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 W.F.P.’S Nobel Prize, The Pandemic, & Our Emerging Existential Food Crisis

Authored by Scott M Lacy

The way we make food shapes the world we live in. And if that’s the case, by reverse logic, our 21st century lives are a collective indictment of an unjust global food system. Historic levels of inequality, poverty, and hunger pervade our lived experience despite centuries of experiments in search of political, economic, and even scientific solutions to alleviate all this suffering on a macro-level.

That is not to say that all of our previous experiments were mistakes, not by a long shot. In fact, our species has a remarkable history of adapting our food system to the dynamic and precarious balance between population growth and our lived environment, the planet. Specifically, the long arc of our Homo sapiens history reveals two existential food crises that may help us better understand our 21st century challenges to feeding the planet.

Our species’ first existential food crisis led to the development of agriculture. For 99.8% of our 7 million years as upright walking apes, our human ancestors relied on forms of hunter-gathering to produce food, but some 12,000 years ago, Homo sapiens started the journey that takes us from protoagriculture to industrial farming, not to mention sedentary living. The hunter-gatherers among us roll their eyes at the question of whether or not our present day socioeconomic inequalities, , are actually rooted in our food system; the anthropological record reminds us that global inequalities and world hunger were possible only after the agricultural transformation seeded surplus into civilizations, and all that comes with them. Foraged aspersions aside, the development of agriculture - from domestication to industrialization - was a human response to our species’ first existential food crisis: climate change and population pressures rendered untenable the widespread continuation of the food system we had relied on for millions of years. Paleopathology and nutritional studies reveal significant costs for this transition, but with populations and ecologies increasingly out of sync, our ancestors reinvented our food system by domesticating plants and animals.

 

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