Did the invention of agriculture make people better fed?

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

Did the invention of agriculture make people better fed?

No. Only in the last century or two has man reached the quality and quantity of diet hunter-gatherers enjoyed.

And agriculture is responsible for most of our lethal infectious diseases and essentially erased leisure as a concept for the average human.

Agriculture degraded the average quality of life of everyone who adopted it, all those millennia ago.

So why did it catch on?

1) Agriculture allows for concentration of wealth at the top of the class/power ladder. (And the top makes most decisions.)

2) Agriculture allows a society to support an army. And that is what determined which civilizations prevailed, not the relative health or happiness of the average citizen.


That said, once you establish agriculture you cannot go back. I am no more anti-agriculture than I am anti-oxygen. It is what it is.

We are much better off today for agriculture. You and I benefit today from thousands of years of what was agriculture induced misery. It worked out well for us.

Without agriculture we would have no civilization.

But civilization was not, historically, a method for bettering the lot of the average person.

[slackmaster]

1. Let's go back to hunting and gathering!

Only the strongest shall survive.

K&R

:kick:

[Oregone]

2. In the world I see – you're stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins....

of Rockefeller Center. You will wear leather clothes that last you the rest of your life. You will climb the wrist thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. You will see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway.

Tyler Durden - Fight Club

[WolverineDG]

3. That's why we find so many graves of 100 year old hunter-gatherers

:eyes:

Agriculture made it possible for humans to have a steady supply of food, giving people time to develop more things to make life easier. While most of their time was still spent on growing, harvesting, and storing food, they at least didn't have to devote 100% of their time to it.


dg

[Oregone]

4. "they at least didn't have to devote 100% of their time to it"

Hunting and gathering wasn't an all day job.

Ill look for sources, but have previously read that men hunted 2-3 days a week.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

11. One reason the founding fathers romanticized the Indian was his life of leisure

The Indian enjoyed two perks that in 18th century England were reserved for the aristocracy.

A lot of leisure time.

A high-protein diet. (In England hunting was an atavism mostly reserved for the wealthy.)

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

6. You are mistaken. (I say that with no hostility)

If you compare hunter-gatherers to modern America you will miss the point. The first 4500 years of agriculture were a public health disaster.

Do you believe that Europeans coming to America in 1500 were healthier or longer-lived than the indians they met? They were not. They were comparatively parasite-ridden, diseased and malnourished.

They prevailed because of other benefits of agricultural society... the benefits of civilization. (Guns, ships, resistance to agriculture-created diseases like small-pox.)

Civilization is very powerful. But it was not developed to improve the health or wealth of the average citizen.

[nuxvomica]

5. If you take all the time humans have been in existence...

And compress it into a 24-hour clock with right now at just before midnight on the second day, then agriculture was invented at around 11:50 pm. I am somewhat in agreement with your sentiments but maybe we should give it a little more time to see how things play out.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

8. I am not saying it has or will play out badly

The OP is historical and pretty careful to say that from our perspective today it is a great boon and that noting that agriculture was a public health disaster doesn't mean we should abandon it today.

But it was not adopted because it made people happier or healthier. At the time it made people sick and miserable.

And that is why the question of its adoption is interesting.

[90-percent]

7. Agriculture

I'm extremely not an expert on the subject, but I use American history with farming to illustrate a point related to manufacturing. In about 1850 or so, like 80 or 90% of the population was directly engaged in farming. That many people were needed to produce food for everybody.

Then the industrial revolution came, and machines were invented that did the farming work of scores of people. That allowed people to "pursue other interests", like work in the factories in the cities.

The point I try to illustrate has to do with modern CNC machine tools, a business I was in for thirty years so far. In order to have economic growth, productivity needs to constantly increase. There was some factoid I read where in 1900, it took 100 minutes to precisely remove metal on a round piece of steel in a manual lathe. Nowadays, a modern CNC lathe can get the same amount of material removed - with higher accuracy and surface finish, in around 30 seconds.

However, the current state of the American diet is very poor due to all our processed foods and HFCS and other pernicious ingredients. So Big Agriculture has been perverted - it no longer serves a healthy diet so much as serve the corporate owners to make big big money while hurting America's health.

Kind of like the public works projects in the Thirties New Deal with all the dams and levees were well intentioned, but new science has shown that many of this stuff was ill conceived and makes the problems they were trying to fix even worse. Like Katrina in New Orleans worse.

So, the public health aspects of Big Agriculture has to be modified by educated American Consumers so they can make their money and we can lead healthier lives, like we use to until the processed food boom of post WW2 America.

-90% Jimmy,
specializing in spontaneous internet message board essays that may or may not be beneficial to the reader.

[Emillereid]

9. Jared Diamond wrote that agriculture was the worst mistake humans ever made:

http://www.environnement.ens.fr/perso/claessen/agriculture/mistake_jared_diamond.pdf

[ThomWV]

10. Drivel

[90-percent]

12. Old Sturbridge Village

in Mass at the northeast corner of Connecticut, is a living museum of how American life was back in around 1770 to 1820 or so? (I don't know exactly what era in our past it's supposed to represent)

What I learned there is that early American life may not have been the drudgery sun up to sun down constant work just to survive kind of life we were lead to believe. Their community had a handle on how to get everything done effectively enough that they really had a certain amount of leisure time back then.

And possibly even more than Americans of today, that are either overworked and barely keeping their heads above water, or out of work and desperate to survive.

Other than cool gizmo's we have today, what is it about our modern lives that is really any better than 200 years ago? It seems like we still have a good deal of economic servitude drudgery that was supposed to be gone by now?

-90% Jimmy