To Lead or Be Led? his behavior caught us off guard, teaching us what it meant to lead and
not be led.
His actions transcended our understanding, limited as it was by
our reliance on the modern food system. America’s grand food bargain,
begun in the nineteenth century, had maintained its lock on how we per-
ceive our world well into the twenty-first. This insight was the missing
piece I had been looking for—a glimpse of the fact that changes to the
environment, brought about by humans’ drive for food, still shape who
we are and how we live. For the Bushman, ensuring harmony with the
Kalahari forged who he was. For his people to survive some two thou-
sand years in this desolate land, where we might have easily perished if
left alone, they had to recognize the contribution of other living beings
and care for the environment and its limited resources.
Americans, by contrast, live with the illusion of infinity. The story
of how this came to be has two parts. The first was humankind’s long
passage to farming. The second, much more recent, was the transition
to becoming a nation of consumers. As farmers, our lives were still
subservient to food. As consumers, food became subservient to us.
It has been said that how we produce and consume food has a bigger
impact on well-being than any other human activity. Indeed, until the
grand food bargain came along, limits to food were an unchallenged fact
of life. Coping with the scarcity of food structured daily living around
the natural rhythms of seasons, plants, and animals. In geologic time,
the transition from food scarcity to abundance was like flicking on a
light switch.
The result is arguably the pinnacle of human accomplishment. What
stands out is how food became readily available, more so than at any
point in human history. What is less apparent, but more important,
is how this growing glut of food has skewed our understanding of our
surroundings and our perceptions of control.
Such an outlook started early. Colonial settlers, even while strug-
gling to produce enough food, saw limitless bounties for the taking.
To all appearances, America had won the resource lottery, inheriting
unprecedented levels of ideal farmland and fresh water, not to mention
a favorable climate. The sense of endless abundance only grew as the
discovery of rich reserves of liquid fossil fuels intensified food produc-
tion. There seemed to be no end to how much could be produced. Why