PENGUIN BOOKS
SO SHALL WE REAP
‘Compelling… a devastating analysis of the arrogance and wrong-headedness of the food-production business’ The Times
‘A frightening reckoning of the damage being done by our appetite for cheap food’ Daily Mail
‘Were it possible to mandate required reading for all the politicians, civil servants, bio-technologies, food processors and retailers with a hand in agriculture today, this would be top of my list’ Jonathon Porritt
‘A well-thought out, detailed book… Although full of scientific rationale, it also appeals to common sense… he gives a great deal of intellectual weight to many of the arguments he presents’ Scarlett Thomas, Independent on Sunday
‘This is a journey all the way from the hunter-gatherers who first tried farming to the agri-businessmen who clear the land for industrial food production. The byways through science, nutrition, genetics, economics and even morality are adorned by learning worn lightly… Colin Tudge persuasively lays out the needs and prospects for enlightened agriculture if future generations are to survive and prosper. It is a tract for our times’ Sir Crispin Tickell, Director of the Green College Centre for Environmental Policy and Understanding, University of Oxford
‘Unlike many opponents of GMOs Tudge can argue the detailed scientific case, but he also has a wonderful eye for anecdote’ Felicity Lawrence, Guardian
‘A blueprint for mankind that not only shows us how to feed everyone, but to feed them well without compromising the ethics required to nurture a responsible stewardship of this planet’ Countryside Voice
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Colin Tudge read zoology at Cambridge and then became a writer, first for magazines, including New Scientist, and then for the BBC. Since then he has focused increasingly on books, writing on agriculture and conservation and on genetics and evolution. His publications include The Variety of Life. Colin Tudge is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and visiting Research Fellow at the Centre of Philosophy at the London School of Economics.
What's Gone Wrong With the World's Food – and How to Fix It
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First published by Allen Lane 2003
Published in Penguin Books with a new Afterword 2004
4
Copyright © Colin Tudge, 2003, 2004
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192731-2
Acknowledgements
Introduction
I
The Nature of the Problem and the Meaning of Agriculture
1 The Nature of the Problem
2 Farming: What It Is, What It's For, How It Became and How It Works
II
Food: The Future Belongs to the Gourmet
3 Good Farming, Good Eating and Great Gastronomy: A Lightning Tour of Modern Nutritional Theory and the Wondrous Serendipity
4 Meat: How Did We Get It So Wrong?
5 Food Unsafe
III
Science, Money and World Power
6 Craft, Science, and the Growing of Crops
7 Better Crops, Better Livestock: The Craft and Science of Breeding and Genetic Engineering
8 GMOs and the Corruption of Science
9 Of Cash and Values
IV
Enlightened Agriculture
10 Alternatives off the Shelf: Vegetarians and Organic Farmers
11 Biology, Morality, Aesthetics: The Meaning of Enlightened Agriculture
12 From Where We Are to Where We Want to Be
13 Afterword
Further Reading
Index
I am always aware of my debt to everyone who has ever taught me anything; and even on the particular matter of food and farming, the people all around the world who have expanded my thoughts are too numerous to mention. But among them I should single out the late (and much missed) Anil Agarwal, who fought for many years in India for the environment and for justice; Michael Allaby, who thought long and hard about self-sufficiency in particular, before I got around to it, and with whom I once co-authored a book; to Sir Kenneth Mellanby, to whom Mike Allaby introduced me; and to Dr Paul Richards, of University College London, who recognized the strengths of indigenous farming long before most people, and opened my eyes to them. I have also benefited enormously from discussions with Peter Bunyard, who has for many years worked for The Ecologist; Dr Matt Ridley, a fine writer on biological matters, who also runs an estate in exemplary fashion; Dr Bernard Dixon, who has guided me in matters relating to animal disease; and Dr Jeremy Cherfas, zoologist turned seedsman, now with IPGRI (the International Plant Genetics Research Institute, Rome). Recently, too, I have come to know Satish Kumar, at Schumacher College, who has helped me to refine my ideas on ethics, and in particular on the philosophy of Gandhi. Among the many scientific institutions I have visited this past three decades, I remember in particular the Rowett Research Institute, Aberdeen, in the 1970s, when it was directed by Sir Kenneth Blaxter; Rothamsted, the oldest dedicated agricultural research institute in the world, where among many others I was privileged to talk at length to N. W. Pirie – another pioneer thinker from the 1970s; ICRISAT (the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, Hyderabad, India); and IPGRI. Of all the agricultural scientists I have met, the ones I spent most time with and so learnt most from are Dr Bob Orskov, formerly at Rowett and now at the Macauley Research Institute, Aberdeen; and Dr Mike Gale, FRS, at what was then the Plant Breeding Institute, Cambridge. In recent years I have learnt an enormous amount from conversations at the Centre for the Philosophy of the Natural and Social Science, and will always be grateful to Dr Helena Cronin for inviting me to become a Visiting Fellow. I am especially grateful, in the present context, to Max Steuer at the London School of Economics (LSE) for his input on economics in general; Dr Richard Webb, for his views on globalization (on which we seem to disagree more or less completely); and Professor Tim Dyson, for his particular insights into demography. Through the LSE I also met Professor Aubrey Sheiham, at University College London, who has done his best to keep me up to date in nutritional science. Since I moved to Oxford, too, I have received great help and encouragement from Sir Crispin Tickell, who has added a slice of my own concerns to his already prodigious workload. To all: much thanks.
