Foods tell stories of people. They say, “We are what we eat”, but foods are more than what they do to a person. They affect the progress of civilizations. They shape human history. Alimentary needs and culinary tastes have affected social and political dynamics. The quality and kind of foods being eaten by people have defined their placements in social ladders. Social laddering has bred tensions across societies. Sourcing foods has created conflicts many times in many places.
The impact of foods in human history is explained in Nutzenadel and Trentmann (eds), Food and Globalization: Consumption, Markets, and Politics in the Modern World (Berg Publishers, 2008).
Linking foods and history is environment. William McNeil shows this in his classic The Rise of the West (University of Chicago Press, 1964). Europeans in the 16th to 17th century, having acquired a taste for spiced foods, fanned out into many parts of the world in search of condiments and exotic victuals in places where environmental conditions (soils, climates, biodiversity) allow them to grow and to thrive.
It led to their dominating places and people that had the foods or the sources of the ingredients they desired, like the Dutch in Indonesia, the English and French in Africa, and the English in Sri Lanka and India.
These resulted to wars to suppress resistance and competition. It led to people being colonized, to traditional governance being mangled or dismantled, to trading regimes becoming arenas for vicious power play, and to learning and other political, social, economic and cultural institutions being changed and reshaped.
People fight over food and over what it takes to produce food, like water. Water is necessary to produce food, and fresh- and salt-water bodies contain many sources of food.
So, people fight over water. There’s continuing tension between Sudan, Egypt, and other countries along the Nile over how much water each one draws from it for their farms.
In the Mekong, China’s intention to build dams in its upper streams has caused tensions in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam because their agriculture and fisheries depend on this river.
Turkey, Iraq and Syria many times almost went to war over the Euphrates which irrigate their farms. So has India and Nepal over the Ganges.
It’s been said that Israel isn’t likely to give up the Golan Heights because it’s the largest watershed in the area, and a key environmental support system for its northern region agriculture.
I’m not surprised by references to food being among Russia’s interests in Ukraine. That it’s invading Ukraine because, among others, Ukraine has vast grain fields, and the country has the biggest area of arable lands in northern Europe.
The Dnieper River irrigates many parts of the country. It also irrigates Crimea which has been recently annexed by Russia. Crimea depends on the Dnieper for its agriculture, and Ukraine had threatened to control its flow to Crimea.
Ukraine was among Hitler’s interests in pushing eastward during World War II. It’s said that Hitler redirected large infantry and panzer units from pushing toward Moscow, to first secure the grain fields of Ukraine
Competition for fisheries has led to conflicts like for cod in the northern Atlantic, for salmon and lobster in the Bering Sea, and elsewhere like in the Flores Sea, the Caribbean, and, of course, nearer home, in the South China Sea.
Many human conflicts — in family tables, communities, and countries — seem to be about foods, or about having food, or about environments that produce food.
Many institutional and regulatory innovations have been prompted by the need to reduce and retard conflicts over foods.
Laws, consumer standards, treaties, contracts, alliances, and all sort of local and international public and private agreements and policies have evolved because of the need to reduce or manage tensions arising from competition and conflicts over food and food sources.
Technologies and techniques have been developed to manage food production, distribution, and safety. Settled agriculture was a technical innovation from hunting-gathering. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides are recent innovations to grow more food.
And there’ve been technologies like satellites to monitor weather to help farmers make good planting and harvest decisions. And, yes, technologies to better equip militaries to wage wars when necessary to secure national food supplies and sources.
It could be said that deep down, history is a story of people, and of their need for food, and of their preferences for certain foods.
The never-ending quest for food grown in different environmental conditions across the world is perhaps how food has shaped human history.
______________________________
Author’s email: beniiim@icloud.com
