The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [65]
But it is upon the grass, mediator of soil and sun, that the human gaze has always tended to settle, and not just our gaze, either. A great many animals, too, are drawn to grass, which partly accounts for our own deep attraction to it: We come here to eat the animals that ate the grass that we (lacking rumens) can’t eat ourselves. “All flesh is grass.” The Old Testament’s earthy equation reflects a pastoral culture’s appreciation of the food chain that sustained it, though the hunter-gatherers living on the African savanna thousands of years earlier would have understood the flesh-grass connection just as well. It’s only in our own time, after we began raising our food animals on grain in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (following the dubious new equation, All flesh is corn), that our ancient engagement with grass could be overlooked.
Or should I say partly overlooked, for surely our abiding affection for the stuff—reflected in our scrupulously tended lawns and playing fields, as well as in the persistence of so many forms of grassy pastoral, in everything from poetry to supermarket labels—expresses an unconscious recognition of our one-time dependence. Our inclination toward grass, which has the force of a tropism, is frequently cited as a prime example of “biophilia,” E. O. Wilson’s coinage for what he claims is our inherited genetic attraction for the plants and animals and landscapes with which we coevolved.
Certainly I was feeling the pull of the pastoral that summer afternoon on Joel Salatin’s farm; whether or not its wellsprings were in my genes who can really say, but the idea does not strike me as implausible in the least. Our species’ coevolutionary alliance with the grasses has deep roots and has probably done more to ensure our success as a species than any other, with the possible exception of our alliance with the trillion or so bacteria that inhabit the human gut. Working together, grass and man have overspread much of the earth, far more of it than would ever have been possible working alone.
This human-grass alliance has, in fact, had two distinct phases, taking us all the way from our time as hunter-gatherers to agriculturists, or, to date this natural history as the grasses might, from the Age of Perennials, like the fescues and bluegrass in these pastures, to the Age of Annuals, such as the corn George Naylor and I had planted in Iowa. In the first phase, which began when our earliest ancestors came down out of the trees to hunt animals on the savanna, the human relationship with grass was mediated by animals that (unlike us) could digest it, in much the same way it still is on Joel Salatin’s postmodern savanna. Like Salatin, hunter-gatherers deliberately promoted the welfare of the grasses in order to attract and fatten the animals they depended upon. Hunters would periodically set fire to the savanna to keep it free of trees and nourish the soil. In a sense, they too were “grass farmers,” deliberately nurturing grasses so that they might harvest meat.
So at least it appeared to us. Regarded from the grasses’ point of view the arrangement appears even cleverer. The existential challenge facing grasses in all but the most arid regions is how to successfully compete against trees for territory and sunlight. The evolutionary strategy they hit upon was to make their leaves nourishing and tasty to animals who in turn are nourishing and tasty to us, the big-brained creature best equipped to vanquish the trees on their behalf. But for this strategy to succeed the grasses needed an anatomy that could withstand the rigors of both grazing and fire. So they developed a deep root system and a ground-hugging crown that in many cases puts out runners, allowing the grasses to recover quickly from fire and to reproduce even when grazers (or lawnmowers) prevent them from ever flowering and going to seed. (I used to think we were dominating the grass whenever we mowed the lawn, but in fact we’re playing right into its strategy for world domination, by helping