IMNSHO

 

I decided to pick on agriculture tonight.

I will posit that grain farming is the great reset of the deep past and is the revolution that enabled so much misery on the earth.

What in the world makes me say that you may ask.  From grain in abundance, we get jolly bread and beer and cookies and cake! Surely no one could object.

It’s well known that the skeletons of nomadic ancients were taller and more robust and had better teeth.  These people lived on meat and whatever edible plants they could gather. After about ten thousand years ago, after the agricultural reset, the skeletons are shorter and have bad teeth.

(Remember how in the Garden, the Lord accepted Abel’s sacrifice of the best of his flocks, but not Cain’s plant offering?  I think there is a ghost of something historical in that. Cain ended up condemned to a life of farming, didn’t he? Or maybe it was just wandering, away from his farm!)

Grain farming both allowed and required organization and even government because it required many hands to successfully grow and then care for the crops.  The life of a shepherd or a hunter was solitary and to succeed did not require the organization of a bunch of people.

From this reset we get psychotic thugs and war lords and big boss men.  It all follows from there.  Tribes, villages, towns, kingdoms, and nations.  Wars and deviltry of all kinds.

Why did farming catch on like it did?  Well, wheat or barley or corn or whatever are easier to catch, and infinitely easier to store. (This is where our relationship with cats comes in!)  In addition to that, kind of like the old concept of original sin, mankind loooooooooves starches, beer and sweets.  This stuff was like crack to historical flesh eaters, who didn’t get much in the way of carbohydrates normally.

We love carbs so much that we have just about built our whole world around them.  In fact, it’s hard to imagine a modern world built on flocks or herds instead.  For one thing there would not be the numbers of people we have now.  One of the results of the reset was a greater number of births.  The women were chubbier and more fertile. It’s true!

That’s it in a nutshell.  I know, I know.  I am descended from farmers too.  We love farmers and we are not going to change all that now.  But we could eat more like shepherds or hunters and gatherers and be healthier and stronger for it. 

Our Lord referred to himself as a Shepherd, not a farmer!

 

lol!!