10 Taking Stock
normal. Farming had replaced hunting and gathering. The grand food
bargain had replaced farming. An abundance of food was taken for
granted.
Today, enough calories are churned out per person in the United
States to feed two moderately active adult women. Expending effort
to cook, prepare, and clean up afterward is now optional, bordering
on obsolete. Without giving it much thought, Americans experience
convenience and selection that legions of royalty never dreamed about.
Anybody can have and eat unlimited portions of whatever food they
desire, so long as they bring money.
Take, for example, fresh eggs, found almost any time in any gro-
cery store. The sheer number of cartons, typically stacked high on
rolling pallets behind the glass doors of room-sized coolers, suggests
their supply is unlimited. The lower the price, the more consumers will
buy—including shoppers who didn’t come into the store with eggs on
their list. All act independently of each other, never asking themselves
how their individual actions might affect overall supply.
The fact that the production of eggs depends on a solitary planet
governed by laws of nature, with set limits on resources like water
and land, has no bearing on the number of eggs each person decides
to take with them. Our third relationship to food allows us to ignore
anything beyond personal considerations, and certainly anything
unpleasant. It is this relationship to food that Paul and I brought to
the Kalahari when we encouraged the Bushman to empty the clutch
of all its ostrich eggs.
In one way or another, my life has always been linked to the modern
food system. I grew up in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Mountains
on a family farm. We raised cattle, grew crops, and tended to fruit
orchards, both to sell and to feed ourselves. My earliest memory of
farming was climbing onto the metal seat of an old grain binder left
to rust in the corner of the farm. Pulled by a team of horses, it cut and
bundled wheat stalks into mushroom looking “shocks,” which were
later fed into a thresher to separate the grain seeds from the chaff.
From stories my uncles told of spending long and hot summer days
caked in dust during grain harvest, I knew my life on the same land