The Crop That Enslaved Us

You are kneeling in a field that does not exist yet. The grass is wild and chest-high and the seeds fall where they want. You reach up and strip a handful into your palm — small, hard, gold — and you eat them standing up, the way your mother did, the way her mother did, all the way back to a time before anyone was keeping count. This is the last morning of the old world. Tomorrow, or some tomorrow very close to this one, someone will do something different. They will keep a few seeds back. They will press them into broken earth. They will wait. And in that waiting, something will change that has never been reversed. Within a few thousand years — barely a breath in the life of the species — your descendants will be shorter than you, their bones bent from the same motion performed ten thousand times a day. Their teeth will be rotting from a diet of almost nothing but grain. They will get sick in crowds, because they now live in crowds, because the field demands it. They will fight wars to protect the surplus, because there is now a surplus to lose. They did not choose agriculture. Agriculture chose them — the way any good trap works, by offering exactly what you need most, just before it closes. The plant is still here. It covers more of the Earth than any forest. You probably ate some this morning.