The Creation of Food Worlds

Abstract

Although the modern food system has come to appear almost normal, many of its fundamental features are in fact very recent. Only recently have people lived in a world in which most food has been consumed by a dominant urbanindustrial population, heavily dependent on resources transported over great distances, from quite different environments and regions -the modern world in which "food miles" can add up to a worrying degree. Only in recent times have consumers in some countries come to think of food as a packaged good, to be obtained almost exclusively by purchase, and come to regard anything taken directly from the wild as potentially dangerous.Only in the past ten thousand years have human beings moved decisively toward living in sedentary settlements, using agricultural, horticultural, and pastoral techniques to produce food from domesticated plants and animals. Over the great length of human history, beginning with the emergence of Homo erectus in Africa two million years ago, some 90 per cent of hominin 1 species have lived by hunting and gathering. The experience for anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) is strikingly different, though covering little more than 200 000 years. The greater part of this period belonged to huntergatherers, and as late as the time of Columbus fully one-quarter of the world remained hunter-gatherer, but the massive and accelerating growth in population over the past two hundred years placed the weight of numbers within an agricultural realm. 1Hominin is preferred to hominid in identifying modern humans and their immediate bipedal relatives and ancestors. In the light of recent genetic findings, the term used previously to describe human-like primates -hominid -is now used to include also gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos (Barham and Mitchell, 2008: 1 and 476).