Finally, I owe a great deal both to John Brockman and to Felicity Bryan for helping me to get the initial outline of this book into shape; and to Stefan McGrath at Penguin who took the book on. Finally, I am in endless debt to my wife, Ruth West, for putting up with me in general, making it easy to focus on the work in hand (at the expense of her own work), and for her very significant intellectual input (for she too has pondered at great length the issues raised in this book).
Acknowledgements for the Paperback Edition
Two people in particular have influenced my thoughts since I submitted the original text for Reap in the spring of 2003 (as now reflected in the Afterword). Professor Norman Myers, who has various posts but is based mainly at Oxford, clarified my thoughts on the (very uncertain and often negative) relationship between money and human well-being. In the Summer of 2003, too, my wife Ruth and I had the privilege of staying with Robin and Binka Le Breton at their wonderful dairy farm cum teaching centre at Iracambi, on the Atlantic coast of Brazil (where Robin is also helping to restore the sadly depleted rainforest). Over several days, and in continuing correspondence, we continue to the discuss the need for and the realities of agrarian economies – which perhaps is the route to pursue in the much-needed reform of world food production as a whole.
February, 2004
Be not deceived… whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
Galatians 6: 7
This book is about food, and in particular the production of it, which mainly means farming. It argues that if we – humanity – get farming right, then our future could be glorious. Our descendants should still be here in ten thousand years, or indeed in a million years, and everyone who is liable to be born from now on and for ever could be well fed: not simply according to the tenets of nutritional theory, but to the highest standards of gastronomy. Our descendants could be surrounded, too, if they chose (as they surely would), by other creatures: butterflies, elephants, all manner of plants – there should be room for all; or at least for a very fair proportion of those that are with us now. Health, environment, good relations between nations; everything follows, or can follow, from good farming. But if we get it wrong, then the future will be dire; as Thomas Hobbes said in the seventeenth century in a slightly different context, ‘poor, nasty, brutish’, and a great deal shorter than it should be.
There are good reasons for thinking we are getting it wrong. Most obviously, famine is common, primarily these days in sub-Saharan Africa but also, from time to time, elsewhere. At the time of writing (November 2002) people are starving even in Argentina, once a brave new world to which poor Europeans emigrated, and only recently held up as the model of economic development for all the rest to follow. But over-nutrition is at least as common as starvation, and far more conspicuous: the World Health Organization now describes obesity as a ‘global epidemic’. At the same time, of course, we are wiping out our fellow creatures at an unprecedented rate while at least in some parts of the world the relationship between nations is again as Thomas Hobbes described, ‘a condition of war of everyone against everyone’.
This book asks – or rather shows – what we need to do to get it right. The thinking required is radical but not revolutionary. We need not contemplate anything so dramatic or unlikely as the overthrow of capitalism: just a different model of capitalism from the abstracted, overheated, aggressive form that now demands the maximization of cash efficiency on a global scale. We need not become ascetics. Vegetarianism is not called for. The opposite is the case: traditional, regional cuisines beautifully meet the requirements both of nutritional theory and of sound farming. People who really care about food – gourmets – are much easier to feed than faddists, or those who are wedded to lean meat and junk.
We need not, and indeed should not, be anti-science. Science provides the sharpest insights into the mechanisms of life that have yet been devised, and perhaps ever can be devised, and we need much more of it rather than less. But we need to liberate science. We need it to suggest new ways of looking at the world, of course. But primarily we need to identify the problems that really need solving, and then direct science at them. At the moment it seems to be assumed worldwide that the proper role of agricultural science is simply to help us to do whatever needs doing more cheaply, and on a larger scale: primarily to replace human labour with machines and industrial chemistry and now with biotechnology. As we lose people from the land we also lose ingenuity and attention to detail – plus, of course, the rural communities that until recently accommodated most of humanity. Out of traditional farming these past ten thousand years or so have emerged principles and techniques that can collectively be called ‘good husbandry’. They include the conservation of diversity, of crops, livestock and landscape, and the interruption of chains of infection. Agricultural science is one of the world's greatest assets when it is used to abet and enhance good husbandry. But at present, increasingly, it is used to override the common-sense principles of farming, simply because that is the cheaper course. Then, despite the innate brilliance of many scientists and the good intentions of the great majority, science can be numbered among the world's most serious enemies.
