Whole Diets 231
So far the main differences between the Hunza diet and our own seems to be
that the Hunza foods are all natural foods, they are eaten fresher than ours, and
they are consumed whole, but there is one more difference, the most fundamental
of all, and this lies in the way in which these foods are grown.
In their system of agriculture which has been continued ‘century after century’
the chief factors in their plant food have been two.
Firstly, there is the continuous slight renewal of the soil by a sprinkling of the black
glacier-ground sand, which is brought to the fields by the aqueducts.
Secondly, there is the direct preparation by man of food for the plants, given in the
form of manure.
The Hunza, in their manuring, use everything that they can return to the soil. They
carefully collect the cattle manure and store it in the byres. They collect all vegetable
parts and pieces that will not serve as food to either man or beast, including such fallen
leaves as the cattle will not eat, and mix them with the dung and urine in the byres. They
use the human sewage after keeping it for six months. They take silt from special recesses
built in their irrigating channels. They collect the ashes of their fires. All these they mix
together and make into a compost. They also spread alkaline earth from the hills on
their vegetable fields on days when the fields are watered.
O. F. Cook of the Bureau of Plant Industry of the US Department of Agriculture has
written: ‘Agriculture is not a lost art, but it must be reckoned as one of those which
reached a remarkable development in the remote past and afterwards declined.’ As
an example he cites the system of the ancient Peruvians which enabled them to sup-
port large populations in places ‘where modern farmers would be helpless’.^3
Travellers who have visited both Peru and the North-West Indian Provinces
have been struck by the resemblance between the stone aqueducts and mammoth
walls that support the terraced fields of both areas. Describing those of Hunza the
late Lord Conway wrote:
The path that leads up to Baltit^4 is bordered on either side by a wall of dry cyclopean
masonry the undressed component parts of which are very large and excellently fitted
together ... a monumental piece of simple engineering ... the valley between the cliffs
and the edge of the river’s gorge is covered with terraced fields... The cultivated area of
the oasis is some five square miles in extent. When it is remembered that the individual
fields average as many as twenty to the acre, it will be seen what a stupendous mass of
work was involved in the building of these walls and the collection of earth to fill them.
The walls have every appearance of great antiquity, and alone suffice to prove the long
existence in this remote valley of an organized and industrious community...
To build these fields was the smaller part of the difficulties that husbandmen had
to face in Hunza. The fields also had to be irrigated. For this purpose there was but one
perennial supply of water – the torrent from the Ultar glacier. The spout of that glacier,
as has been stated, lies deep in a rock-bound gorge, whose sides are for a space perpen-
dicular cliffs. The torrent had to be tapped, and a canal of sufficient volume to irrigate