John_Yudkin_-_Pure_White_and_Deadly_revised_1986_OCR

Pure, White and Deadly
vation of cereals. This derived from the discovery that some of the
wild grasses whose seeds were occasionally eaten could yield many
times that amount of edible seeds if they were deliberately planted.
The domestication of these grasses produced the cereals that are
now the staple food of a large part of present-day human,ity and it
was followed or accompanied by the domestication of root crops,
and of wild animals that were used both for food and as animals of
burden.
The results of the discovery of agriculture - the Neolithic revolution
- were many and far-reaching. Human beings ceased being
nomads and began to live in settled socially organized communities.
This landmark of progress became the basis for all that we know of
civilization, with its arts, its inventions and its discoveries.
Compared with hunting and foraging, agriculture usually yielded
more food; it also allowed the cultivation of areas where existing
resources of food would have been inadequate. Thus the human
population grew, because fewer died of food shortage and because
people spread into increasing areas of the earth's surface. But in due
course the limits of food production again became the limits to the
numbers that could be fed. The inevitable pressure of popUlation
on food supplies tended to produce and stabilize a type of diet quite
different from that of our hunting ancestors. It was - and still is -
much easier to produce vegetable foods than animal foods; for a
given area of land, some ten times as many calories can be produced
in the form of cereals or root crops than in the form of meat,· eggs
or milk.
The effect of the Neolithic revolution was thus to alter the components
of the diet so that it was now rich in carbohydrate and poor
both in protein and in fat. The carbohydrate was overwhelmingly
starch, with sugars supplied only to a small extent as before by wild
fruits and vegetables. It is likely that deficiency of protein and of
many of the vitamins began to affect large sections of the human
species only after they became food producers.
Human beings, like all animals, constantly face recurring periods
of food shortage. Although the Neolithic revolution increased total
food supplies and radically changed the composition of our diet,
hunger and famine did not vanish. For most of the time, wind,
drought, flood and our own exploitation of the land have combined
to limit food production to levels lower than those necessary to feed
all our offspring. It is only in the last few decades that a sizeable
proportion of people - though still only a minority - have been born
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I eat it because I like it
into a situation where it is likely that they will never know real
hunger throughout their lives.
The reasons for this second revolutionary change are the cumulative
effects of science and technology. I need only list a few of these
to show the extent of this revolution and its effect upon the availability
of food to mankind: genetics and the breeding of improved
varieties of plants and animals for food; engineering and its effect
on drainage and irrigation; the discovery of synthetic fertilizers,
weed killers and pesticides; the internal combustion engine and its
effect upon transport by sea, land and air; modern methods offood
preservation by canning, dehydration, deep freezing. I could cite
many more examples of changes that have given humanity the possibility
of producing and preserving much more food than has ever
been available to any other species.
As a result, in the affluent countries a large proportion of the
popUlations has a very wide choice of foods, irrespective of season
or geography. The effect has been that these people are able more
and more to choose foods that please their palates, and not simply
foods that fill their stomachs. The first and most obvious result has
been an increase in the consumption of more palatable foods, such
as meat and fruit. And because of the basic association between
palatability and nutrition, there has come a simultaneous improvement
in the nutritional standards in these groups, just as there has
always been a better level of nutrition in the much smaller section
that comprises the wealthy members of any population.
The advances in agricultural techniques and general technology
have had an effect not only on the yield of food and the availability
of food. They have also had a tremendous effect on the way foods
can deliberately be changed by extractions and additions, so that
quite new foods can be made that do not exist in anything like these
forms in nature. Some of these manufactured foods have been in
existence for quite a long time - bread, for example, and tortillas
and chapatis and cakes and biscuits. But most of them have been
produced, or vastly improved, only in the past century or two or in
recent decades. I am thinking now of ice cream and soft drinks, an
enormous range of chocolate and confectionery, and new sorts of
snacks in the form of sweet and savoury biscuits. And there is now
a new range of 'meat' products made from textured vegetable or
microbial protein.
We can do all these things largely because nutritional value and
palatability are two different qualities. As I pointed out, although
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