Why, though, has the world drifted so seriously off beam? Why do we do things badly and destructively when we have the power – easily – to look after ourselves very well indeed? It is easy to moralize, to suggest that people in power are greedy, or in some general way are ‘wicked’. There are evil people about beyond doubt, and of course they make a difference, but simple moral turpitude is not the main cause of our present ills. Most politicians would rather do good than harm. Scientists are commonly motivated by a desire to help humanity. Most industrialists that I have met are very civilized people, convinced that well-run, efficient industry alone can keep the world on an even keel – including what is now called ‘agro-industry’.
Yet, astonishing though it may seem in this age of experts and think-tanks, I believe that the people in the highest places have misconstrued the nature of the problem. They do not see (because it has never occurred to them, and because their education has led them in quite different directions) that at bottom, the problems of humanity as a whole are those of biology. If we really want to survive in the long term (and ten thousand years is ‘the long term’; not the thirty-year projections of conventional economics) then we have to begin by thinking of ourselves as a biological species, Homo sapiens, and the earth as our habitat; not simply a stage, or a tabula rasa, on which we can impose any manner of fantasy and whim. We need to see that farming must march to its own drum – that of ‘good husbandry’, founded in sound biology, and steered by respect for human values; and that this in many practical ways runs totally counter to the modern mantra which says, in the chill phrase I have heard so often these past three decades, that ‘agriculture is just a business like any other’. Actually, all businesses are different, but farming is more different than all the others: indeed we could sensibly place farming in one panel of a diptych, and everything else we do in the other. Agriculture is properly seen as the counterpoise of all other human activities.
We need again to see farming as a major employer – indeed to perceive that to employ people is one of its principal functions, second only to the need to produce good food and maintain the landscape. Yet modern policies are designed expressly to cut farm labour to the bone, and then cut it again. This is seen as ‘modernization’, which in turn is seen to be both necessary and good. Thus Britain's government recently agreed to finance a scheme in Andhra Pradesh, India, which would drive 20 million farmers from the land. It's not just me, a comfortable European, who says that this is misguided. We need also to acknowledge on the one hand that science is wonderful, and can solve problems; but that it does not and never can provide omniscience, and in the creation of policy must always be secondary to human values. It is a huge mistake to suppose, as so many influential people these past few centuries have supposed, that science can create a qualitatively different world, in which all problems are solved, and that all we have to do is follow its lead. Absent from this line of thinking is any appreciation of human values, or indeed of the philosophy of science.
It may seem odd to suggest that so many people in high places have misconstrued the problems of humanity so absolutely, but no other explanation holds water. Yet if we look more closely we see it is not so implausible. Most of the world's leaders have been educated in law or economics or history, none of which take any serious account of life's physical realities: of the fabric of the earth itself, or the physiology of human beings and other animals, or of plants. For most people, even or perhaps especially for the most expensively educated, life itself and the things that support it – flesh, atmosphere, soil – are merely a ‘given’: the background, the setting, in which human beings can do exclusively human things. Only recently has it occurred to politicians in high places that ‘the environment’ itself must be taken care of. The first world summit that specifically addressed its problems was the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, which is commonly perceived as a ‘watershed’. Scientists ought to be more alert to the physical realities of life than politicians are, and some of them are. But scientists are brought up in an increasingly bullish atmosphere, effectively to believe that they can do anything that might be conceived and even, nowadays, that it is morally right to do whatever the market will pay them to do. It isn't that difficult to see how the world could have deceived itself; and when we contrast what is theoretically possible with what is actually happening we see that this self-deception, unlikely though it may seem at first, must indeed be the case. Often in the past, after all, world leaders have got things horribly wrong. Anyone who spent any time at all in the twentieth century would know that.
For my part, I effectively began writing this book in the early 1970s when I spent several years at Farmer's Weekly, which was (and I believe still is) Britain's leading agricultural magazine. It was enormous fun (my best years as a magazine journalist) but I also took it very seriously: treated my time there as an undergraduate course, to flesh out the biology I had learnt at university. I also took a great interest in nutritional theory, which (as this book will discuss) took some radical turns in the 1970s, and in some highly significant ways was turned on its head. I liked cooking, too, and (after Farmer's Weekly) worked for a time in London's West End, among the best restaurants; and (another perk of journalism) had an expense account that enabled me to sample just about everything. I even wrote a few restaurant reviews, including one of Britain's first ever tandoori restaurant. Now, of course, there is a tandoori in every high street (and a balti and a Thai takeaway as well); proving, if proof were needed, that people's tastes even in conservative Britain are nothing like so conservative as is often supposed.
