariously on the fruits of rich but increasingly overworked land, the agricultural industry continued pushing outward. Today’s agricultural industry has been turned over to an oligarchy of huge businesses that utilize a cocktail of fertilizers, genetically modified organisms, and a massive supply of water to sow sustenance for the growing global population. Much like the coordinated exploits of the Benedictine food production monopoly, today’s producers have left no stone unturned in the search for fertile earth, and consider no scientific method too dangerous.

In the High Middle ages, a series of unfortunate but foreseeable events led to the demise of the food empire. Excessive farming caused severe soil degradation. Wood sources were exhausted and deforestation caused erosion. Prices went up, banks collapsed, and poverty swelled. Then, a sustained period of “meteorological goodwill” came to an end. Heavy rains caused starvation, illness spread, and the year 1347 gave rise to the bubonic plague.

The implications of the historical parallels are obvious if not outright threatening. In the High Middle Ages, at the height of the Roman Empire, in the heyday of ancient Sumerian society, and at several other moments in history, humans have constructed food empires based on three dangerous assumptions: “that the Earth is fertile,” “that the forecast calls for sunny, mild weather, with possible showers,” and “that it’s good business to do one thing well.” Rimas and Fraser’s abundant examples lay bare our self-destructive compulsion to maintain these assumptions.

“There’s a fourth assumption that affects the first three,” they add. “Our food supply, like everything else in our civilization, takes cheap fossil fuels for granted.” Should oil prices rise significantly, should reserves run out, should there be a dry year, or a new strain of indestructible bug-the outcome could be catastrophic.

Fraser and Rimas advocate a system they call “nested bioregionalism” – global and local systems working together to “offset each other’s failings.” Community farms would cultivate a diverse range of products native to each small region, which would provide sustenance for the local population. On the whole, regions would cultivate some bulk quantities of specialized items for global distribution. Each community would consume mostly local products with a few imported items to even out the pressure on the land. And all producers would have to agree to avoid using fossil fuels. The change requires legislation, both within each nation and worldwide, along with a healthy obsession – on every human’s part – over what we eat.

Buy the book: Skylight, Powell’s, Amazon, Borders.

Further reading: Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization by Spencer Wells and The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It by Julian Cribb

*Photo courtesy Reto Fetz.


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