Aquatic Ape again

Ok starting again on the aquatic ape theory, we humans have some exceptional adaptations over other great apes. Its not just the more famous differences like having an opposable thumb, or the fact that we can walk in an uopright posture for a sustained period of time but many smaller adaptations which we dont really see as unique for our species. Heres a list of the various adaptations.

Bipedalism

Almost hairless skin

Increased subcutaneous fat

Descended larynx

Vestigial webbing between the finger

Vernix caseosa

Hooded nose

Muscular nostril aperture control

The philtrum

Voluntary breath control

Greasy skin with an abundance of sebaceous glands

Large Penis

Sweating

Tears

and yes

Missionary position for mating

Now lets have a look at each of them specifically. 

Bipedalism

Bipedalism is a rare characteristic in the animal kingdom and humans are the only mammals to walk and run on two legs habitually. There must have been very strong selection pressures for it to have evolved. Bipedalism predates the earliest found tools by about one million years. Bipedalism also predates the significant increase in brain size that was most likely needed for the manufacture of tools. The regular use of stone tools and the increase in brain capacity are believed to first appear with the species Homo Habilis 2.4 million years ago.

Bipedalism in the human lineage has been dated to roughly four million years ago. 

Many who study human evolution believe that none of the “savannah theories” provide sufficiently strong selection pressures to outweigh the many disadvantages of bipedalism in the savannah environment. As well as all the muscular remodelling that was necessary, the change to bipedalism altered the angle of the birth canal in females resulting in a more difficult mode of giving birth. Our hearts work harder to pump blood around our bodies due to the enhanced gravitational pull on blood returning from the legs.

In 1960 Professor Sir Alister Hardy proposed that we must have had an aquatic phase in our evolution. He suggests that at an early stage of hominid evolution, early in the fossil gap, the area of land inhabited by a group of hominids became flooded. Morgan later suggested that this area was the Afar triangle/Danakil desert, which is a low lying area known to have been flooded at this time. This flooding would have lead to an environment of flooded forests, islands and mangrove swamps. Hominids living here would have spent a lot of time in the water, probably coming to rely on it for the abundant and nutritious food sources it contained.

When wading in water there are obvious advantages to being bipedal, the major one being that one can walk further in without drowning. A bipedal posture also presents less resistance when walking through water and means that one can look down to the ground for food without needing to be completely submerged.

There is some evidence from the behaviour of the probocis monkey that water tends to promote bipedalism. They live in the mangrove swamps of Borneo, are good swimmers and walk into water on two legs. They have even been observed walking bipedally when on land.

Hail loss

Humans are considered primates. This order includes apes, monkeys, and lemurs. There are hundreds of living primate species, but only humans are naked. Naked mammals are known to evolve in two kinds of habitat: A subterranean one or a wet one. All other non-human mammals that have lost their fur are either swimmers (whales, dolphins, manatees, walruses, etc.) or wallowers (pigs, tapirs,  hippopotamuses, etc.). Even the elephant and rhino show signs of a watery past, and will wallow whenever they can. 

Some scientists suggest that humans became hairless to prevent themselves from overheating in the savannah. But no other mammal has ever needed to do this. A convering of hair can act as a defense against the heat of the sun. That is why even desert-dwelling mammals, like the camel, kept their fur. Another suggestion is "to make sweat-cooling possible", but many species use sweat-cooling effectively without losing their hair. 

For a savannah primate, hairlessness would create a serious problem. Primate infants are carried around by holding onto their mothers' fur; the females would be severely slowed during foraging if that was no longer possible. There is one simple conclusion that can explain this: Although the best insulation for land mammals is a fur coat, the best insulation in water is a layer of fat.

Sub cutaneous fat

Humans are, without question, the fattest primates. Our bodies contain ten times more fat cells than would be expected in an animal of our size.

The two kinds of animals which often have large deposits of fat: Hibernating ones (the fat is seasonal, like with bears) and aquatic animals (the fat is there all year round, like with humans); most of the fat in land mammals is usually stored around the kidneys and intestines. In aquatic mammals (and humans) a lot of it is stored under the skin. This is why humans can gain a lot of weight in a short amount of time, while other land mammals (like a retired race horse) that don't get a lot of exercise will only gain a few pounds.

