My wife and I planted a vegetable garden while under quarantine. It was really hard work. We were sore for two days. Ice, Advil, groaning. You know that bumper sticker “No farms, no food”? If the shift to farming had been up to me, we’d still be hunter-gatherers. I’d be like, “Fuck it. Do you know how hard it’s going to be to keep up with the weeds? Gimme a spear.”
And sure, hunting and gathering was hard. The good food was really fast and could probably kill you while you’re trying to kill it. But then how come we nearly wiped out buffalos? Why do we have endangered species list? Now we gawk at those same deadly beasts from the other side of plexiglass at the zoo. And do you know why? The Second Amendment. My bumper sticker says “No guns, no food.”
Why did we waste all that time learning how to farm instead of learning how to build a flintlock? I’ll bet we were really close to inventing it too when some idiot said, “Hey, look at all this zucchini I grew right here in my backyard! Now we don’t have to gather!!” And we all dropped our forged iron and sat down to a nice zucchini bread.
Suddenly we didn’t have to gather. But nobody stopped to think...what about hunting? Who’s going to hunt if we’re all here pulling weeds and flicking bugs off the basil?
And that’s when we lost our edge. We didn’t have to go anywhere because lunch was in the backyard. We didn’t have to chase down animals so exercise went out the window. Where do you think the term “couch potato” comes from? Some guy’s wife was hauling in a sack of potatoes from the backyard when she dropped them on the couch next to him. “Are you going to sit there like a potato all day or are you going to go hunt something?!”
“Why would I risk my life chasing down a dangerous beast when we’ve got all this food right here in the backyard? You got a problem with being vegetarians now?
It took us thousands of years to get back on track and build a rifle to pick off a wildebeest across the savannah. Do you realize how much harder it is to grow a tomato than to pull a trigger? There’s tilling the soil, cutting fish heads for fertilizer, planting the seed, fencing in the garden, watering, weeding, watering, weeding watering...for 45-60 days to get one tomato. That’s why there are no tomatoes on the endangered species list.
