ABSTRACT
Throughout almost all human existence, people ate what their immediate environment provided. For millions of years, ancestral humans lived solely by hunting and gathering. Agriculture arose some 11,000 years ago, but it remained very local and produced little surplus. Only in the last 2500 years have large segments of humanity farmed, traded food and relied on food produced far from their homes. Now a majority of the world’s people live in cities, producing virtually no food. Many of the rest live in areas dominated by monocrop or low-diversity agriculture. Subsistence farming is far from extinct, but has been pushed into marginal areas. Hunting-gathering has all but gone from many environments. Few people now eat what they produce. Urbanites have little chance, but even many rural residents are often landless farm workers or specialized producers of one or a few commodities for sale. Very few are diversified farmers who live off their lands.
