The “orthodox” theory of plant and animal domestication revolves around the idea that the first humans began as hunters and gathers and eventually progressed into the current economic state as a result of “forced” change due to “stress” e.g. climate change, overpopulation, etc. The orthodox theory also notes that there were various areas of independent invention in several countries worldwide from 8,000 to 12,000 BCE. The orthodox theory was also the end of the last glacial epic, or last time when people were solely dependent on hunting for food production. One societal change that is a result of the orthodox theory is the Fertile Crescent, a region containing the comparatively moist and fertile land of otherwise arid and semi-arid Western Asia, the Nile Valley and Nile Delta of northeast Africa and the origin of the earliest domesticated plants and …show more content…
According to our class lecture and Michael Polland’s article, No Bar Code, industrial agriculture is the process of growing harvesting, and processing food. According to Polland, “the industrial agriculture industry has bombarded us with the message that all pork is pork, all chicken is chicken, eggs eggs, even though we all know that can't really be true” and because of this ignorance, people begin to make different kinds of buying decisions that are usually motivated by criteria other than just price. One example of industrial agriculture that we discussed in class is monoculture. Monoculture, or the practice of growing single crops intensively on a very large scale is a technological production system developed after World War II that depends on huge amounts of pesticide and fertilizer usage to protect the production fields. The heavy use of the chemicals has major environmental effects such as soil depletion and erosion, global warming and dead zones, and wildlife and human health