It would be very unlikely for humans to develop this feature after moving to the savannah and becoming hunters. If a land predator becomes too fat, it will become slow. It cannot afford to gain weight. The tendancy of humans to gain weight probably came from an earlier aquatic past. It's true that some apes may put on weight if they live in captivity, but there are two differances:

(1)     All infant primates are very slender, with almost no fat. There lives depend on how well they can cling to their mothers and support their whole weight with their fingers; only human infants are born fat. They begin to gain weight before they're even born and continue to gain it for several months. White fat, which is very rare in new-born mammals. While white fat isn't very good for supplying heat and energy, it is good for insulation in water and for buoyancy.

(2)     The fat is bonded to our skin. If you were to skin a rabbit or a dog, or even a chimp, any fat under the skin would remain attached to the tissues underneath. In humans, it would come away with the skin, as it does in aquatic species (dolphins, seals, manatees, etc.) 

The attribute of fat to which least attention has been paid is that it provides buoyancy. The amount of fat in diving mammals is liable to vary according to whether they are surface feeders, or deep divers for whom too much buoyancy would be an embarrassment. It is worth noting that a human baby – apart from adapting happily to the water if introduced to it early enough – will float, whereas a chimpanzee or gorilla infant would sink.

Breath Control & Descended Larynx

The human respiratory system is differant from that of all other land mammals in two ways:

1. In most mammals breathing is an involuntary action (like the heart beat or digestion), but humans can consciously control their breathing. This voluntary breath control is an aquatic adaptation; it can be found aquatic mammals (seals, dolphins, whales, etc.). When a dolphin or whale decides how deep they're going to dive they can guess how much air they need to take in.
   
   
2. The descended larynx is another peculiarity. A land mammal would normally find it much easier to breathe through its nose; its windpipe passes up through the back of the throat and the larynx it situated in the back of the nasal passages. A dog has to make an effort to bring its larynx down into the its throat  so that it can pant or bark, and when it relaxes the larynx goes back up.

Even human babies are born like that, but a few months after they're born the larynx  descends into the throat. This means that the opening to the lungs lies side by side with the opening to the stomach; that is why humans' food and drink may go down the wrong way sometimes. It would happen every time if we hadn't evolved a complex swallowing mechanism.

Humans can breathe through their mouths as easily as they do through their noses. This is most likely an aquatic adaptation, because a swimmer who needs to gulp in air quickly can inhale more of it through the mouth than through the nose; also, the only other mammals with a descended larynx (other than us) are aquatic ones.

Modern Man

"I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond!

I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive.

Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial!

I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers.

I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail.

But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant.

I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn.

I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity.

I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!"

George Carlin, a comedic genius and poet extraodinaire

Swimming Monkeys?

One of the subjects I have been studying since childhood has been evolution. Long before I knew of Wallace and Darwin, simple things in the natural world has intrigued me. I grew up surrounded by animals, and the favourite weekend pastime for my parents used to be trips to the Alipore Zoo. It was a heartbreak for me when "Adwaita", a Giant Aldabra Tortoise which was brought from Seychelles and gifted to the zoo in 1875, died in 2006 at a ripe age of 250 years! It was born around the Battle of Plassey in 1757! Astonishing! 

The great fascination with animals continued during my days at the Aurobindo and National Libraries, where I read any book I used to find on animals. However these days I am more focussed on the human species, and have been decoding many aspects which I never thought to be unique developments among our species. Like body hair for example. Hair is a multi-billion dollar industry, but it is also one of the great mysteries of evolution. 

The debate is so pronounced that Hair, or the lack of it thereof, has been the core point of debate in the two theories of human evolution. The savannah theory which is well established and the much recent but extremely convincing aquatic ape theory, which to most evolutionary biologists seems like blasphemy. It is pretty much like the geocentric or heliocentric models of the universe in the 15th century. However unlike the universe debate, there can be two winners in this case, as it is very mch possible that humans actually took something from both the sea and the savannah, in that order. 

