Salon: Why our agricultural empire will fall

An expert tells us how our food system is repeating the history of doomed civilizations

BY RIDDHI SHAH

In an age of super-sized meals and obesity epidemics, food-shortage doomsday scenarios always seem a little surreal. Backed by half a century of agricultural abundance, it’s easy to imagine that cheap food will permanently abound. But in a new book, “Empires of Food,” academic Evan Fraser and journalistAndrew Rimas show us that we are not the first advanced civilization to have a hubristic, misplaced confidence that we’ll always be fed.

By tracing the rise and fall of a number of preindustrial empires, the authors show us just how much trouble we’re in. The Romans, the Mesopotamians and the medieval Europeans, for example, all had agricultural systems that, much like ours, were yoked to complex technology and highly specialized trade networks. And each of those societies eventually failed because they hadn’t accounted for soil erosion, growing overpopulation and weather changes. Climate change, anyone?

Fraser and Rimas propose no easy solutions, advocating instead that we learn to store surplus food, live locally, farm organically and diversify our crops.

Salon spoke to Evan Fraser over the phone about agricultural patterns through history, the instability of our food system, and whether the solutions he proposes are ultimately unaffordable for the world’s poor.

Your book focuses on how food can cause empires to rise and fall, and specifically, how this is an almost cyclical process that has been repeated through history.

A society has to go through the same steps to grow. For example, all complex societies have people living in cities who rely on country folk to produce their food. They have to transport the food over large distances, and they begin to use food as a tradable commodity. But usually this happens during a time of good weather. So the Romans, for example, grew because they specialized in wheat, but things got colder around 300 A.D., and the empire collapsed. The same thing happened with medieval Europe. In the 14th century, the medieval warm period ended, and there were huge famines.

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