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Evan DG Fraser & Andrew Rimas In their new book Empires of Food: Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, authors Evan Fraser and Andrew Rimas look at how what we put in our bellies has shaped our existence since the time of the huntergatherers. From Imperial Rome to the British Empire, the search for food – and more efficient ways to cultivate it – has sparked both glorious civilization and horrendous, worldwide depravation. And it’s still shaping us today
evan fraser Umbrella: When did people start cooking food? Evan Fraser: A long time ago. We have no evidence for a specific date, but it probably had to do with killing bacteria and preventing food poisoning. U: When did a specific food culture appear? E: The earliest examples of settled agriculture are the Chinese, the Sumerians around Mesopotamia, and then later in South America. These are the key starting points. From then on, you see references to food in hieroglyphics and people being buried with food. U: Didn’t the Roman Empire depend on ‘garam’, the fish oil? EF: “Yes. For the most part, the Empire fed itself from wheat and barley, but there’s little protein in them. Fish is an obvious supplement, but it spoils quickly. Garam, which is fish soaked in brine so the bones and flesh drop off, became major role in Roman diets and was a huge part of the Empire’s trade. U: So how does food lead to empire-building? EF: The core of a complex society is to have farmers who make more than they can eat. Their surplus is then fed to the urban population. You need a food surplus, a way of storing and transporting this food, and finally, a means to get it exchanged from the farmer to the consumer. You can then take a percentage of your population and allow them to be scholars or journalists or engineers. If you don’t have that then everyone’s tied to the land. Every
civilization that developed possessed those three vital ingredients. U: Medieval monasteries became great powerhouses through trade, too… EF: Think of western Europe as being unlawful with a low population in about 500AD. You then see monks building farms and monasteries. They became the focus of communities that grew by producing food, storing it and trading it with other monasteries. After a few hundred years, this process made them enormously wealthy. The monks then focused on improving agricultural technology by inventing/rediscovering things like water mills, big, heavy ploughs and windmills. It was an agricultural revolution. U: Wasn’t beer key to their trade? EF: It was, certainly in Britain. One of the ways the monks stored beer was by adding hops to it. Hops are anti-bacterial, which meant you could take your surplus barley/wheat and turn it into something that could last for a few months – enough time to get it from northern France to Italy. The same happened with Parmesan cheese.
years of ‘natural capital’. When you first use that soil, you get great harvests. But it doesn’t last. The second mistake was that farmers got their surplus by specializing in just one crop. It makes economical sense, but you end up with an ecological nightmare –a monocultural landscape dedicated to one crop. It’s very fragile and very attractive to pests. When you grow intensely, it requires lots of nitrogen and water. It’s very demanding on the soil. The third mistake sent the system into decline. When societies hit a high watermark of huge achievement it tended to coincide with good climate – Roman times were warm, but there was enough rain. The Mayan period and the medieval period of growth all enjoyed good weather and grew dependent on those harvests. But these periods came to an end and as the weather declined, the soils were fragile and couldn’t adapt to the new conditions. There was widespread famine – the Roman Empire lost half its population in two generations.
U: Was this sustainable? EF: The monks were shrewd businessmen, but three mistakes were made by them, as had been by the Chinese, the Romans, the Mesopotamians – and now, unfortunately, us.
U: How else does that affect a big, complex society like Rome? EF: There’s a lack of tax revenues – that hits the military funding, so people in the periphery become lawless and attack Roman legions who themselves haven’t been paid in months. Food, climate and soil kick off huge problems and food price inflation.
U: Which were? EF: First, the society grew dependent on harvests that had been ploughed on virgin soil. After the Romans left places like England, soils that had been drained of nutrients in the past had 300
U: What about in medieval Europe? EF: In 1290, food price inflation starts happening, prices start gong up. A bad midsummer rain in 1315, a series of food harvest failures between 1315-20 and 15 per cent of Europe dies.
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