In brief the Savannah Theory proposes that the onset of drier conditions severely reduced the amount of wooded habitats. During this period, when the forests became thin, early hominids adapted to an environment which was now more like the liminal forest-savanna mosaic zones of equatorial Africa. Consensus amongst scientists has the following sequence occurred:

• When human predecessors in the African jungles became overpopulated, some of them were forced to live on the open plain or savannah.
• Having to hunt game for food, they learnt to stand on their hind legs to see their prey more easily
• Because it was so hot out there, they shed their hair to enable sweat to flow freely
• Speech and intelligence grew from the need to communicate and hunt in packs

Hence humans evolved. 

However, the Savannah Theory is riddled with conundrums, such as:

• Primates such as baboons and vervet monkeys live on the savannah - they have not become bipedal, nor have they lost hair
• The many thousands of years it took to evolve from being able to move quickly on four legs, to beings able to run on two legs, would have left the prototype humans extremely vulnerable to predators.

Mammals are not designed to walk vertically, because it is grossly inefficient. If the first apes attempted it, they would have been like year old babies: falling over all the time. Furthermore, the “missing link” would have lacked the locking mechanism of the knees that we have today. Imagine trying to stand with your knees bent for a few hours. Without a high priority reason to do so, the human predecessors would have simply given up. 

Evolution does not have an agenda. It didnt happen exclusively to humans to give us a clear advantage over other species, which resulted in various bodily changes, which ultimately culminated in us becoming the most intelligent of all species. Then why did we suddenly make an effort to walk on two legs? 

The necessary trigger would have to be spread over a million years in order for the genetic modification in the anatomy, which is massive, to have taken place. So this trigger would have to be within the natural environment around, from which due to circumstances the early humans did not move out, till the changes had fallen in place. Only with the changes in place, were the humans able to move out into the continent, and start the savannah theory. 

The savannah theory does not explain the large brain size. The savannah theory is not possible without a large brain. Pack hunting and survival in an open environment takes considerable intelligence for such a frail species like humans to survive. We dont know how to swim, to fly or to run fast. We dont have camouflage, or poison or claws. We dont have armour, or horns or night vision. Without any of these defensive mechanisms it is highly improbable that the humans would have survived evolution at all in the wild and unforgiving savannah, with many more deadly carnivorous hunters than what is there in Africa now.

Whose Reality is it anyway?

Our human brain is truly amazing, and the most ironical fact is we have partial control over it, unlike most other "top priority" organs, like the heart and the stomach. Well we cant really stop our hearts from beating, can we? Nor can we stop the stomach from digesting, or the kidneys from distilling. Off course what I mean by control of the brain, is not that we are capable of thinking all the time, which we anyways do, but that we have conscious power over what we remember and what we dont. We can deliberately memorize things, but we involuntarily forget things. Creating memories is under our consiousness, forgetfullness is in our sub-consious mind. 

Even if we don’t want, our brain will start grouping patterns, and it is very difficult to change each persons’ personal stereotypes no matter how much of that might be a myth in reality. This happens mainly because change is seen as a threat to survival, and the risk involved in diverting from an established survival pattern. The information we carry in many cases needs referencing and collaboration to validate its authenticity, because in most cases we do not personally experience them. For example I didn’t see India getting independence on 15th August 1947, but I believe in it through a system of historical validation by people who personally experienced it, which doesn’t make the incident a myth, but a real event of consequence.

The roots of these myths are formed through information around us. Information is experienced through all our five senses, which maintains our consciousness, and thereby confirms our existence. They are therefore crucial in building an absolute sense of reality around us. Everything around us is information, and the brain through a process of systematic and complex codification understands this information.

Every code has an encoding and decoding system, which we have learnt through a stimulus-response process of imitation, repetition and error. This selection and rejection process leads each individual being subject to a different set of individual codes, and this results in all of us developing our own unique belief systems.

