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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org, valshowers@hotmail.com, smallscalefarming@yahoogroups.com, Stillwater-Homestead@yahoogroups.com
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  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Surviving Domestication
  • Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2005 00:41:33 -0700


Surviving Domestication
http://www.prophecyandsurvival.com/farming2.htm

Animals in our diet are animals that were subjectable. You could subject them
to domestication. Lots of animals, which you would have probably have
preferred to eat, didn’t cooperate. Even for today, for example, although you
have domesticated buffalos, they’re not really domesticated. A tame buffalo
isn’t really very tame. You’re not going to ride one. You’re not really smart
to get too close to one.

So, it was easier, better, and more efficient to domesticate cattle than it
was to domesticate buffalos. And this is true all down the line. We’ve
domesticated a number of animals that were subject to and willing to be
domesticated.

Plants have been the same way. We have chosen plants based on their
amenability to cultivation. There was a trade off there. Those were not the
plants that our species used to go out and gather as their primary food
sources. They were probably secondary sources. It’s even possible that they
were sources of food that you ate when you were very, very hungry. You could
eat them, but they had bad effects on you.

Every plant has a defense mechanism built into it to keep it from being
eaten, unless it produces a fruit, which it wants you to eat so that you’ll
disperse its seeds, almost every plant has stuff in it that if you eat that
it will make you sick. You’ll notice that all our grain plants, you have to
cook them. You can’t eat them raw. The reason for that is that they have
chemicals in them that are supposed to defend the plant from you.

Now, we overcame that with technology, but at a cost. The cost was that, we
are eating food to which our bodies aren’t naturally adapted. Technology
adapts the food to our bodies, but we’re not adapted to our food, and there’s
a trade off there. This is survival food. This is the food that our species
chose to eat when there wasn’t anything else to eat.

It’s probable that in almost every case that agriculture was the result of
climate change that left people desperate for food. It probably wasn’t a
first choice. People probably didn’t say, ‘Let’s quit hunting and gathering
and start planting.’ They probably ran out of food and found that they could
survive by doing some planting. You’ll notice that agriculture doesn’t start
in climates that are full of water and good weather. It starts in dry and
tough climates.

So, what does this mean for us?

Technology has intervened in the last 150 years in ways unimaginable to our
ancient forebears, especially the people who invented agriculture, to the
point that we now can manipulate the genes of the plant and we can do all
sorts of things to alter the plant, so the plant becomes more bug resistant;
so the plant will grow faster; there will be more of what we want on the
stalk of the plant. We have been able to engineer the plant more and more to
what we wanted as farmers.

The problem is, if anything goes wrong with our system, our system is very
dependent on the capacity to maintain this technology. The technology is not
self-regenerative. Once you’ve created a hybridized plant, one of the trade
offs is the hybridized plant loses the ability to reproduce itself.

This is really kind of interesting because when you change turkeys, they lose
the ability to reproduce themselves, too. Although some domestic animals can
now reproduce themselves physically, they can’t reproduce themselves
socially. The domesticated hog, for example, isn’t really a self-sufficient
type hog. It really is a totally dependent animal. There probably still are
some hogs in the world that are half wild. If the humans died, the hog
wouldn’t notice. The pig was a forager. The pigs have a society.

We’ve intervened to the point where the food we eat is not that kind of food.
The animal that we’re eating doesn’t have a survival capacity without us.

Here is the question. We have rapid climate change. If the climate change
produces economic, social and cultural changes that disappear Monsanto and
all of the chemical and biological producers, What are we left with? We’re
going to be left with wheats that can’t reproduce, with pigs that can’t
reproduce. We don’t have a survival strategy about what to do if things go
really, really wrong.






  • [Livingontheland] Surviving Domestication, Tradingpost, 01/02/2005

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