Against The Grain
Richard Manning
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2005 North Point Press
ISBN: 0865477132

How agriculture has hijacked civilization.

Richard Manning offers a dramatically revisionist view of recent human evolution, beginning with the vast increase in brain size that set us apart from our primate relatives & brought an accompanying increase in our need for nourishment.

For 290,000 years, we managed to meet that need as hunter-gatherers, a state in which Richard Manning believes we were at our most human & “humane”: at our smartest, strongest, most sensually alive -- perhaps at our most “innocent” & unpolluted. & if you think our nomadic ancestors were misshapen & ill-fed, think again!

What changed? We were seduced into the sedentary way of life by “secure” sources of food. Grains we could harvest & learn to process to fill our bellies on a predictable time table. That attraction set us upon the agricultural experiment that has been the 10,000 year history of our global past, no matter where on earth we dwelt & which “grain” we grew.

While the Evolutionary road of our world is littered with “failed” experiments, Richard Manning suggests that agriculture, as we have practiced it, runs against both our grain & nature's.

Drawing on the work of anthropologists, biologists, archaeologists, & philosophers, along with his own travels, he argues that our ecological ills -- overpopulation, erosion, pollution, malnutrition -- & our social & emotional malaise are rooted in the devil's bargain we made in our not-so-distant past.

That having been said Against The Grain is so much more than a dry & dusty treatise on where we took which fork & landed in the beggars' bowls of famine, disease & poverty. One of Richard Manning's motifs is his reference to our almost universal answer to “why”, is that things are “just so”, as in Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. Richard Manning isn't willing to submit to that panacea. After you've read Against The Grain, neither will you!

Another motif is Richard Manning's telling of his personal lifestyle. His ideas about hunting in his neck of the woods, & the questions that set him on the paths of his research.

It was always difficult for me, as a learning child, to go from the immense opulence & wealth of the upper class English to the dismal, drear greyness of post-WWII poverty, without wondering what was wrong with that picture. Against The Grain unlocked the door.

I never understood how people who farmed: raised crops, bred kind, milked cows & such, were land rich & money poor. Against The Grain pushed open the door so I could see for myself.

I couldn't grasp why there were so many hungry people in lands of such wealth. Against The Grain turned on the light & explained why what we eat doesn't feed us, it simply fuels us the better to labor to make wealth for others.

You should see my copy of Against The Grain. I rarely scribble in margins & highlight paragraphs anymore, this time I simply had to, as well as stop & think about how agriculture has transformed us as a species, no matter where on earth we lived, & how the few of us who governed the harvesting, storage, transportation & distribution of our perishable commodities have kept us hungry. Suddenly, what Marie Antoinette uttered during the French Revolution takes on an entirely different hue.

Let's go back into our distant past to the diaspora of our progenitors who were all hunters & gatherers, & the catastrophic clash between Neanderthals & Cro-Magnons. We like to cast blame for genocides, like the asteroid we've decided brought about the end of the highly successful dinosaurs. So who did in the most successful of all hunter/gatherers ... the Cro-Magnons? That's a segment of our history we tend to shun because ... it was the Sedentists = us! Tribes of people who decided to stay put, settle down & grow our own crops & raise our own cattle & own our land & foul our own water. The farmers drove out the hunters & gatherers, slowly & everso surely, by transforming the earth so it would no longer support the wild & the nomadic.

Against The Grain explains the following:
 • glaciation & how animals & plants spread around the globe.
 • how the dandelion became international.
 • who the Basque-speaking people are & why they are to be treasured, instead of exterminated.
 • what catastrophe does to our world & is a consistent condition that works to keep our fangs & claws sharp.
 • the intimate interfacing between agriculture & disease, wealth & poverty.
 • how wheat, rice, maize & potatoes have been both the foundations of great empires & the source of their demise.
 • how bison, horses, oxen, cows, sheep, pigs, rats, flies & fleas were transformed by our change in lifestyle.
 • what floods really do.
 • how virgin soil epidemics have sown plagues among us.
 • how hunger became a way of life in agricultural societies & famine a creation of farming.

I like Richard Manning's vast perspective. It's as if you are standing with him on his hilltop in Montana & watching the panoply of history unfurl before you as he connects the dots of our story.

If you read no other history book this year, pick up Against The Grain & sit with it for a while. You will not look at the food on your plate, the vittles in your fridge, the produce at the supermarket, nor the vast fields of amber grains the same way. & you might just find yourself mourning for a different way of life, one closer to the earth, closer to the dignity & inexpressible communion with this planet we call home.

Absolutely outstanding!

More from Richard Manning:
Last Stand: Logging, Journalism, and the Case for Humility
A Good House: Building a Life on the Land
Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie
One Round River: The Curse of Gold and the Fight for the Big Blackfoot
Food's Frontier: The Next Green Revolution
Inside Passage: A Journey Beyond Borders.
(04/24/05)

Rebecca