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COULD YOU expand on the relationship between the rising price of oil and the rising price of food? THE PRICE of food and the price of oil are closely related. This is so because modern mechanized agriculture is heavily reliant on petroleum and petroleum-based products to generate the increased yields necessary to feed growing world populations and sustain the profits of giant agribusiness firms. Every piece of farm machinery is powered by gasoline or diesel, and most food crops are delivered many miles to market by oil-powered trucks, trains, planes or boats. Hence, when the price of oil rises, the cost of all these other activities rises as well. In addition, petroleum is the feedstock for many of the pesticides and herbicides and other products that are needed to produce modern "miracle" crops that possess little resistance to disease. These, too, have risen in price. On top of all this, croplands around the world have been turned over to production for ethanol for road transportation, reducing the crops grown for food and adding additional upward pressure on global food prices.

“In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”“The day is not far off,” Kennan concluded, “when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.”

As Kennan recognized, however, the maintenance of such a concentration of wealth often requires violent action. Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature's offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts—the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.