Food and KnowledgeThe need for food has always been a sharpgoad to human intelligencel For untoldages, man has applied his wits to gettingthings to eat. All his acumen in thisfield will be demanded by the end of thiscentury, when the world is expected to

have 2 billion more mouths to feed...

[] Food is so much a part of all existence that,unless they do not have enough of it, people paylittle attention to what it is or where it comes from.To the urban North American sitting down to hisChristmas dinner this year, it matters not at allthe turkey he will eat is a descendant of a bird ofthe pheasant family dating back 40 million yearsand first domesticated by the Aztecs of ancientMexico, or that he will be consuming a salubriousdose of potassium, phosphorous and iron alongwith his mashed potatoes. What matters is thatthere is good food and plenty of it, well-prepared.

But behind that traditional feast- and indeedalmost any meal in the developed world today-is a triumph of human ingenuity. Take the turkey:it is many, many times heavier than its Mexicanancestor thanks to scientific breeding and feedingpractices which, we are told, will soon result in aturkey as large as a pig. It reached our typicalNorth American home through a combination ofrefrigeration and mechanized transport which aman of a hundred years ago would have regardedas miraculous. Another near-miracle of engineer-ing was responsible for the electrical or naturalgas heat with which it is cooked.

To those who will enjoy that meal, it is next toinconceivable that any of its components couldever be unavailable. There is, for instance, noquestion of not being able to buy potatoes becauseblight or beetle infestations have wiped out the

crop. The supply of potatoes -- and of all the othercommon vegetables of North America -- is as reli-able as it is plentiful. Modern methods of cultiva-tion and disease and insect control have seen tothat.

Then there is the cooking. Without giving it apassing thought, the lady of the house has at hercommand a stock of ingredients, equipment andexpertise unknown to any but the premier masterchefs of a century ago. The most difficult feats ofculinary art in years past are now a matter ofroutine. By looking no further than the wrapper ofthe turkey, she can ascertain how long it should beroasted at what temperature, and, with a twist of adial, she can summon up precisely that tempera-ture. The spices she uses in the stuffing arrived onher cupboard shelves in good condition from the farcorners of the earth.

In short, that housewife and her family are thebeneficiaries of a fund of knowledge about how toraise and prepare food that has been accumulatingsince before history was ever recorded. The needfor food -- and palatable food at that -- has alwaysbeen a sharp goad to thought. It gave man hisfirst weapons, and thus set him on a different pathof development from his fellow creatures. It puthim to work at gaining control of his world.

It might be said that science got its start when acave-man noticed that a rhinoceros or buffalo bonehe had used for fuel in his fire yielded a juicy

marrow that was easier to extract and tasted betterthan the raw variety. This probably led him tothrow a chunk of meat in the fire to see if he gotsimilar results. Or cooking may have been dis-covered by accident when a piece of meat droppedin the fire and a cave-man recovered it. Either way,the eating of it was an essay in scientific research.

Certainly it was a considerable scientificachievement when, something like 11,000 yearsago, people learned how to extract food from whatappeared to be wild grasses. Someone had to con-ceive the notion that the tiny, hard, starchy grainshidden within the rough seed cases of wheat andbarley would be edible if they could be separatedfrom the chaff. Even when the grain was extractedfrom the husks by toasting, it was too hard and dryto be eaten, so it was then ground into flour andmixed with water to make a kind of porridge.Later, whether by accident or design, it was foundthat this stuff was transformed into somethingmore appetizing if it was flattened into a cake andlaid on a hot stone beside the fire to make it solidify-- and so there was bread.

A technological breakthroughinto man’s first power tools

According to Reay Tannahill in her most infor-mative and readable book Food in History (Steinand Day, New York, 1973), the first known villageswere formed around fields of wild grain in the Nearand Middle East even before the wheel was invent-ed. To save the toil of hauling the grain back totheir distant caves, people had to stay together inone place. The social organism we now call thecommunity then came into being, to be strength-ened and refined when the villagers banded togeth-er to defend themselves against invaders whocoveted their food but were less willing to settledown than they were. Thus hand-in-hand with thegenesis of society came the genesis of war.

