Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

We often saw mother weeping to herself, and it was hard on a mother, not having any food to put on the table for her hungry children. Emaciated, starving children were often seen going from farm to farm, begging for a few crumbs of bread. One day three children came to us, crying and begging for something to still the pangs of hunger. Sadly, her eyes brimming with tears, our mother was forced to tell them that we had nothing but a few crumbs of bread which we ourselves needed. When we children saw the anguish in the unknown children’s supplicatory eyes, we burst into tears and begged mother to share with them what crumbs we had. Hesitantly she acceded to our request, and the unknown children wolfed down the food before going on to the next farm, which was a good way off from our home. The following day all three were found dead between our farm and the next.¹

The historian Fernand Braudel has documented that premodern Europe suffered from famines every few decades.² Desperate peasants would harvest grain before it was ripe, eat grass or human flesh, and pour into cities to beg. Even in good times, many would get the bulk of their calories from bread or gruel, and not many at that: in The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100, the economist Robert Fogel noted that “the energy value of the typical diet in France at the start of the eighteenth century was as low as that of Rwanda in 1965, the most malnourished nation for that year.”³ Many of those who were not starving were too weak to work, which locked them into poverty. Hungry Europeans titillated themselves with food pornography, such as tales of Cockaigne, a country where pancakes grew on trees, the streets were paved with pastry, roasted pigs wandered around with knives in their backs for easy carving, and cooked fish jumped out of the water and landed at one’s feet.

Today we live in Cockaigne, and our problem is not too few calories but too many. As the comedian Chris Rock observed, “This is the first society in history where the poor people are fat.” With the usual first-world ingratitude, modern social critics rail against the obesity epidemic with a level of outrage that might be appropriate for a famine (that is, when they are not railing at fat-shaming, slender fashion models, or eating disorders). Though obesity surely is a public health problem, by the standards of history it’s a good problem to have.

What about the rest of the world? The hunger that many Westerners associate with Africa and Asia is by no means a modern phenomenon. India and China have always been vulnerable to famine, because millions of people subsisted on rice that was watered by erratic monsoons or fragile irrigation systems and had to be transported across great distances. Braudel recounts the testimony of a Dutch merchant who was in India during a famine in 1630–31:

“Men abandoned towns and villages and wandered helplessly. It was easy to recognize their condition: eyes sunk deep in the head, lips pale and covered with slime, the skin hard, with the bones showing through, the belly nothing but a pouch hanging down empty. . . . One would cry and howl for hunger, while another lay stretched on the ground dying in misery.” The familiar human dramas followed: wives and children abandoned, children sold by parents, who either abandoned them or sold themselves in order to survive, collective suicides. . . . Then came the stage when the starving split open the stomachs of the dead or dying and “drew at the entrails to fill their own bellies.” “Many hundred thousands of men died of hunger, so that the whole country was covered with corpses lying unburied, which caused such a stench that the whole air was filled and infected with it. . . . In the village of Susuntra . . . human flesh was sold in open market.”⁴

But in recent times the world has been blessed with another remarkable and little-noticed advance: in spite of burgeoning numbers, the developing world is feeding itself. This is most obvious in China, whose 1.3 billion people now have access to an average of 3,100 calories per person per day, which, according to US government guidelines, is the number needed by a highly active young man.⁵ India’s billion people get an average of 2,400 calories a day, the number recommended for a highly active young woman or an active middle-aged man. The figure for the continent of Africa comes in between the two at 2,600.⁶ Figure 7-1, which plots available calories for a representative sample of developed and developing nations and for the world as a whole, shows a pattern familiar from earlier graphs: hardship everywhere before the 19th century, rapid improvement in Europe and the United States over the next two centuries, and, in recent decades, the developing world catching up.

Figure 7-1: Calories, 1700–2013