Then in 1974 I attended a couple of key conferences. The first was the World Food Conference in Rome that was convened by Henry Kissinger, following famines not least in India and Pakistan. In Rome, shockingly, I saw how the representatives of nations at big meetings do not for the most part address the central issues, but contrive primarily to ensure that whatever is agreed does not cost them too much, and to show that whatever might have gone wrong in the past was not their fault. The few nations at Rome that really did seem to focus on the issue of world famine – Canada, Norway, and indeed China – were those who were outside the mainstream of world power politics or (like Algeria and China) had their own fish to fry. Only the NGOs – the ‘non-governmental organizations’, which for example include charities such as Oxfam, and religious groups such as the Roman Catholic Church – focused consistently on the matter that was ostensibly in hand, which is that people were starving. 'Twas ever thus, at world summits; including, most recently, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in August 2002. Nonetheless, most who have anything to do with these summits agree that they are a good thing. Among other things, good institutions come out of them: Stockholm, for example, gave rise to UNEP, the United Nations Environment Programme. Recent mutterings within the British government, following Johannesburg, that summits are a waste of time, are surely pernicious. If we didn't have them, then the only grand global meetings to be held at all would be those to do with world trade. Even as things are, everything besides world trade is considered secondary. The loss of summits, for all their obvious deficiencies, would make this neglect official.
The other pivotal meeting of 1974, at least for me, was on ‘Food Technology in the 1980s’. It was held at the Royal Society in London, widely acknowledged (even in France, Russia and America) as the world's most prestigious scientific club. At this meeting, scientists both in industry and in academe urged the need in particular for ‘textured vegetable proteins’, or TVPs: artificial meat spun from protein extracted from soya, or from fungi, or indeed from bacteria raised on oil – which, in those still pre-OPEC days, was perceived as the earth's inexhaustible benison. The mantra of the day had it that people in general need large amounts of protein, and that they (we) have a particular predilection for meat. The supply chain (the passage of food from field to table) was in those days dominated by the food processors, who took it as read that farms merely produced raw materials which then had to be manipulated in various ways before people at large (peremptorily known as ‘the public’) could be allowed to eat them.
After these two meetings I experienced what I think should probably rank as a revelation. I remember sitting in the garden one bright June dawn – it must have been about 5 a.m. – on our children's swing, contemplating famine in general, and the particular claims of the food processors that the problems could be solved only by their own ministrations, for example through the provision of TVPs. I felt in my bones that their claims made no sense. If people really do need TVPs, then we should all be dead already – since, at that time, TVPs were still novel, and available only to a few.
The revelation that came to me was that the products of good, basic farming precisely match the requirements of the nutritional theory that was then unfolding: in all but the most extreme latitudes traditional farming provides precisely that combination of plants and animals that human physiology requires. It also came to me as if from on high that all the world's great cooking – Chinese, Indian, peasant French and Italian, Turkish, North African, South-East Asian, East European – is based on the products of traditional farming, for how could it be otherwise? In other words, the principles of good, basic farming, of the most up-to-date (and convincing) nutritional theory, and of great gastronomy, work perfectly in harmony. Indeed, it could not be any other way, since human physiology is adapted to the produce of wild nature; and traditional farming reflects wild nature; and great cooking has evolved over hundreds or indeed thousands of years to make best use of what wild nature, and traditional farming, provide. It occurred to me that the efforts of the food-processing industry were the most absolute nonsense: that here was a multimillion (or billion) dollar world industry with all the substance of the South Sea Bubble (a wild speculation based on nothing at all that in 1720 caused many of the most prominent Englishmen, including King George I, to lose fortunes). I wrote a book about food and the food industry, called The Famine Business, first published in Britain by Faber & Faber in 1977. Some people liked the book and some are still kind enough to remember it, but on the whole it went down like a lead balloon. Twenty-five years later the world has moved on. So have I: among other things, I have had the opportunity to talk to farmers and scientists in at least a score of countries on five continents, and have written about half a dozen scientific reports for various agricultural and related institutions, including those of what was then called the Agricultural and Food Research Council (AFRC) in the late 1980s. So I have learnt a lot more science, and seen a lot more farms in far-flung and sometimes unlikely places, and done a lot more thinking about politics and matters of morality. This, then, is an update of The Famine Business, but much broader in scope. I now regard The Famine Business as an apprentice work.
Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.
