Omnivory: Eat It All!

I’ve had a couple of thought-provoking experiences lately.  First, Huckleberry commented on my original Omnivory Month post that it was probably harder to do this in March.  Second, a friend told me she’d heard February and March referred to as Starvation Season, because in the old days, if you hadn’t (literally) salted away enough food in your smokehouse, if you hadn’t stocked your root cellar adequately, you were gonna be hurting until late spring.

Huckleberry’s comment got me thinking about how we tend to think that variety in our diet is provided by plants - when the snow covers the ground, and plants are scarce, variety is harder to come by.  And I certainly noticed in the first two weeks of Omnivory Month that in our agricultural world, where most of our food is provided by domesticated species, there are lots and lots more domesticated plant species available than domesticated animal species.  But what about wild animals and wild plants?  Apparently the numbers are relatively similar - 250,000+ for plants, about 240,000 for animals.  Of course, I have no idea how many of those are edible to humans.  (All living things are edible to some other living thing, I guess.)  In any case, when I read what Huckleberry wrote, I started to wonder if eating a wider variety of animal species could be a kind of insurance against the lack of variety in winter and early spring.  It’s not foolproof, mind you - some animals hibernate, and ultimately the whole food chain relies on photosynthesis, so food is always going to be somewhat more limited when plants are scarce.  But there are more kinds of food, and just plain more food, available in winter if you eat animals, wild or domesticated, than if you stick to plants.  Sort of Diet for a Small Planet in reverse - when plants are scarce, eating animals is not a bad idea.

To my friend’s comment I replied, “What, people didn’t hunt and fish a hundred years ago?”  Her observation seemed to be truer in a strictly agricultural society than in a society with some hunting or gathering behaviors.  While it’s true that hunter-gatherers still have to deal with the same wintertime scarcity issues I described above, those scarcity issues are counterbalanced by the fact that hunter-gatherers eat many, many more different species than agriculturists do.  I would guess that makes them less vulnerable to shortages of one species.  The most extreme example:  a plague of insects that eat a crop would be a disaster to an agriculturist, who would do everything possible to keep the insects at bay.  But hunter-gatherers would consider the insects themselves to be a tremendous windfall of delicious food.  (I understand cicadas are mighty tasty.)  Closer to home, I’ve certainly eaten snails (this month, actually, which gives me two omnivory points, one for the species and one for wild).  Many people consider snails to be a garden pest.  Omnivory, then, is a pretty clever evolutionary survival mechanism - if something eats your lettuce, there’s no need to despair.  Just eat the thing that ate the lettuce.  The koala is screwed if the eucalyptus equivalent of Dutch elm disease strikes; but it’s hard to imagine what kind of food shortage could wipe out bears or raccoons.  Reduce populations, maybe, but wipe them out completely?

It reminded me a little bit of Socrates, in one of the Platonic dialogues, talking about how writing made us less smart, because we stopped needing to use our memories.  The conventional wisdom is that agriculture was a great benefit to humans because it increased the amount of available food.  But I wonder if that’s really true.  Did agriculture actually make us more helpless by making us dependent on domesticated species to the exclusion of wild foods?