178 animal, vegetable, miracleening our backs and wiping a hand across our sweaty brow, leaving it
striped with mud like some child’s idea of war paint. What is it about gar-
dening that is so addicting?
That longing is probably mixed up with our DNA. Agriculture is the
oldest, most continuous livelihood in which humans have engaged. It’s
the line of work through which we promoted ourselves from just another
primate to Animal- in-Chief. It is the basis for successful dispersal from
our original home in Africa to every cold, dry, high, low, or clammy region
of the globe. Growing food was the first activity that gave us enough pros-
perity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories,
and build our cities. Archaeologists have sturdy evidence that plant and
animal domestication both go back 14,000 years in some parts of the
world—which makes farming substantially older than what we call “civi-
lization” in any place. All the important crops we now eat were already
domesticated around five thousand years ago. Early humans indepen-
dently followed the same impulse wherever they found themselves, creat-
ing small agricultural economies based on the domestication of whatever
was at hand: wheat, rice, beans, barley, and corn on various continents,
along with sheep in Iraq (around 9000 bc), pigs in Thailand (8000 bc),
horses in the Ukraine (5000 bc), and ducks in the Americas (pre- Inca). If
you want to know which came first, the chicken- in-every-pot or the politi-
cian, that’s an easy answer.
Hunter- gatherers slowly gained the skills to control and increase their
food supply, learned to accumulate surplus to feed family groups through
dry or cold seasons, and then settled down to build towns, cities, empires,
and the like. And when centralization collapses on itself, as it inevitably
does, back we go to the family farm. The Roman Empire grew fat on the
fruits of huge, corporate, slave- driven agricultural operations, to the near
exclusion of any small farms by the end of the era. But when Rome
crashed and burned, its urbanized citizenry scurried out to every nook
and cranny of Italy’s mountains and valleys, returning once again to the
work of feeding themselves and their families. They’re still doing it, fa-
mously, to this day.
Where our modern dependence on corporate agriculture is concerned,
some signs suggest we might play out our hand a little smarter than Rome