Taking Stock
number of eggs for decades to come. Ostriches, it turns out, are some
of the longest-living animals on Earth, capable of surviving some forty
years in the wild.
While this helped explain why the Bushman took only one egg, I
still couldn’t fully square his decision (or the San people’s lifestyle) with
what I perceived to be human nature. After all, laying claim to all of
the eggs was his reward for making the effort to hunt, especially since
he had no assurances of finding food. Also, he would have known that
predators like hyenas roamed the desert. If they were to come across
that clutch of eggs, their actions would be less magnanimous.
Besides, with no one from his community looking on, he was free to
indulge his own appetites. Given his thin frame, he would have likely
benefited from extra calories and protein, and he surely would have
enjoyed them. Even if he had denied himself personally, he could have
generated much goodwill by sharing the eggs with others.
Leaving those eggs behind seemed at odds with what I thought
of as the universal approach to food scarcity: always take advantage of
having more food on hand whenever possible. Yet the more I stared at
that photo, the more I realized that my perspective wasn’t universal. It
was decidedly Western.
My modern world had brought about such an immense availability
of food that past generations of Bushmen would have found hard to
even imagine. It had changed how people related to food. But had
something else happened along the way? Had an abundance of food
changed modern society in ways its people never considered?
Living apart from the rest of the world for more than twenty thou-
sand years, the Bushmen were reminders of how humans first related
to food. To meet the need for daily nourishment, they lived nomadic
lives, continually hunting and gathering. Their odds of survival ebbed
and flowed with the availably of edible plants, roots, nuts, insects, and
animals, which in turn depended on a dynamic environment. They had
to withstand disease and pestilence, flash floods, severe temperatures,
and droughts. Besides the constant uncertainty, little else could be
taken for granted.
In the full scope of history, it was not that long ago when my an-
cestors’ path diverged from that of the Bushmen. My early forebears
eventually became dissatisfied with the precarious hunter-gatherer