Introduction

Growing, procuring and eating food, argued American historian Donald Worster, has been humanity’s ‘most vital, constant and concrete’ connection to the natural world. Exploring our relationships between ecology, culture and food production, he urged, ‘must be one of the major activities’ of the emerging field of environmental history’. ¹ More than two decades after the publication of those words, the question of how we feed the world without destroying it is as pressing as ever. The weight of the challenges we face grows each year: peak soil, peak oil, peak water, peak phosphate, obesity, inequality, soil erosion, river degradation, commodity speculation, species extinctions, food riots and a billion people hungry. What does it mean to live at a time when the way we feed ourselves threatens the social and ecological fabric of the planet? This is a conversation in which we must continue to participate, and this book is just one contribution to that ongoing dialogue. It offers a perspective from history in a recently colonised, food surplus- producing nation, a place that possesses a fraught and complex relationship with its ecology.