Genesis 9: 3
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.
Genesis 3: 19
The prospects for humanity and for the world as a whole are somewhere between glorious and dire. It is hard to be much more precise.
By ‘glorious’ I mean that our descendants – all who are born on to this earth – could live very well indeed, each as comfortably and a great deal more securely than any ancient potentate, and could continue to do so for as long as the earth can support life, which should be for a very long time indeed. We should at least be thinking in terms of the next million years. Furthermore, our descendants could continue to enjoy the company of other species – establishing a much better relationship with them than we have now. Other animals need not live constantly on their beam-ends, and in perpetual fear of us. Many of those fellow species now seem bound to disappear but a significant proportion, enough to be well worth saving, could and should continue to live alongside us. Such a future may seem idyllic, and so it is. Yet I do not believe it is fanciful: no mere Utopia. There is nothing in the physical fabric of the earth or in our own biology to suggest that this is not possible.
‘Dire’ means that we, human beings, could be in deep trouble within the next few centuries, living but also dying in large numbers in political terror and from starvation, while our fellow creatures, a huge and random swathe of them, would simply disappear, leaving only the ones that we find convenient, or that we can't shake off: our chickens, our cattle, and the flies and mice that come along for the ride. I'm taking it to be self-evident that glory is preferable.
Our future is not entirely in our own hands because Earth has its own rules, and is part of the solar system, and is neither stable nor innately safe. Other planets in the solar system are quite beyond habitation, deep frozen or melting hot, and ours too in principle could tip either way. Recondite and unspectacular changes in the atmosphere could do the trick. The core of Earth is hot, which in many ways is good for living creatures, but the surface is pocked with volcanoes, and every now and again the melted rock beneath bursts through. Among the biggest volcanic eruptions in recent memory was Mount St Helens, in Washington State, which threw out a cubic kilometre of ejecta – fortunately in an area where very few people live. Vesuvius in AD 79 was no bigger, but it wiped out Pompeii. The eruption of Santorini on the island of Thira to the north of Crete in 1470 BC was ten times larger than either – and the aftermath destroyed the civilization of the Minoans (and left the Mediterranean to the Greeks). The eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia in 1883 matched Santorini for violence and affected the weather worldwide. Between April and July 1815 Tambora (on the island of Sumbawa east of Java) threw ten times more ejecta into the upper atmosphere than either Santorini or Krakatoa and disrupted the climate for season after season. The people of New England referred to the winter of 1816 as ‘Eighteen hundred and froze to death’. Mary Shelley, on holiday in the Alps with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Byron, wrote Frankenstein while they all sheltered from the rain.
Yet none of these show what volcanoes can really do. Almost all of India sits on the consolidated lava of the ancient Deccan volcanoes that apparently erupted soon before the dinosaurs disappeared. Yellowstone, the biggest national park in the US outside Alaska, occupies the caldera of an exceedingly ancient volcano of extraordinary magnitude. Modern surveys show that its centre is now rising. Sometime in the next 200 million years Yellowstone could erupt again and when it does the whole world will be transformed. Yellowstone could erupt tomorrow. But there's a very good chance that it will give us another million years, and that surely is enough to be going on with. It seems sensible to assume that this will be the case.
The universe at large is dangerous too: in particular, we share the sky with a swarm of wayward asteroids, and every now and again they encroach upon us. An asteroid the size of a small island, hitting Earth at 10,000 miles an hour (a modest relative speed by the standards of heavenly bodies) would strike the ocean bed like a rock in a puddle, as if the water was not there at all, send a tidal wave around the world as high as a small mountain and as fast as a jumbo jet, and propel us into an ice age that could last for centuries. There are plans to head off such disasters (including heroic and hugely expensive rockets to shove approaching asteroids into new trajectories), but in truth it's down to luck. On the other hand, the archaeological and the fossil evidence tells us that humanity's luck has held reasonably enough for the past 5 million years and that no truly devastating asteroid has struck since the one that seems to have accounted for the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. So again, there seems no immediate reason for despair. The earth is indeed a precarious place, in an uncertain universe, but with average luck it should do us well enough. If the world does become inhospitable in the next few thousand or million years, then it will probably be our own fault. In short, despite the underlying uncertainty, our own future and that of our fellow creatures is very much in our own hands. Or that, at least, is the sensible way to look at it.
Given average luck on the geological and the cosmic scale, the differeence between glory and disaster will be made, and is being made, by politics. As this book unfolds I want to discuss the kinds of political systems and strategies that would predispose us to long-term survival (and indeed to comfort and security and the pleasure of being alive), and also the kind that will take us more and more frenetically towards collapse. The broad point is, though, that we need to look at ourselves – humanity – and at the world in general in a quite new light. We need in particular to perceive that our material problems are, at the most fundamental level, those of biology. We need to think, and we need our politicians to think, biologically. Do that, and take the ideas seriously, and we are in with a chance. Ignore the great beating drum of biology and we and our fellow creatures haven't a prayer. To begin with, we might reasonably turn the biological spotlight on ourselves.
