In all likelihood, Marie Antoinette never said ‘let them eat cake’ when she was told the people had no bread. Great story though. Royalty really did party a tad much, so it paints the image we want; an out of touch queen spending the royal coffers on the backs of starving peasants.
If the quote wasn’t made up entirely, it easily could have been word vomit from one of many dipshit royals shortly before they lost their head. Because few things are more consistently linked to civil unrest than the rising cost of bread.
Today’s Moment of Science… Bread or Guillotines, my new band name.
The history of agriculture has included multiple revolutions, each uniquely changing the way that humans interacted with food and making our access to calories more secure. We figured out how to throw seeds into dirt about twelve thousand years ago. It took another four goddamn thousand years to sort out irrigation. There’s evidence of oxen-drawn ploughs as early as 2,000 BCE. Then It was a bit of a slog from what I assume to be someone’s first attempt at sourdough during a Biblical plague until the Green Revolution in the twentieth century.
The full story of the Green Revolution and Norman Borlaug’s work in the mid-twentieth century is another full article. TL;DR, his research on improving grain yields has been credited with saving over a billion lives from starvation. A goddamn billion.
“You can’t build world peace on empty stomachs and human misery,” Borlaug famously said.
With the major improvements in crop yields, you’d think perhaps we’d be past things like famine and food riots.
You’d think that.
Unfortunately, all the technology in the world to produce calories cannot protect us from something proven to be technology proof: human douchebaggery. Economic instability, corruption, or the dictator next door deciding to do war crimes are some historic causes for why starving people take to the streets.
“But Mrs. Auntie SciBabe,” I hear you kvetch, “people surely go all VIVA LA REVOLUTION over non-bread related gripes.” Indeed, but skyrocketing cost of food- specifically grain- is such a firmly established cause of social upheaval that there are charts and shit.
A 2012 study in PLOS One listed “food scarcity and food price increases” as one of the leading causes of civil unrest. A paper from the New England Complex Systems Institute (NESCI) more or less said “we’ve found the exact point at which food prices lead to riots.” High food prices contributed to the Arab Spring. A few years earlier in 2008, food prices that broke the “way too goddamn many people can’t afford bread” threshold resulting in riots in over forty countries.
Looking at the FAO Food Price Index, current food prices are… on second thought, maybe don’t look at the FAO Food Price Index.
So what does that mean for you, person who hopefully has plenty of access to food right now?
Russia and Ukraine are responsible for approximately 30% of the world’s wheat exports. Exports of grains and other staples have temporarily been halted from both countries. This disproportionately affects their trading partners including Yemen, Egypt, and Cameroon which rely heavily on Russia and Ukraine for their calories. Effects of the war will continue to ripple across the planet, one of the first being empty stomachs and human misery.
If you’re not in a country facing potential famine, resist the temptation to hoard grain. It’s going to be more expensive, but there will be food.
If you are in a country facing major upheaval, I recommend the humble Molotov cocktail.
This has been your Moment of Science, forever incapable of sticking to the science.
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