Holman

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“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

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“Because when he returns, Richard, he would be the biggest man in town. He wants revenge on his childhood. He wants the respect of the town. Saint Paul tells us that when we were children we spoke as children, we understood and thought as children but when we become men we put away childish things, but I’m not so sure we ever do put them away. I think the childish things linger on, and your brother craves what he wanted as a child, the respect of his home town”
― Bernard Cornwell, Fools and Mortals

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“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

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“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

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“Evening in the garden of the Askanischer Hof. Ate
rice a la Trautmannsdorf and a peach. A man drinking
wine watched my attempts to cut the unripe little peach with my knife. I couldn’t. Stricken with shame under the old man’s eyes, I let the peach go completely and ten times leafed through Die Fliegenden Blatter. I waited to see if he wouldn’t at last turn away. Finally I collected all my strength and in defiance of him bit into the completely juiceless and expensive peach.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

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