Spore society
Could the way we structure our societies – collectivist, individualist, authoritarian or liberal – be influenced by our diet?
Words by Heather Parry.
Illustration by Jack Snelling (detail above).
Ask a stranger on the street about the origin of their political beliefs, and they’ll probably tell you they've come to their convictions through evidence and argument. Ask them whether they've come to those convictions because of what they had for breakfast, though, and you’ll probably get a funny look. The idea that the way we live is linked to what we eat sounds both logical and not. Food and the growing of food is central to our existence, but most of us like to think that we have complete personal free will and that we arrive at our social and political positions through objective analysis. But food and politics are inextricably connected – think of the Brexit battles fought over fish, the class markers attached to olives, hummus and vegan sausage rolls – or the impact of Ed Miliband’s close encounter with a bacon butty on the campaign trail.
The connection, it seems, may go much deeper. Thomas Talhelm, Associate Professor of Behavioural Science at the University of Chicago, has suggested that cultures around the world derive their social structures from their primary source of nutrition.
He notes that in the global west, where wheat has long been our staple, we tend towards individualist cultures because wheat can be grown in isolation, on small plots of land. In Asian countries, however, where rice is the staple, collectivism is more common—because rice is a labour-intensive crop that requires co-operation between farmers to irrigate large swathes of land and to flood and drain their paddies at the same time.
Even our understanding of biological processes is led by what we consume. In the west, with the exception of blue cheese, mould has often been considered harmful; something to avoid. But in Asian cultures, mould is positive; a transformative material. In fact, fungi are at the heart of many staple ingredients in East Asian food cultures.
‘Qu’ is the term for the yeasts, bacteria and moulds which grow on grains and transform these tiny, individual things into whole food stuffs; namely soy, miso, sake and the other fermented soy products that Asian food cultures are based on. In Europe and North America, moulds spoil. In China, Japan and Indonesia, they bind, they transform, they make delicious. Moulds, which sporate to propagate themselves, create sustainable food products such as tempeh. And more than anything else, (some) moulds are delicious.
Tempeh is a traditional Indonesian food that’s created in three distinct stages. Legumes, usually soybeans, are partially cooked before they are acidified and fermented, first via lactic acid fermentation and then through inoculation with the mould Rhizopus oligosporus, which presents as white mycelia that grow into a fluffy, off-white dense mass as the process progresses.
Given the right conditions (enough, but not too much oxygen, moisture and heat), Rhizopus oligosporus grows rapidly on the acidified beans, producing releasing enzymes that make the legumes more easily digestible, bringing everything together in a block that’s ready to be sliced, stored and cooked three to four days later. This magical mould takes individual soybeans, changes them, binds them together. It takes disparate, inedible things and connects them to form a whole. Tempeh is a protein-rich alternative to meat, needs only a relatively brief cooking period, and produces, when consumed, an antibiotic that limits potentially harmful gut bacteria. It’s easy to see how this neatly fits into the cultural dichotomy between individualism and collectivism.
But perhaps it’s no longer appropriate to make these huge generalisations when it comes to cultural norms; things are never this neatly cleft. With globalisation has come cultural exchange, and that includes food choices. While China, for instance, has historically eschewed cow’s milk products in favour of soy, its booming middle class is now changing what it consumes. With the country’s demand for dairy currently growing at about 6% per year, it will be the world’s largest dairy market by 2022.
And in North America, foods from Asian countries are being embraced more than ever before; in the US, between 1999 and 2015, sales of Asian fast food rose 135%—and Asian grocers continue to make inroads into the American market. Yet this isn’t as recent as we sometimes believe. For those looking for an alternative to mass-market western foods, Asian agriculture has provided inspiration for over 50 years. Tempeh was introduced to the US in the 1970s, in part thanks to a Tennessee vegetarian collective called The Farm. This spiritual and farming community was dedicated to working out how to subsist on a more environmentally-friendly vegan diet than the offered by the mainstream. Cornell University research in the late 60s had shown that tempeh was one of the best vegetarian sources of vitamin B-12, which can otherwise be difficult to consume in adequate amounts outside of meat sources. One of the members of the collective had a PhD in biochemistry and had learned of tempeh’s potential, so set up a ‘soy dairy’ at The Farm, where intense experimentation would result in a tempeh shop and commercially-produced Rhizopus oligosporus starter. Several businesses were spun out over the next decade, spreading tempeh into the US.
It probably won’t come as a surprise that, during and after the Summer of Love and with large-scale protests against the Vietnam War ongoing, many in the US were starting to explore ways of existing in the world that were less extractive, less harmful, less based on the myth of American exceptionalism and individualism. What might come as a shock, however, is the fact that around the same time, an economic shift based on the principles of collectivism was on the verge of taking hold in America. In 1968, five prominent economists had written, on the front page of the New York Times, that “[t]he country will not have met its responsibility until everyone in the nation is assured an income no less than the officially recognized definition of poverty.”
A year later, universal basic income (UBI) pilots were running across the States, with results so positive that President Nixon (yes, Nixon) was on the verge of implementing UBI nationwide. Studies showed that these programs were affordable, did not reduce an individual’s will to work (a common conservative objection) and did not seem politically unfeasible. Almost all the hours of work ‘lost’ because of UBI were replaced by hours of education, and in one state the rate of high school graduations among those receiving UBI rose 30%. There seemed to be few downsides. However, not all were in support. The hardcore libertarian and Ayn Rand fan Martin Anderson, one of Nixon’s advisors, warned the president that collectivist measures like UBI led those on lower incomes towards idleness, and by undermining the importance of work, threatened capitalism — and, by extension, the American way. Nixon changed his mind — and began parroting lines about the importance of work and personal responsibility, repeating old myths about the unworthy poor.
Today, with wages stagnating, inequality accelerating and general standards of living falling, it’s hard not to wonder how different life in North America and Europe might look if Nixon had embraced this single policy, and provided political cover for similar schemes across the rest of the west. Though UBI pilots have recently been embraced in some European countries, and the conversation about the need for a global welfare system has picked up some steam, we exist now in place where individuals are often forced into huge amounts of personal debt with financial welfare systems more and more difficult to access. Individuals may struggle through to personal wealth, but this is extractive and often comes at the expense of others. We punish the poor at huge social cost, in both financial and ethical terms, when it would be more cost effective, more moral and more sustainable to look after everyone. We are tilling our own wheat fields without caring whether the crops of others flourish or fail; we are grasping upwards without looking over to see how our neighbours are faring. We need to embrace the qu – the things that bind us together and change us for the better, that make us as a group more sustainable, more enriched, and more beneficial for the health of the planet.
Growth necessitates change. Where individualism has failed, collectivism is the only viable alternative. We must find a way to come together to look after the group as a whole, rather than focusing on ourselves alone. It is time to learn a few lessons from mould.
Heather Parry is an author and journalist based in Glasgow.