Aristotle said that human beings are ‘political animals’. I remember from my school choir days a medieval chant that seemed somewhat prematurely to celebrate death, and the consequent liberation of the soul: ‘That from clod of earth set free, winged with zeal flies up to thee!’ In these two sentiments is encompassed the classical, Western view of humanity: we see ourselves as cerebral and secular creatures on the one hand, jockeying for power, and as spiritual beings on the other, destined for heaven; or at least preferring the world of the imagination to what we perceive as the crude realities of life. In general we share Jaques's view in As You Like It, that ‘All the world's a stage’ for us to act out our fantasies upon; or to put the matter more fiscally, that the world is simply raw material, for us to mine and to trade.
We think of ourselves as British or French or American or whatever, or as doctors or bricklayers, as frustrated schoolchildren or harassed parents, each with our own particular problems and claiming our particular ‘rights’, but we don't as a matter of habit think of ourselves in our raw biological form – as animals: collectively as the species Homo sapiens. We don't treat the world at large as our habitat and no longer think, as many other societies have often thought, of other species as our fellow creatures. Anthropologists tell us that some other peoples through history and prehistory saw themselves as a part of a Creation, alongside other species: they might see themselves primarily as Cherokee or Algonquin but also as the brothers and sisters of bears and beavers. There are hints of such a tradition in the Western world, for example in St Francis of Assisi, but in the modern West this is not the common view. Rational and materialist on the one hand, and effetely ‘spiritual’ on the other, we like to think we are above mere flesh, and that with our rational minds and our technologies we can do whatever we want. There is no need to take other life forms seriously, or the fabric of the earth itself, because we can make of them what we will. The men and women who run the world's affairs and spend so many hours around the conference table seem to think exclusively in these political and bureaucratic terms. Until very recent years, when ‘environment’ became a slogan that could attract votes, and ‘biodiversity’ has become the subject both of diplomacy and of law, most politicians (I can attest from experience) found any mention of either to be slightly ludicrous. Even now, the world's leaders typically seem to suppose that ‘environment’ means ‘golf course’ and that ‘biodiversity’ is simply another resource, vaguely linked to tourism on the one hand and to biotechnology on the other, but in either case far less interesting than oil.
But whatever else we may be, whatever our aspirations and pretensions, in the end we are animals, and big and voracious animals at that; and the greatest mistake humanity has made these past few thousand years is to forget this most elementary fact. Earlier societies might be forgiven for messing up their environments (as the archaeological and historical records show they often did) because, at least in some cases, they did not know enough biology to keep out of trouble. We have much less excuse. Present science is far from perfect but we should do better than, say, the ancient Greeks or the Mayans. On the whole, though, we don't. Indeed, because we act on a much bigger scale and with much more vigour, we do a great deal worse. The trouble is, of course, that we don't use our science for general human comfort and long-term survival; and the basic reason for that, I suggest, is not that the people in charge are evil but that they, along with most of the rest of us, have misconstrued the nature of the problem. We don't think of ourselves as animals. We don't think of the world as our habitat, but as modelling clay to be shaped as we choose. Nature is remarkably flexible and astonishingly adaptable, and will lend itself to a huge variety of manipulations. But it is not infinitely forgiving. If for commercial or political or ideological reasons our manipulations drift too far from what is biologically permissible (‘sustainable’ is the fashionable term) then the biological systems collapse, spin off in quite new directions, and humanity and our fellow creatures must collapse with them. The archaeological and historical record is crammed with examples of policy outstripping biological possibility, or sometimes of plain apathy; and as the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana observed, ‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes’.
So what does it mean to think of ourselves in biological terms?
Theologians and poets are right to extol the virtues of human beings, for we are indeed extraordinary. We are not the only creatures with claims to consciousness but we are clearly more conscious than, say, dogs or elephants. We are not the only animals with language, but we alone have verbal language, syntactically based, that enables us not only to frame our thoughts more subtly than other creatures but also – crucially – to share them with each other, rapidly and in detail, so that each of us becomes party to a universal human collective intelligence that in principle stretches across the whole world, and back through all of history.
But our preoccupation with our own brilliance tends to blind us to our underlying corporealness – that we are also flesh and blood, with flesh-and-blood needs. Crude survival is not about theology and poetry (or politics and philosophy), but about the need to keep our physiology intact, in tolerable habitats. It is perilous to lose sight of our biological roots.
