Evan D.G. Fraser > Quotes

“...eating is the purest mode of consumption. Our purchases are statements about our social class, our friends, and our beliefs. Buying something as continually necessary as food is an ongoing act of self-definition.”
― Evan D.G. Fraser

“Eating connects us to our histories as much as it connects our souls to our bodies, our bodies to the earth.”
― Evan D.G. Fraser, Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilization

“Plutarch describes how this system worked in reality:

‘But when the wealthy men began to offer larger rents, and drive the poorer people out, it was enacted by law, that no person whatever should enjoy more than five hundred acres of ground. This act for some time checked the avarice of the richer, and was of great assistance to the poorer people, who retained under it their respective proportions of ground, as they had been formerly rented by them. Afterwards the rich men of the neighborhood contrived to get these lands again into their possession, under other people’s names, and at last would not stick to claim most of them publicly in their own. The poor… were thus deprived of their farms.’

Flushed with righteous zeal, Tiberius Gracchus ran for the office of tribune on a platform of redistributing land to the poor so they could fee themselves. The idea, though riotously popular with the plebs, horrified the plantation owners and their moneyed allies. Gracchus won the election, but… the patricians cried that Gracchus was exploiting those same masses to seize power and declare himself king.

...

On the day that Gracchus’s reforms were due for debate in the Curia Julia, the honorable gentlemen of the Senate arrived in a state of eagerness bordering on cannibal savagery… Again, Plutarch describes the scene:

‘Tiberius [Gracchus] tried to save himself by flight. As he was running, he was stopped by one who caught hold of him by the gown; but he threw it off, and fled in his under-garments only. And stumbling over those who before had been knocked down, as he was endeavoring to get up again, Publius Satureius, a tribune, one of his colleagues, was observed to give him the first fatal stroke, by hitting him upon the head with the foot of a stool. The second blow was claimed, as though it had been a deed to be proud of, by Lucius Rufus. And of the rest there fell above three hundred, killed by clubs and staves only, none by an iron weapon.”
― Evan D.G. Fraser, Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilization

“Archaeologists have proven that nearly every early agricultural center suffered a plunge in the quality of diet as the farmers switched from fresh meat and vegetables to gruel made from the seeds from grass plants. Apart from the loss of pleasure, the new menu caused tooth decay – no small misery in the predentistry era.”
― Evan D.G. Fraser, Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilization

“The litany of farmhouse pains goes on. Diseases like tuberculosis and bone inflammations were part of the new lifestyle, incubating in cramped rooms that lacked fresh air and spread by agriculturalists’ habit of mingling with livestock. Worse, the actual farmwork ground away the laborers’ joints and contorted their backs. Worst of all, while hunter-gatherers had to work an average of twenty hours per week, farmers toiled for an inhumane forty to sixty hours.”
― Evan D.G. Fraser, Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilization

“Furthermore, the agricultural revolution stunted children’s growth rates. An analysis of juvenile long bones from Neolithic sites shows declines in length and density over the periods when farming took root. Hunter-gatherer skeletons are far more strapping than those of settled laborers, and it’s only since the Industrial Revolution that we’ve regained the stature of our ancestors from ten thousand years ago.”
― Evan D.G. Fraser, Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilization