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The Future of Food

by Dr. Amanda McKinney, M.D.

torian, geographer, and author declared Plantations were just large, industrialized
in his 1999 article of the same name that farms and slaves were an inexpensive
“agriculture was the worst mistake in the energy source used to power economic
history of the human race”. Diamond ar- growth. Here in America, we fought a
gues that rather than being the capstone of bloody civil war to end the practice of
humanity’s million-year-long progressive slavery, but as we are seeing in this coun-
evolution and our “most decisive step try, the stain of slavery and intentional,
toward a better life”, the adoption of agri- institutionalized racism remains today.
culture “was in many ways a catastrophe Even though slavery ended, capital-
from which we have never recovered.” ism, human greed, and large permanent
The transition from a hunter-gatherer settlements with small numbers of farm-
society to an agrarian one might seem ers relative to the population remained.
an obvious improvement. However, the So we traded the repugnance of slavery
Neolithic Revolution transformed what for another inexpensive energy source...
was basically a conglomeration of small fossil fuels.
egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers to The use of fossil fuels to replace hu-
Dr. Amanda McKinney, M.D., Associate one cursed with sexism, slavery, despo- man labor and to create petrochemicals
Dean of Health Sciences and Executive tism, food insecurity, disease, overpopu- like fertilizers and pesticides helped to
Director of the Institute for Human and lation, resource depletion, pollution, and liberate many from enslavement, hard la-
Planetary Health at Doane University, human-induced climate change. bor and death. Unfortunately, there have
delivered a keynote address for the 2020 Slavery was present in every agrar- also been some negative consequences.
Nebraskans for Peace Annual Peace ian society in history. The cultivation The use of fossil fuels has improved
Conference, Saturday, September 26. of plants and domestication of animals life for those of us who use the most of
Printed below is the full text of her timely required far more labor than hunting and them. Our modern, consumptive life-
speech on “The Future of Food”. gathering. Agriculture also brought with styles would not be remotely possible

Humans have occupied the planet for it hierarchies with a land-owning and without them. Their use over the last
around 6 million years with modern non-producing elite class, and slavery 200 years, however, is now resulting in
homo sapiens coming on the scene ap- was modeled after the practice of do- global climate change and other kinds of
proximately 300,000 years ago. As early mesticating animals for both food and pollution that, yet again, largely affect
as 13,000 years ago, homo sapiens were labor. Slavery was a matter of economics. people of color and the poor—those that
the only humans remaining on Earth
and approximately 1,000 years later, we 100 Human Hours of Labor
fundamentally changed the way we lived
and fed ourselves and began, in earnest,
changing the planet in ways that will
likely be our undoing as a species.
When the glaciers receded at the end
of the last ice age 12,000 years ago and
the big game animals migrated north,
it left a dwindling food supply for our
hunter-gatherer ancestors in places like
the Middle East, leading to the birth of
agriculture and the domestication of
animals in lieu of hunting and gathering.
Jared Diamond, an American his-
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