The roots of our own particular ‘hominid’ lineage evidently began in Africa about 5 million years ago, with an ape-like creature, less than a metre tall, known as Ardipithecus, who soon evolved into the better-known Australopithecus. Both had chimp-sized brains, around 400 ml in size. About 2.5 million years ago the global climate became drier and cooler, forests worldwide retreated, and Australopithecus became more and more committed to the spreading savannah, and left the shrinking woods to its closest relatives, the chimpanzees and gorillas. The savannah evidently tested the ingenuity of Australopithecus – and so promoted the growth of its brain. By 2.2 million years ago Australopithecus had given rise to the first members of our own genus, Homo. This human debutant, Homo habilis, had a brain of around 700 ml and, it seems, was the first bona fide maker of stone tools.
Members of the genus Homo went on getting taller and brainier. The people broadly known as Homo erectus had appeared by about 1.6 million years ago. They were up to six feet tall, had brains of around 1,100 ml, and were the first to migrate out of Africa, across Europe and as far as South-East Asia. Homo erectus developed fire, possibly as long as 1.4 million years ago; and fire is extremely important, first as a means of influencing habitat (by burning vegetation) and to extend the range of the diet, by cooking. By 500,000 years ago people had assumed the form traditionally known as ‘archaic Homo sapiens’. They had brains as big as ours (around 1,450 ml) but also had big ‘caveman’ faces and bodies. One group of ‘archaics’ went on to become the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis), who became even brawnier (though still brainy) but died out around 30,000 years ago; and another group evolved into us – modern Homo sapiens. Clearly, the hominid lineage has evolved enormously in the past 5 million years, and particularly – spectacularly – in the past 2 million. Our bodies have doubled in height. Our brains have tripled in volume.
To a significant extent and in various ways, so many biologists argue, the rapid and unparalleled increase in human brain size depended upon diet, which had to be both various and reliable (see for example Michael and Sheilagh Crawford, What We Eat Today, Neville Spearman, London, 1972). Nervous tissue uses a lot of energy, and biochemically it is complex. In short, the brain is both pernickety and expensive. To foster and sustain such an organ, our ancestors needed in particular to consume a significant proportion of meat. They were never out-and-out carnivores, like lions. But they were very definite omnivores; unable to thrive exclusively on wild vegetation, and in general inclined to sample anything that grows and a few things (like salt) that do not.
The concentration of energy in vegetation is in general much less than in meat. For instance, as recorded in the nutritionist's bible, McCance and Widdowson's The Composition of Foods (revised by A. A. Paul and S. A. T. Southgate, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London, 1978), 100 g of cabbage provides only 20 calories* – yet cabbage is a domestic plant, less fibrous and so more rich in energy than most wild leaves. A hundred grams of potato (a typical tuber) gives around 80 calories. Seeds are richer – 100 g of wheat flour offers around 350 calories. Pure sugar offers around 400 calories per 100 g, but sugar qua sugar is rare in nature except in the form of honey. But little compares with animal flesh, and especially with fat. Lean raw steak provides around 120 calories per 100 g but beef fat provides more than 600 calories; thirty times more, weight for weight, than cabbage. If the water is removed from fat, it provides around 900 calories per 100 g. Meat (and some plant materials) also supplies other nutrients that are of enormous significance for brains, including a range of recondite fatty acids used in the construction of nerve-cell membranes. Herbivores can sustain big brains if they eat enough of the right kinds of plants, as elephants demonstrate. But the general metabolic rate of a warm-blooded animal is inversely related to its body size, so that elephants have a very slow metabolic rate, which means they need much less energy per unit of weight than you or I do and many times less than, say, a mouse. So elephants can eat enough vegetation to sustain big brains within their vast bodies, but to do so must eat through most of the day and night.
Smaller animals that aspire to maintain big brains need richer fare – which in general means eating seeds and/or meat. Extreme specialist leaf-eaters, like the leaf-eating monkeys of Africa and South-East Asia and the koala of Australia, tend to have smaller brains than other animals of the same general kind and of comparable size. The difference in the energy content of leaves and meat is reflected in the wonderfully contrasting lifestyles of elephants and lions. Both are social and intelligent. But whereas elephants in the wild must eat for seventeen hours a day, lions sleep for around twenty hours a day and sit around for another two, and are commonly content to hunt about twice a week. In general, the more flesh you eat the lazier you can afford to be. None of this implies that modern people need or indeed should eat anything like as much meat as we in practice aspire to do, as discussed in Chapter 4. A little goes a long way. But in general, unless we have access to a modern health-food shop, a little animal flesh is advisable.
