GRAINS OF TRUTH AND CIVILIZATION

The way we think about grains is a pretty good marker of whether or not we have lost our bearings as social beings, ethical beings, animal beings and beneficiaries of civilization. 

That thought came to me as I wrestled with the implications of an article by Evan Fraser and colleagues on "Food stocks and grain reserves: evaluating whether storing food creates resilient food systems," recently published in the romantically-titled journal J Environ Stud Sci.

Since the fooforah about high-carb diets during the 1990s, followed by last decade's fooforah with grain intolerances, we have lost sight of a few things that are not about you, the individual, and your choice of nutrients.

Grains are rightly called the foundation of civilization. Before grains, humans relied on foods that were perishable, sometimes perishable in a matter of hours or days.

That made many things difficult or impossible. It made things difficult when the offerings from local hunting and gathering were lean -- as would happen at least for one season of the year in most parts of the world, and could happen for longer stretches of time.

Lack of storage encouraged group feasts, since there was no logic to hoarding instead of sharing when most of what was hoarded would go bad. Lack of storage also discouraged long trips and long wars (alas, another product of civilization), since it was hard to put on a lot of miles while living off the land.  

But lack of storage also made it hard to trade food over longer distances and hard to produce much of a leisure class that could make a living looking at stars, thinking up alphabets and arithmetic tables, and concocting self-aggrandizing megalomaniac pyramid schemes.

Without grain storage, cities of any consequence were an impossibility, which put a severe limit on the greatest competitive advantage enjoyed by humans -- the ability to create culture and share and grow it through society.

The advantage of grains was not nutrients -- indeed, nutrients from complex carbs found in plants and tubers are likely superior to what's in grains -- but storage.

Grains didn't require refrigeration or anything else that didn't exist before they could be stored; they just had to be kept dry.

And that's probably why storing grains for lean seasons and lean years entered the cultural DNA of humanity. Every major early civilization and formal religion practiced storage. Until the 1990s, efforts were made to keep enough grain stored to last a year.

That all changed during the 1990s, when the end of history was declared, neo-liberalism prevailed, and grains became a matter of nutrients, not civilization. Institutions designed to store grains have since systematically been destroyed.

We need to start thinking about neo-liberalism, and its policy of ending grain storage, as an anti-civilizing force.

The neo-liberal argument for ending storage is pretty simple. Humans have transportation and trade systems (and global corporations that dominate those systems) which allow us to respond efficiently to lean seasons or years -- as long as no-one minds not having the staff of life and civilization belonging to global corporations, instead of communities or nations.

That's it in a nutshell (if I may be permitted a non-grain metaphor).

It's not a very fine-grained basis for good public policy (if I may be allowed a grainy pun).

Storage fulfills many functions. It supports farmers when they have a good year, by allowing them to sell their surplus at a good price instead of dumping it on the marketplace and losing their shirts (a big deal in civilized societies, because shirts are a basic necessity -- no shoes, no shirts, no service). Supporting farmers is pretty fundamental to food security, I would say.

It gives people, not corporations, the power to decide if they wish to donate surplus to another area of the world where it's desperately needed.

It provides the ultimate hedge against speculators jacking up the price of grain in lean times -- which is what happened in 2008, when grain prices went crazy and the poor in many areas of the world were literally starving.

That year, 2008, is a red letter year that should not be pushed out of the collective unconscious. It revealed that grain is not a matter of dietary choice, but a necessity of civilization.

As a necessity of civilization, it belongs where other necessities of civilization belong -- in the public realm.

I personally think people should wean themselves from too much dietary reliance on grains, and shift toward vegetables as their major source of complex carbohydrates.

Vegetables, unlike grains, can be grown efficiently in almost every corner of the world. They do not require large fields or large amounts of mechanization, or huge amounts of inputs, such as water. And vegetables are better than grains in responding to obesity, which has overtaken absolute hunger as the top threat to human health. 

But grains are not fundamentally about nutrients. They are about civilization and civil society.

When we understand grains as essential to civilization, we can recover the food security ground we lost during the 1990s when global corporations convinced the governments of the world that grain was just a nutritional choice, and therefore essential to privatization.

Bu the civilizing argument is the grain of truth that underlies a cornerstone of food security.

A world entering the era of global warming and drought needs more than the three months supply of grains that has become the norm since global corporations took over the grain business.

(You can follow Wayne's other thoughts about food in his free weekly newsletter available at https://bit.ly/OpportunCity)