I was loath to put this book down once I started it. It held
my interest like a well-crafted novel would- for the most part. The author’s
premise is that empires expand when they have good sources of food (mainly
grain), and then, when the food sources fail the empire collapses. They present
the Mayans, Mesopotamia, the Romans, the British Empire, modern China, and
modern America among others, and they paint a pretty scary picture.
Sadly, their scholarship doesn’t match their writing. The
British Empire didn’t fail because of a shortage of grains. Some of the dates
given are just wrong; in at least one case, that makes what they are saying
impossible (that a certain event caused something).
The book jumps around in time and place; I found it rather
jolting at times to make the connections. For some reason, they felt they could
bind a lot of the events together with the story of the world roaming trader
Carletti, but they don’t even give him a continuous narration. He really had
nothing to do with their thesis.
What was good about it? It does examine food surplus and
scarcity. To be a food empire, the empire must be able to produce or capture a
surplus of grains. They must be able to ship it to all its area, and trade it
for other things, both necessities and luxuries. Having more food than your own
population also gives a society another, very important, thing: when there is
enough food that not everyone has to be a farmer, people can do other things,
like learn to read and write, become artisans, and go exploring. Being able to
have a non-farmer class gave us civilization.
They also go over why the food surpluses ceased to be.
Irrigation that created over saline soils, loss of soil nutrients, loss of soil
itself due to erosion, lowering of average temperatures by even one degree
makes plants take longer to ripen grain, lack of rain- all these things can
create disaster. And we are facing that again today: today we face climate
change, soil erosion, drought, and the fact that the vast majority of grain
growing (and, hence, meat producing) relies on petroleum inputs- and we are
fast running out of petroleum.
The authors do not have an answer to our possible/probably
plight. One thing they do suggest isn’t something that will work for most areas
of the world: becoming locavores. Eating only foods grown within a
circumscribed area at least remedies the amounts of fuel used to truck and
process foods. Now, a big city, with all its suburbs, covers a huge area with
blacktop and concrete and will have few areas for growing foods- and it takes a
LOT of area to grow grains and frankly no one wants a pig farm next door. Our
area, despite being rural, cannot successfully feed itself. The soils are not
rich enough to support much beyond grass hay and cattle. The growing season is
too short to ripen grain a lot of years- not to mention many fruits and
vegetables. It’s possible on a small scale to ripen peppers and tomatoes by
protective coverings but it would take a LOT of greenhouses to feed the county
year round.
What this book does is point out a lot of different aspects
of food supplies and make you think about them. For that I give it four stars.
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