A belief system is what balances the meanings and proportions of rationality, humanism, ethics, morals, aesthetics and other abstract values within us. They are so rigid that challenging them proves severely detrimental to our emotional sanity and cognition stability. That does not mean that they shouldn’t be challenged, provided there is absolute conviction in the purpose for the change. Changing belief systems reshapes our entire perception of reality. However reality itself is immensely ambiguous, which is formed through our individual and communal understanding and pursuit of an absolute truth.

For example Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the solar system was the established truth, which was perceived as real, and therefore the prevalent belief system for thousands of years till the arrival of the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus in the 16th century. Copernicus's new and blasphemous heliocentric theory was published in the book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) during the year of his death (1543), though he had arrived at his theory several decades earlier. 

It redefined the notion of reality altogether, and today, after 450 years it is an established truth. In Copernicus’s case, and later Galileo’s, they faced persecution, which was a result of severe cognition dissonance faced in accepting a new theory by the church and the junta. However, we saw how truth was determined not by an absolute value but entirely by the belief systems of the majority of the population, which is not constant, and subject to changes and challenges. The same challenge to established truth values took place when Charles Darwin published his seminal book, the Origin of Species in 1859, denouncing biblical creationism and proclaiming evolution through a process of natural selection.

For me, standing on a visually flat world and arguing it is round, like what Galileo did, is nothing but a brilliant example of the lateral thought processes we humans possess, which allows us to find logic in abstraction. He did it, because he had the imagination to visualize the world from space, much before Yuri Gagarin went "up" in 1961. However, by suspending the vertical thinking system I do not mean ignoring it completely. Off course, Galileo had the rational conviction to back his idea.

The vertical thinking pattern is necessary to generate quick information based on previous knowledge, but to find new insights we should also look laterally, and seek solutions not only through arguments but also through an alternative way of looking at things, and most crucially, through imagination, which should be the strongest skill set of any designer. Gagarin witnessed one thing, which Galileo didn’t imagine, which was expressed in the following quote:

“The Earth is blue. How wonderful. It is amazing.”

I guess at a macro level design is ultimately aimed at creating, increasing human convenience and efficiency. Design has historically been severely human centric at the expense of the environment. It has resulted in massive rise in consumption levels and created a ever increasing drainage of available resources to feed the artificially created markets. As a result, each design intervention, which we feel is making a major difference in the convenience levels of the end users, who are always humans, is implicitly appreciated as a successful model. Contradicting this assumption, historically there are myriad instances where convenience in one area has led to severe inconveniences in other areas, maybe not always in the short run, but in the long run. This happened because convenience or efficiency is not a constant universal truth but is again, what the majority believes in. If the context changes, so might be the convenience of the majority.

For example, the invention of the automobile and indeed one of the most significant inventions ever, the internal combustion engine in 1859 by Etienne Lenoir. It leapfrogged an era of alternative energy replacing animal, steam, wind and water energy sources with fuel energy. Gottlieb Daimler, Karl Benz and Henry Ford did enormous service to humanity by immediately identifying this potentiality and implementing them at a global level through mass production of automobiles and motorcycles, and perfecting the assembly lines, thereby raising new benchmarks of speed and quality.

However, a hundred years later, it is the pollution which has been created by the enormous levels of carbon dioxide emissions that has been produced in this meantime by automobiles, which is now leading to serious global warming. Within just fifty years of its invention, in 1951 Elma Wischmeir became the millionth American to die on the highway. Nowadays millions of people (between 23 to 34) are victims of road accidents caused by automobiles around the world each year. Huge amounts of metal have been mined out of the earth to meet the ever-increasing supply chains. Was all this taken into consideration at the time of the discovery of the automobile, or were this seen as minor inconveniences in the attainment of the larger goal of mobility?

In the case of the car, it has solved one convenience: mobility. Instead it has created havoc in multiple domains like safety, environment and resources. So where does the benefit of its invention fit in? I personally feel that each solution itself is not an end to the process but rather produces a new process itself. It is not a line but a circle, with the problem and the solution running around each other rather than being at the two ends. I feel a design solution creates a new problem or multiples of them.

