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Comment by sriacha | Hacker News Reader

Sad news. Highly recommend his "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States".

This was a great book. It seems less well-known in the HN-sphere than Seeing Like A State, but it's at least as good IMHO. It really changed my mental model of the dynamics of early states and "barbarians", and how agriculture interplayed with the story of how it all unfolded.

My one criticism was that when answering the question "why did people start eating grains", he never seemed to consider that it could simply be that people enjoy eating them.

I like that theory, its like how people today can't stop eating junk food even though they know its bad for them :) Maybe it was a plot by Uruk's Big-Ag pushing subsidized barley porridge on the masses and hijacking their gut-brain axis so they left their epicurean utopia in the marshes.

Now that I think about it a little more, that general idea fits into Scott's framework of the how the constraints of cultivation, specifically that what we cultivate domesticates us in turn.

Specifically grain being so calorie dense and pleasurable that we end up becoming beholden to its growth, with significant cost. Look at all the ideas permeating these days about dangers of high carb diets, this book [1] suggesting they make us stupid for example. Or about the link between metabolic disfunction and mental disorders [2]

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17333302-grain-brain?fro...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjEFo3a1AnI

Same. Such an incredible book.

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