“Man is born free and yet everywhere eats bread.”
- Rousseau
Addiction
A wise philosopher once stated that the three most harmful addictions were heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary – all three lead to man’s ruin.
In The Golden Bough, Frazer relates how enthralled primitive man was to the corn-goddess, Demeter. For millennia the peoples of Eurasia committed exorbitant and often violent rituals of extreme supplication and human sacrifice to ensure her good favor. Demeter was later worshiped in Rome as Ceres, the root of our word cereal.
Over 60% of the human caloric intake globally comes from 3 crops: rice, maize, and wheat. Our diet has become incredibly narrowed from our neolithic forebearers who had much more variety in their eating habits.
Ex-CIA agent turned Yale professor, James Scott, notes that with wheat crops’ inability to survive without human help, and the exorbitant amount of resources societies put towards their growth – that grains have domesticated us, not the other way around.
In short, a group of edible grasses have exploited mankind – gaslighting humans into deforesting the world, so that we could create environments for them to thrive.
Michael Pollan makes the same point above and notes how much smarter plants are than we give them credit for. Using neurotransmitter-esque chemical signaling in the air or symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi networks in their roots – plants are communicating all around us, about us.
I myself haven’t had a carb since 2004, eat a 95% animal based diet, and in the intermittent periods where I have gone full carnivore, I’ve noted much more mental clarity and alacrity. The Ray Peat fanatics will hate me for this.
Bootlicking & Grain Eating
Agriculture and control are linked not just between plants and humans but humans and humans as well.
Grain based agriculture provides an easy nexus for social control. The plants themselves aren’t mobile like livestock. They grow above ground and can’t be hidden like root vegetables. Their plots follow regular temporal and geographical patterns. Their produce can be stored in centralized granaries. This makes grain crops easier to observe, track, and tax – in short they provide the perfect mechanism for governments to control society through.
Scott argues that grain agriculture has been promoted by states and authorities across the globe because they provide legibility, that is an easy way for humans to be centrally organized, measured, managed, taxed, and punished. Grain agriculture is just a form of statecraft used to coerce and corral man in; and authorities have been literally shoving it down our throats for millennia.
Hierarchical states have only arisen with grain agriculture. Archeological and anthropological evidence points to peoples only doing intensive grain farming by compulsion and opting for easier sources of caloric yield like swidden/recessional agriculture, pastoralism, or hunting and gathering when left to their own devices. Do we only have grain agriculture because it’s the only way authoritarian states can exist?
It is worth noting that hunter gatherers like the !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari dedicate less than half their waking hours procuring food, yielded a more efficient food supply than French farmers before WWII, and have much more leisure time than you or I living in the 4HL.
Heraclitus stated that “war is the father of all things,” but the earliest wars themselves seem to be a product of agriculture as early civs looked to conquer others to procure more workers for their fields. Slavery is an easy marker of grain based states, so are epidemic diseases coming from the concentrated human density.
“Where’s the beef” – Plato
When asked what the best use of agricultural land was Cato the Elder stated: “Profitable cattle raising.” The next best? “Moderately profitable cattle raising.” The third best? “Very unprofitable cattle raising.” The fourth? “To plow the land.”
The ancients knew all about agriculture – Cicero’s surname (cognomen) derives from his family’s ancient growing of Cicer arietinum, or chick-peas. Roman statesman Fabian received his family name for their cultivation of legumes – the root of our fava beans.
Homer only fed his heroes roasted meat. Similarly, Plato would require the ruling classes in his republic to eat meat without sweet sauces or frivolous accoutrement in order to give them strength and vitality.
In Robert Drew’s Coming of the Greeks he notes that the pastoralists Proto-Indo European peoples decapitated and ruled over the various agrarian societies of Europe and the Middle East with ease – looking down on the servile peasants whose lot in life was to scratch and toil for others.
Caesar remarked that German barbarians who fed on milk, cheese and flesh were incredibly well formed and tall. Nomadic pastoralists and hunter gatherers have been noted for their health and vigor. Before their eradication, Indians of the American Plains were the tallest people in the world, Wooden Leg of the Cheyenne was measured at 6’3” and 230lbs.
The Taurid meteor stream named because it sprouts from the astrological sign of the bull in the night sky. This cosmic shower has been worshipped for millennia (Spanish bullfighting is a symbolic reenactment) and it has been monumental in shifting world events – potentially even bringing about the last ice-age. There is a celestial power to beef.
Sustainable for who?
The Lying New York Times would have you believe that meat is killing us and the environment. Without claiming it is a push for a complete Eat Ze Bug, Live In Ze Pod dystopian future – food is big business and there is a much higher margins for feeding people non-nutritious corn and soy based slop over beef and dairy.
The fact of the matter is that industrial farming and meat production and the hormone, herbicide, and shit soaked offal it pawns off on us as food are immensely toxic to us and the environment.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. A plethora of holistic farming and animal husbandry techniques – including permaculture and restoration, regenerative, and perennial agriculture – raise produce and animals healthy for both the consumer and the world. White Oak Pastures has proven to be a net greenhouse-gas sink despite raising thousands of heads of cattle on a zero-waste farm. Mark Shepard’s New Forest farm reinvigorated a dilapidated row-crop grain farm to a nutrient-rich oasis.
Questions naturally arise as to whether these practices are scalable or sustainable. Well for one example Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm in Virginia has only 550 acres but is able to raise 900 heads of cattle and 700 pigs. I myself have installed a permaculture irrigation system on a friend’s property with less than $100 of tools. Perhaps the solutions to our problems don’t require billions of dollars in agency budgets or contracts.
The framing of the question of sustainability and scalability are wrong. The onus should be on our current system to prove that it is worthwhile. Plow-based monocrop grain agriculture has already spread desertification around the Mediterranean, and is now doing the same to America’s Pacific coast. Because of the serpentine nature of production chains, 1/3rd of food is wasted before it ever hits a plate. And with the Standard American Diet (SAD) being nearly half processed carbs over 40% of adults are obese and rates of chronic disease are skyrocketing.
Even if you cannot emancipate the world from carbs – why not free yourself?