Encyclopedia of Food & Culture | Civilization and Food

CIVILIZATION AND FOOD. If by "civilization" we mean the culture of cities, assumed to have emerged with the Bronze Age, in about 3000 B.C.E., then food was the decisive factor in terms of both production and consumption. Before this time, in the farming revolution of the New Stone (Neolithic) Age, crops and animals that have continued until today to provide much of human food had been domesticated. This represented a shift from hunting and gathering, from the collection of wild plants and animals, to food raised under the control of humans, leading to a great increase in the population. The bulk of cultivated foods (cereals) came from the domestication of local grasses, hitherto gathered in their wild state; root crops and vegetables proved more of a problem to grow, and fruit cultivation appeared only later on.

The Bronze Age saw another formidable move forward. The strength of animals was harnessed to wheeled transport and to the plow. Complex irrigation systems were developed. A further great increase in food production thus became possible. The animal-drawn plow enabled an individual to cultivate considerably larger areas of land; wheeled transport meant that the surplus could be shifted more easily; and irrigation in the sundrenched lands of the Near East, India, and China again brought about increased yields, especially of rice but also of the other main Neolithic cultigens, wheat and barley. A parallel change took place in Mexico, centering on maize (corn).

These various changes led to increased production and therefore to population expansion, but they also led to socioeconomic differentiation. With hoe (manual) agriculture and a plentiful supply of land, it had hardly been profitable or indeed possible to employ others to work, except under conditions of slavery.

Landholding before the Bronze Age had been relatively egalitarian, as had food production. Most households had a roughly similar supply of food, as indeed had been the case with earlier hunter-gatherer regimes, in which the sharing of food was institutionalized to a high degree. With the plow, that equality disappeared rapidly. One man could cultivate a much larger area than another; the acquisition of additional land became a way of maintaining a higher standard of living, not only paying agriculturalists to perform work but also using the surplus to exchange with local specialists, or to obtain luxury goods from traders. Those luxuries included culinary delicacies imported from elsewhere, particularly those that could withstand travel, such as cheese from the Massif Central of France brought to Rome, or sugared foods carried from India to China, or wine and olive oil shipped throughout the Mediterranean.

What has been called the urban revolution of the Bronze Age, giving rise to civilization in the form of cities, enabled societies to use their food surpluses to support full-time specialists; this meant the development of activities that included trading, metalworking, and writing. Trade and transport opened up distant and different food supplies and resources; metalworking and the use of ovens made possible new modes of food preparation, such as the baking of bread; and writing led to the elaboration and transmission of more complex recipes, and eventually to the emergence of a differentiated—even a high—cuisine, the latter occurring in China, in India, in the Arab and Muslim world, and later, with the Renaissance, in Italy and France. But hierarchical differences in diet aside, greater agricultural productivity meant that a society could supply a larger number of people, a proportion of whom could be engaged in activities not connected with the production of essential foodstuffs. Among other things, town dwellers required the large-scale transport of food, to markets as well as restaurants and other eating places outside the house. It was China with its vast cities that first experienced the rise of a restaurant culture, as well as the emergence of prepared foods, such as tofu (bean curd), sold in the marketplace.

Food and Class

Initially such developments affected only the rich and high-status groups. For this change in food production meant an increase not only in population but also in differentiation between owners of large estates, peasants cultivating their own fields, and the newly emergent stratum of landless laborers. A similar degree of socioeconomic stratification emerged in urban areas. These "classes" were now marked not only by differences in amounts consumed, as had long existed in the under hoe cultures, but also by qualitative differences in styles of life, with largely in-marrying subcultures, conserving their particular practices. The rich had access to dishes and drinks unavailable to the poor, either because of their lack of economic power or because of sumptuary legislation (or indeed of internalized preference or "taste"). Such differences were elaborated on and conserved in cookbooks originally compiled for the households of nobles and rich merchants and taken up more widely only with the coming of the printing press and the flowering of the urban middle classes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This process of democratization was the result of the industrialization of prepared foods that could be said to have effectively begun with the invention of bottling by Nicolas Appert in France (1806) and its subsequent expansion into canning, especially in America during and after the Civil War, which altered the whole economy of food, interposing the grocer and later the supermarket between the producer and the consumer. Not only the industrialization of food preparation was involved but advances in food production itself, with changes in farm practice. For example, the rotation of crops and the use of manure had been adopted early on in the medieval period. The nineteenth century saw not only mechanization but also the coming of artificial fertilizers and chemical sprays and the more rapid transformation of crops by seed selection and finally by manipulation of the genes of crops, and above all the shift from the use of animal energy (which began with the plow) to that derived from mineral (fossil fuel) sources. Water of course had long been significant for food production, especially in arid regions. Its early control gave rise to extensive irrigation schemes with their heightened productivity (and problems of distribution, dangers of salinization and soil exhaustion), and later on it could be harnessed to provide the power for mills to grind grain and, much more recently, for other manufacturing processes, including the generation of electricity as a new source of power. But the basic activities of cultivation, such as plowing, were not affected by the use of waterpower nor yet by that of coal, which transformed other forms of production, leading up to the First Industrial Revolution. Farming was radically changed only with the advent of the use of gasoline in the combustion engine, during the Second Industrial Revolution, and the introduction of tractors and then of combine harvesters, inventions that affected the whole use of manpower on the land, freeing labor (and sometimes creating unemployment) as well as transforming villages from productive communities to ones dominated numerically by commuters, pensioners, and holiday makers. If by "democratization" we refer not only to political arrangements but also to the diffusion of products to the mass of the people, the transformation of small luxury into larger consumer cultures, then these changes in the production of food were as important as the changes in manufacturing and employment with which they were associated.

The Modern World

Despite enormous recent increases in world population, levels of food consumption per capita have risen rather than fallen in most regions. Owing to the Green Revolution and the adoption of "improved" plant varieties, with improved water control and fertilizing, famine has become less frequent in India and China. That is not true, however, of Africa, where total food production has decreased in relation to population growth and to consumption, mainly because the production of food is still based on the hoe; the plow (together with animal traction and elaborate water control) crossed the Sahara only recently, and its use remains scattered. Regional food deficits are largely made up through trade and aid, allowing imports of food from the surpluses of the more productive regions of the world (especially North America). The overall increase in well-being has been substantial, at all levels of society, with better health for most inhabitants—albeit with obesity and other food-related ills for some. Such productivity increases have always depended on the deliberate modification of crops, but recently the capacity to increase production by chemical means (such as adding hormones to beef), and to manipulate genes directly, has given rise to fears about the effects on human health and on our relationship to the natural world. People have always been concerned about their intake of food, fearing poison, sorcery, adulteration, and other modes of interference that might compromise their physical or mental health. That is nothing new, but these fears have grown with our capacity to intervene—that is, with the growth of civilization.

See also Agriculture, Origins of; Agriculture since the Industrial Revolution; American Indians; Anthropology and Food; Australian Aborigines; Horticulture; Hunting and Gathering; Inuit; Maize; Packaging and Canning; Paleonutrition, Methods of; Prehistoric Societies.

Jack Goody