The Luxuries of Food Security

“Hunter-gatherer life isn’t sounding so bad.” Say what?

The utter naivety of this response is staggering. The fact that the response comes from someone who is well educated, and is an educator herself, raises all kinds of questions. How any individual could romanticize a hunter-gatherer lifestyle exceeds the realm of sane comprehension.

Here’s what’s wrong with this simplistic notion of a hunter-gatherers lifestyle.

• Let’s start with life expectancy. Over 40% of hunter-gatherers didn’t reach the age of 15. Of those that did, three-quarters lived to be 45 or older, middle-aged today (in other words one-third of all births lived to 45). The average life expectancy was between 21 and 37.
• How about environmental degradation? The reason hunter-gatherers were nomadic was that they had to move to find new sources of meat. A lack of local food sources certainly doesn’t correlate to environmental sustainability.
• Workdays for hunter-gatherers lasted as long as it took to kill an animal or gather enough plant material for food. If one was fortunate, a sufficient kill was made early in the day. Those less fortunate didn’t eat that day.
• Those not hunting to kill food spent their days scavenging for grasses, roots, fruits, seeds and nuts. Not easy or enjoyable in the Northern Hemisphere during the winter months.
• Better health outcomes were also brutally efficient, the healthy survived, the rest died.

If those that romanticize food production think the above realities of hunter-gatherer lifestyles are preferable, then I wish them well. I’ll gladly choose to have agriculture’s ability to provide diverse, healthy and nutritious foods. Agriculture has been so successful at providing food security that people now have the luxury to recline with full stomachs and ponder ridiculous ideas.