The villagers had other competitors for food inaddition to hungry human marauders. These werethe wild animals that patrolled the fringes of thefields, eating up grain. In a classic exercise of

human wits, people tamed these animals, whichfurnished them with meat, skin clothing and cook-ing vessels, tallow for lamps, dung for fuel, milk,butter and cheese.

The harnessing of domestic animals can becounted as a signal technological breakthrough.As Dr. Tannahill points out, ~’The goat, sheep andox could be pressed into service as agriculturallabourers, made to sow seeds, pull the plough, andthresh the ripe grain. The barnyard animal be-came, in effect, man’s first power tool."

By then the world’s first farmer had arrived onthe scene -- the man or woman who realized thata crop would be more productive and predictableif it was planted in an orderly fashion. This wasprobably preceded by the adoption of the essentialagricultural practice of weeding--although insome cases weeds themselves, such as rye and to-matoes, were cleverly turned into domestic crops.

The world’s first teacher also may well haveoriginated with the dawn of agriculture. We canimagine a camp fire surrounded by primitive peo-ple communicating in grunts and sign languagewith a stranger who tells them about taming goatsor planting grain, perhaps handing them a fewseeds to try out. Archeological evidence suggeststhat the knowledge of farming spread quicklyamong the people who followed the cave-men. Itcould only have been carried by farmers and herds-men seeking new land who passed on their know-how to those they encountered on the way.

The only thing that tasted worsethan a mole was a blue-bottle fly

The spread of learning in general flourished withthe rise of trade and commerce. As soon as agricul-ture became widespread, there were surpluses offood which could be traded for the food that grewelsewhere. The world’s first businessmen werequick to catch on to this, and soon caravans andships were moving restlessly about the ancientworld trading food and other commodities. No

matter how hard they bargain, people who tradewith one another exchange more than the itemsbeing bartered; they tend to pool the best of theircultures and technologies. Mankind’s move intointellectual enlightenment was largely an indirectresult of the trade that began with food.

"He was a bold man that first ate an oyster,"wrote Dean Swift. Food has always stirred man’ssense of adventure. Obviously some of his gastro-nomical experiments must have ended in failure;he was a bold man that first ate a mushroom, too,and he may soon have been dead. But over thecenturies, by trial and error, people have succeededin finding an amazing number of things to eat anddrink, and ways of making them palatable. An as-siduous researcher into what can and cannot beeaten agreeably, a 19th century Englishmannamed Dr. Buckland, reported that the only thingthat tasted worse than a mole was a blue-bottle fly.

The trial and error approach to raising food gaverise to some very serious errors. The discovery ofirrigation sometime after 5000 B.C. proved a greatboon until farmers overdid it and leached too muchsalt from the soil; consequently vast stretches offormerly arable land in the Near East and Africaare deserts to this day.

But in the main, the story of food since ancienttimes has been one of intermittent progress. Theearly Romans observed that soil sown annuallywith the same crop became exhausted and startedto let land lie fallow for a year. Central Europeansin the Middle Ages improved upon this system byintroducing crop rotation, sowing one field in threewith legumes that had the effect of restoring thesoil. At about the same time an improved type ofplough opened up land that could not be used foragriculture with the old ploughs.

The knowledge of how to produce more andbetter food expanded over the centuries. Thescience of agronomy may have begun when someunknown farmer found that plants grew better ifhe covered the seeds with humus or manure. Sincethen incredible strides have been made in gettingmore out of the soil by various means.

One of the giants of agronomy was a Canadian,Sir Charles Saunders, who in 1904 perfected whathas been called "the most valuable plant in his-tory". This was a variety of wheat called Marquiswhich ripened early enough to avoid the sharpfrosts of the Canadian prairies. Saunders followedit up with other varieties that would grow in a coldclimate. Thanks mainly to him, western Canadahas become one of the world’s great granaries.

The fate of the human racemay depend on food expertise

In the current century the North American con-tinent has taken on the role of the earth’s chiefprovisioner. Recent advances in growing tech-niques, farm machinery and pest and disease con-trol have spurred breathtaking leaps in productivi-ty. The average North American farmer nowproduces enough food for something like 50 otherpeople. That is about 10 times as much as he wasable to supply 60 years ago.

