{"id":4670,"date":"2019-10-15T16:10:14","date_gmt":"2019-10-15T16:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/?p=4670"},"modified":"2019-10-15T16:10:21","modified_gmt":"2019-10-15T16:10:21","slug":"300-pages-of-calling-wheat-a-fascist-slate-star-codex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/15\/300-pages-of-calling-wheat-a-fascist-slate-star-codex\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;300 pages of calling wheat a fascist&#8221; | Slate Star Codex"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Review of James C Scott&#8217;s <em>Against the Grain<\/em> (Scott is the author of <cite>Seeing Like a State<\/cite>):<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"background:rgb(255,255,255); border:0px; margin:0px0px24px; padding:0px; vertical-align:baseline; color:rgb(51,51,51); font-family:Verdana,sans-serif; font-size:12px; font-style:normal; font-variant-ligatures:normal; font-variant-caps:normal; font-weight:400; letter-spacing:normal; orphans:2text-indent:0px; text-transform:none; white-space:normal; widows:2; word-spacing:0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width:0px; text-decoration-style:initial; text-decoration-color:initial; text-align:left;\">Sumer just before the dawn of civilization was in many ways an idyllic place. Forget your vision of stark Middle Eastern deserts; in the Paleolithic the area where the first cities would one day arise was a great swamp. Foragers roamed the landscape, eating everything from fishes to gazelles to shellfish to wild plants. There was more than enough for everyone; \u201cas Jack Harlan famously showed, one could gather enough [wild] grain with a flint sickle in three weeks to feed a family for a year\u201d. Foragers alternated short periods of frenetic activity (eg catching as many gazelles as possible during their weeklong migration through the area) with longer periods of rest and recreation.<\/p>\n<p style=\"background:rgb(255,255,255); border:0px; margin:0px0px24px; padding:0px; vertical-align:baseline; color:rgb(51,51,51); font-family:Verdana,sans-serif; font-size:12px; font-style:normal; font-variant-ligatures:normal; font-variant-caps:normal; font-weight:400; letter-spacing:normal; orphans:2text-indent:0px; text-transform:none; white-space:normal; widows:2; word-spacing:0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width:0px; text-decoration-style:initial; text-decoration-color:initial; text-align:left;\">Intensive cereal cultivation is miserable work requiring constant toil with little guarantee of a good harvest. Why would anyone leave this wilderness Eden for a 100% wheat diet?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/slatestarcodex.com\/2019\/10\/14\/book-review-against-the-grain\/\">https:\/\/slatestarcodex.com\/2019\/10\/14\/book-review-against-the-grain\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Review of James C Scott&#8217;s Against the Grain (Scott is the author of Seeing Like a State): Sumer just before the dawn of civilization was in many ways an idyllic place. Forget your vision of stark Middle Eastern deserts; in the Paleolithic the area where the first cities would one day arise was a great [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-1dk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4670"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4671,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4670\/revisions\/4671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}