Around eleven thousand years ago, there was, Harari says, “a Faustian bargain between humans and grains” in which our humanity “cast off its intimate symbiosis with nature and sprinted towards greed and alienation”. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers.
The Agricultural Revolution enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, and allowed for more complex civilizations and cultures to form, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure time. Rather, it translated into population explosions, pampered elites, and the creation of empires. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return.