How wheat corrupted us
Russia’s invasion of the “breadbasket of Europe” has reminded us that food is political, says John LewisStempel. The connection was once well understood. “Beef and liberty” was the slogan of the 18th-century London dining club, The Sublime Society of Beef Steaks, which understood the link between sirloin and the freedom of Britons. But if meat brings liberty, wheat has brought little but tyranny.
A hard slave-master
Ever since the grain was first cultivated 10,000 years ago, wheat was a “slave-master”. It demands constant attention and weeding. It locked us into a seasonal cycle that we have been unable to escape ever since. It made us more sedentary and replaced our varied ancestral diets with something far more restricted and unhealthy. It made us more organised and cooperative, but also more “docile and disconnected from nature”.
Wheat also facilitated the rise of the state. As James Scott, author of Against the Grain, has pointed out, wheat was the best way to tax people – being visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable and rationable, all things much harder to achieve with livestock (easy to transport and hide) or root vegetables (which can be left in the ground till the tax collector has gone). Societies which relied on livestock and tubers rarely became states.
The taxing of wheat then enabled the emergence of nonproductive elites, who required an “armed wing to defend their regime”. Wheat fuelled the necessary population rise to staff the army and provide nutrient-poor but energy-dense fodder for the masses. The early grain states were, says Scott, “population machines”, domesticating people as the farmer domesticates the herd.
Later Western society was eventually organised around the production and consumption of wheat and it became a political tool. Since the Second World War, the “chief agricultural aim of government has been productivity – quantity over quality”. Wheat farming became a yield-obsessed industry increasingly dependent on labour-reducing but expensive technology, including biotechnology. It became a “cereal killer” of small, family farms, turned swathes of the UK countryside into a “coffin for nature”, doused in toxic chemicals, and spews greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
In short, humanity took a wrong turn with wheat. If the Russian invasion of Ukraine forces a rethink, that will be no bad thing. Pastoralism is the intelligent solution. “Beef and liberty! More meat, less wheat!”