In the vocabulary of cattle farming, vegetation in general is classed as ‘fodder’, and meat as ‘concentrate’; and it is worth taking trouble, and running risks, to acquire concentrate. Until the 1960s, biologists commonly believed that our fellow great apes – gorillas and chimps – were vegetarians. Indeed, they generally supposed that primates in general are primarily herbivorous, and many a zoo monkey has languished in consequence, wanly confronting its twice-daily bowl of oranges and chopped apple. In truth, most primates do like fruit and some are more or less vegetarian. But most are omnivores, and take meat when they can get it. Gorillas spend most of their time eating leaves, but they certainly do not refuse eggs in the wild, and John Aspinall used to give joints of roast lamb to his excellent troops of gorillas at Howlett's Zoo in Kent, south-east England, which they fell upon with relish. Jane Goodall showed in the 1960s to everyone's surprise (not to say horror) that chimpanzees can be fanatical hunters, particularly of monkeys, which they tear limb from limb. Chimps in full hunting flight are terrifying beasts. The cute little quasi-humans of sickly Hollywood movies and TV ads are only the infants.
Our own ancestors, from earliest times, must have been accomplished hunters. This surely influenced their psychology – though not in the way that it has become fashionable to suppose. Thus in the 1960s and '70s Robert Ardrey argued in books such as African Genesis and The Hunting Hypothesis that the earliest humans (then thought to be the Australopithecines) were indeed hunters, and that hunters perforce are innately aggressive, and that we moderns must have inherited our ancestors' aggressiveness. This idea had the ring of folk wisdom and it caught on. But Ardrey's biology always ran somewhat obliquely to the mainstream, and in any case scientific theory has moved on a great deal since then.
In the first place, there is no clear relationship between aggressiveness and diet. For my part, I would as soon be confined with a wolf as with, say, a stallion; and among ‘big game’, African buffalo have the most fearsome reputation of all although they are 100 per cent herbivores. Then – perhaps paradoxically (and in absolute contradiction of Ardrey) – the fact that our ancestors ate at least some meat probably enhanced their sociality, and ours too. Thus when chimpanzees have fruit, they keep it very much to themselves. But when they make a kill, they share the meat. We can easily see how natural selection would have favoured such discrimination: if a chimp eats more meat at any one sitting than it needs, the surplus is simply wasted (the body does not store surplus protein). In our own societies we put the surplus meat in the fridge for another day. Some wild animals also store their provender, including dogs, which bury bones. Ancient Icelanders traditionally stored large amounts of meat (notably that of sharks, some of which live in northern waters) by burying it on the beach, and there is evidence that Ice Age people in Britain stored meat in cairns. Out-and-out specialist predators like lions and pythons simply stuff the lot at a sitting, and then sleep it off. But chimps cannot do this, and for social animals that live in tropical forest there is little opportunity for safe storage. The most economical strategy for predatory chimps is to share the meat while it's there, so that the whole troop gets some benefit. After all, the troop must cooperate to make a kill in the first place. Thus for animals that are innately gregarious to begin with, meat-eating further encourages cooperativeness. As Homer Simpson observed (to Lisa's disgust) when he invited the neighbours to his burger-and-steak barbecue: ‘You don't make friends with salad!’
Food chains are always pyramids: there are always many more creatures waiting to be eaten than there are to eat them. If predators consume more of their prey than the prey can replenish, then their food supply dwindles and they too begin to die off. Thus individual herbivores need great swathes of vegetation to graze and browse upon, while carnivores need entire herds to feed from and generally are content to pick off the stragglers. The food chain is also inefficient. As a very rough rule of thumb, for every gram of protein an animal adds to its body, it needs to eat 10 grams. The protein in plant material tends to be diluted by water and fibre, so herbivores need to consume an enormous amount of it, relative to their own body weight. The protein in meat is generally far more concentrated, but even so the meat-eater needs to eat far more than it can convert into its own body flesh. Thus the makers of myth may see the big carnivores as ‘the kings of the jungle’ but their total biomass will always be far less than that of the humbler herbivores on which they prey. In short, as Paul Colinbaux so succinctly put the matter in the title of his excellent book: ‘big, fierce animals are rare’ (Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare, Allen and Unwin, London, 1980).
Indeed, ‘big, fierce animals are rare’ might reasonably be seen as the most fundamental law of ecology. I know of only two exceptions. One is the crabeater seal of Antarctica, of which there are still many millions. But crabeaters live on krill, planktonic shrimp-like crustaceans which in turn live on diatoms and other single-celled organisms which grow by the million ton in the unshaded sunlight of the Southern Ocean. The crabeaters effectively graze on krill like cows on grass.
The other exception to this bedrock law of ecology is, of course, ourselves.