IP Blog

Until this day, society as a whole enjoys to eat and eat, and then eat again. Our ancestors and predecessors were no different from us. This one factor proves to be the most important proximate cause that led to food production, a lack of food. Jared Diamond relays this fact to us throughout his enticing book, Guns, Germs, and Steel.  “All these considerations make it clear that we should not suppose that the decision to adopt farming was made in a vacuum, as if the people had previously had no means to feed themselves”(109). With this statement, Diamond implies that an underlying cause of food production happens to be a lack of food. Hunter-gatherers could not sustain themselves or their families with the amount of food they were collecting which drove an abundance of them to become farmers. Food production tends to lead to increased population densities because it yields more edible calories per acre than does hunter-gathering cites a perfect in-between the lines example Diamond provides(111). The subject at hand is food production, but when the text is read in-between the lines, Diamond implies the lack of food for a set population drove them into food production.

Diamond believes that there are five proximate causes for the development of food production; they are a decrease in wild foods, an increase in domesticable plants, the introduction of new technology, a rise in population density, and the spread of food production from other areas (109-112). Does something jump out at you? because it hit me in the stomach, no pun intended. People need food in order to survive, and if there wasn’t a lack of food, food production wouldn’t have happened at all because hunter gatherers would have been self sufficient and never thought of living a life as a farmer. “The lifestyle of hunter-gatherers has become increasingly less rewarding over the past 13,000 years, as resources on which they depended have become less abundant or even disappeared”(110). Diamond hits the nail on the coffin with this statement. Hunter-gatherers goes a little in depth about the extent of what kinds of tools they used and how they lived, and when I begin to realize how primitive they were, it puzzles me how even thousands of years ago they weren’t looked at as primitive people. Farming, yet when I look at this, even the most basic farming topples hunter-gathers’ primitive technology.  Just looking at the facts, farming was the way to go, and food production sky rocketed because these people made that profound decision.

With my last words, I plan to exemplify that a lack of wild foods was the one most important proximate cause. People have to be driven to do something that is not in their normal lifestyles. When people cannot survive because they do not have enough to eat, they are forced to produce food. “From those precursors of food production already practiced by hunter-gatherers, it developed stepwise” shows that gathering food was not sufficient enough to begin with, and hence again, lack of food prevailed as a main cause (109). Looking at the other proximate causes, they all scaffold onto the main cause, lack of food. Depletion of wild game fits under lack of food because they are basically stating the same concept but instead involve animals as the lack of food. Development of technology would not even be a factor if the population never evolved into a farming society. Human population density is another cause, but is just a branch of lack of food. Isn’t it obvious that the more people the more food you need? The last proximate cause is the spread of food production, but this seems pointless as a proximate cause because it is just a restatement of what has already happened. How can you use a word to define itself? This leaves a lack of wild foods to be the number one reason of the rise and spread of domesticables. Diamond tells us that the few that remained hunter-gatherers only did so because it was unsuitable for them to farm on the harsh lands they resided on (113). Closing my blog, I firmly believe lack of wild foods was the key proximate factor in the spread and rise of food production.

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