1.    What led you to this topic: the rise and fall of food empires?

The idea for the book arose out of conversations that we started when we wrote our first book, Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World, which was largely an essay on the industrialization of livestock. We started asking broader questions about the history of how our food system got to its present state. As we explored the background, we saw a pattern in how agriculture and the food trade affect societies as disparate as ancient Rome and 19th-century Sri Lanka.

 

 

2.  Can you describe the concept of bioregionalism, and why it so important for sustainability in the food empire?

Bioregionalism is the idea that geography dictates what a particular place should specialize in producing. Prairies ought to grow grain; rough terrain should be pasture. This is well and good, except over-specialization carries an environmental cost. So, while regions ought to specialize on what they do well, within that specialization there needs to be a lot of diversity (e.g. different types of cow, different varieties of grain, and a landscape that is broken up with forests, hedge rows, etc.)  In our opinion, sustainability is better served by a “nested” bioregionalism, which breaks up the specialized area with smaller, mixed plots. So trade will still occur across wide distances, but that environmental cost will be offset by as much local, mixed food production as possible.

 

 

3.  You argue that while developments in agriculture make feeding large numbers of people possible, agro-technology has also made food systems less stable. Can you explain this paradox?

It’s not really a paradox. Just because something’s efficient doesn’t mean it’s stable. There are at least two parts to this:  (1) Modern agro-technology seems to have overcome the problem of dearth, but it’s dependant on fossil fuels. As fossil fuels go, so go our super seeds and magic fertilizers. And we all know how stable our supply of fossil fuel looks to be in the next hundred years.  (2) Our super abundant fields need super abundant amounts of soil nutrients (especially nitrogen) and water.  If there is even a small decline in these inputs our yields plummet.  This means that even minor droughts tend to have disproportionately large effects on harvests.  Also super abundant fields are extremely attractive to pests, which makes pest control more difficult.  Traditional farming tends to be less productive but more stable year to year.

 

 

 

4.  In Empires of Food, you draw from an array of historical examples in which rapid population and food production growth ended in collapse of food empires. Why do we continue to make the same mistakes in the 21st century as the Mycenaean civilization did thousands of years ago?

It’s natural to want to improve your economic lot. Past societies can hardly be blamed for wanting to extend their agricultural reach, grow as much food as they could, and generate as much trade as possible. But we now know the hidden costs of doing so. If we’re forward-thinking (“if” is really the salient word), we’ll choose to place limits on ourselves in the name of self-preservation.

 

5.  During the course of your research, what did you find that most surprised you?

The almost guano war of 1852 is a pretty astonishing historical tidbit that’s often overlooked. Basically, the US and the UK almost went to war over islands of bird shit.  Both superpowers were looking for a way to keep their farmland fertile and guano is a superlative fertilizer.  Guano was even mentioned in a state of the union address in the mid 1800s. But the biggest surprise was our friend Francesco Carletti, a 16th-century Italian merchant whose circumnavigation of the globe gave us a narrative framework for the book. He’s a wonderful character, and he gave us some amazing stories about South America and Asia during the early colonial period.

 

6.  You discuss the Fair Trade, Organic and Slow Food movements. Do these initiatives provide an alternate model or are they more fashion than substance?

Taken alone, none of them answers the big problem of how to feed the planet. Together, though, they certainly help steer us in the right direction. They all have important lessons we should embrace.

 

 

7.  You claim that buying, eating and producing food is a political issue. How can governments take a more active role in protecting our food systems? How would you rate the Canadian government in its policies toward sustainable food production?

 

In our opinion, governments have a key role in regulating the environmental harm that is caused by industrial agriculture.  If a chicken farm pollutes a river and no one cleans it up because the “cost” of that problem is outside the “price” the consumer pays, then we need government to make sure that the market actually works properly.  That said, food systems and food sustainability isn’t really a big agenda item at the federal level in Canada.  However, there are lots of great examples at the municipal level, such as Toronto’s Food Policy Council and provincial work such as Ontario’s Greenbelt program that are quite innovative.  Mostly, however, there is a plethora of great grassroots initiatives aimed at supporting local farmers, and creating sustainable local food systems. 

 

 

8.  What steps can we as consumers take to create a more sustainable food system?

The most important thing is for people to get excited about the food they eat.  When we put as much energy into food as we do fashion or sports then we’ll be moving in the right direction.  Basically, for the last couple of generations the only thing we’ve really paid attention to in terms of food is the cost.  We’ve lost taste, health, and community.  But these things – taste, health, and community – are intrinsic aspects of eating.  If we regain these elements, then we’ll all start to demand more and the government and corporations will be obliged to follow suit. 

 

 

 

Empires of Food

Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations  

 

 

We are what we eat: this aphorism contains a profound truth about civilization, one that has played out on the world historical stage over many millennia of human endeavor.

 

Using the colorful diaries of a sixteenth-century merchant as a narrative guide, Empires of Food vividly chronicles the fate of people and societies for the past twelve thousand years through the foods they grew, hunted, traded, and ate—and gives us fascinating, and devastating, insights into what to expect in years to come. In energetic prose, agricultural expert Evan D. G. Fraser and journalist Andrew Rimas tell gripping stories that capture the flavor of places as disparate as ancient Mesopotamia and imperial Britain, taking us from the first city in the once-thriving Fertile Crescent to today's overworked breadbaskets and rice bowls in the United States and China, showing just what food has meant to humanity.

 

Cities, culture, art, government, and religion are founded on the creation and exchange of food surpluses, complex societies built by shipping corn and wheat and rice up rivers and into the stewpots of history's generations. But eventually, inevitably, the crops fail, the fields erode, or the temperature drops, and the center of power shifts. Cultures descend into dark ages of poverty, famine, and war. It happened at the end of the Roman Empire, when slave plantations overworked Europe's and Egypt's soil and drained its vigor. It happened to the Mayans, who abandoned their great cities during centuries of drought. It happened in the fourteenth century, when medieval societies crashed in famine and plague, and again in the nineteenth century, when catastrophic colonial schemes plunged half the world into a poverty from which it has never recovered. And today, even though we live in an age of astounding agricultural productivity and genetically modified crops, our food supplies are once again in peril.

Empires of Food brilliantly recounts the history of cyclic consumption, but it is also the story of the future; of, for example, how a shrimp boat hauling up an empty net in the Mekong Delta could spark a riot in the Caribbean. It tells what happens when a culture or nation runs out of food—and shows us the face of the world turned hungry. The authors argue that neither local food movements nor free market economists will stave off the next crash, and they propose their own solutions. A fascinating, fresh history told through the prism of the dining table, Empires of Food offers a grand scope and a provocative analysis of the world today, indispensable in this time of global warming and food crises.

 

Biography

Evan Fraser is an adjunct professor of geography at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada and a Senior Lecturer at the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds in the UK. His research is on farming, climate change and the environment. He lives in the Yorkshire Dales with his wife and three children.