Both Canada and the United States produce farmore food than their populations consume; togeth-er they account for two-thirds of the world’s cerealexports. But the food they produce is less valuableto the world than their knowledge of how to pro-duce it. In the long run, the fate of the human racemay depend on food-producing expertise.

This combination of skill and knowledge has al-ready accomplished much to save people in thedeveloping countries from a life of hunger. In the1940s the Rockefeller Foundation of New Yorksent an agronomist named George Harrar to Mexi-co, a mainly agrarian nation which suffered froma chronic shortage of food. Working with an inter-disciplinary team of agricultural scientists, Harrarset out to help Mexican farmers help themselves.Within a few years their work in plant-breeding,soil management, and crop loss control had.brought about an immense improvement in agri-cultural yields. In the early 1950s Colombia andChile adopted the Mexican program and exper-ienced a similar rise in productivity. In 1955 an

ambitious program modelled on the one in Mexicowas launched in India. From then on, the "GreenRevolution" spread around a hungry world.

’Do not give a man fish,teach him how to fish’

In 1970 the work that began with wheat andmaize was extended into rice with the founding ofthe International Rice Research Institute in Indo-nesia. Soon new strains of rice plants were intro-duced which multiplied yields by several times.Other research institutes have since been estab-lished in developing countries to deal with thecultivation of arid land, animal diseases and ani-mal husbandry. Throughout the Green Revolution,the emphasis has been on adapting to local condi-tions and training local people in new methods.The western scientists involved in it have heededthe old ChineSe saying, "Do not give a man fish,teach him how to fish.:’

Canadians have been active in the drive to pro-vide more prolific and nutritious foodstuffs forfuture generations. In 1975 the Royal Bank OfCanada’s annual $50,000 award for contributionsto human welfare went to two Canadian researchscientists, Dr. R. Keith Downey and Dr. Baldur R.Stefansson, for their work in developing rape-seedinto a reliable high protein food source. The resultsof their efforts in rape-seed breeding are now beingsuccessfully applied in various countries. ’~Theirdiscoveries will be of increasing importance tomankind as world population increases," said theChairman of the Royal Bank Award SelectionCommittee, the Honourable J. V. Clyne.

Although the Green Revolution has done won-ders, no one pretends that it is the whole solutionto the food problem which now faces humanity. Bythe end of this century, the world’s population isexpected to rise from 4 billion to 6 billion. To feedall these people adequately, huge new strides willhave to be made in a number of fields.

The distribution of food, in the broadest senseof the term, is in need of a radical improvement.

According to the Goals for Mankind, a 1977 studyfor the Club of Rome co-ordinated by Ervin Lazlow,the world output of grain is sufficient to give everyperson on earth an adequate diet. Yet as much as40 per cent of the world population suffers fromundernourishment. This is partly because peoplein the developing countries have too little grainwhile in the western world it is fed to animals toproduce meat.

At a recent meeting of the World Food Councilin Ottawa, Sol Lonowitz, Chairman of the U.S.Presidential Commission of World Hunger, calledfor a sharp re-ordering of international prioritiesto avert mass starvation in the balance of thiscentury. ~Because the world hunger problem isgetting worse rather than better, a major crisis liesahead unless a concerted effort is made to avertit," he said.

A major part of this campaign will be in therealm of technology, capitalizing on what is al-ready being done to expand production. There isgreat potential, as well as great challenge, inboosting the productivity of under-utilized land inthe developing countries up to somewhere nearNorth American and European norms. Sciencemay make it possible to open new lands to foodproduction in the same way as Saunders once madeit possible to grow wheat in the more northerlyreaches of western Canada. It may also be able todraw vast "crops" from sources other than land.

But science alone cannot be expected to do the job.Sharp improvements will also be needed in inter-national development, investment and trade prac-tices. In the realm of political and social policy,there is a basic need for better population control.

The concerted effort to provide an adequate dietfor all humanity obviously must be made; therecan be no question of that in this age of inter-national co-operation. This effort will tax humanknowledge, intelligence and determination to thefullest degree. But if history is any guide, the foodproblem can and will be beaten. It is a matter ofman applying as much and more intellectual ener-gy to the subject of food in the future as he has inthe past.