Going further back, Johannes Guttenberg made the first information revolution by inventing the printing press in 1454, which created a huge global requirement for paper. Paper still forms one of the most heavily manufactured items of daily consumption worldwide, and also one of the most wasted. Although it increased literacy, record keeping and communication, it also resulted in the clearing of huge tracts of forests to supply pulp. Although it is biodegradable and recyclable, still it has created severe pressure on the tropical rainforests around the globe, endangering several species in the process.

Similarly the invention of dynamite by Alfred Nobel in 1867 for the purpose of mining and blasting for road construction has become one of the great killers over the last century and a half. The cell-phone might have revolutionized telecommunications but it has also led to subsidiary rise in health risks, privacy, crime and terrorism. Computers might have revolutionized information accessibility and communication, but it has allowed the flourishing of pornography, cyber crime, hacking, internet fraud, and severe psychological, ergonomic and cognitive stresses.

There are many more such instances, which makes me skeptical of the real value created out of new opportunities. I feel it is very contextual and extremely relative, depending on whether we have the foresight to fully understand the consequences of its implication. I might be solving some problem in the short run, but in the long term it might have a butterfly effect which might be cataclysmic.

What do we believe?

We take information for granted, which is acquired through a vertical thinking system of learning, received, or I would say imitated from school, family and culture, which is based on previously transferred knowledge gained through a system of error identification and elimination process, thereby aimed at the most convenient mode of survival.

Much of the information we know around us is a concocter of myths and stereotypes. On one hand stereotypes are important because they allow us to make quick decisions, and no matter how much we try to avoid them, they are unavoidable aspects of the cultural coding system, especially in India, which being a high context culture, much of information is implicitly recorded and understood.

For example our names carry so much information about us, which may not be true at an individual level, but that will be immediately used by the society around us to compartmentalize us and put us in some kind of established memory pattern, so that we are easier to recall later.

For example, if I say my name is Ayan Ghosh, it immediately establishes my ethnic identity of being a Bengali, and a Hindu. This has been built up historically by other people whose surname were also Ghosh, like Aurobindo and Amitava, and who were all ethnically Bengali, and religiously Hindu. Being a Bengali will next stereotype me as being from Bengal, or more narrowed down, from Calcutta. Being from Calcutta will lead to a next level of stereotyping with historical, political and cultural associations with Calcutta, like communism, fish cuisine, and football. This process keeps continuing. 

However, when stereotypes are assessed individually, it is easy to see that in most cases they are nothing more than myths. I might be from Gujarat, a socialist, a vegetarian and a chess player and still be a Bengali, but this idiosyncrasy will stay only with me. This is mainly because we form stereotypes based on our direct personal experience with only a very small fraction of the larger entity. We do not form a stereotype of a community after interacting with thousands of people from that community. 

So we really cannot run away from our names no matter how much we feel it stereotypes us. No matter how much you detest such cultural branding we have to live with it, and the strangest irony is that we dont even choose our own names. 

Down the drain

I feel a primary aspect to be understood while analyzing the role of food and its importance in its current context is to examine how humans consume food, which is after all what its main function is. This consumption pattern has never been constant, and has changed considerably depending on the way food has been cultivated, stored, transported, re-stored and eaten. These systems have been considerably modified by the various discoveries, innovations, improvisations and inventions which continued to evolve since humans settled as an agrarian society.

Cultivation
Some main events in the journey of food have been the discovery of fire and the plough, and a basic understanding of time and seasons, leading to agriculture. This new form of foraging, through cultivation, was helped substantiality by innovations in irrigation techniques (like the Archimedes’s screw and the Noria) and extensive canal building. Later, architectural innovations followed in the form of dams and later more sophisticated aqueducts built in ancient Rome.

However, the pattern of agriculture the world over remained unchanged for thousands of years, although techniques might have differed from civilization to civilization depending on the climate and topography. The most significant innovations that boosted the production capacities of fields to feed the increasing global populations happened in the post industrial revolution late 18th and 19th century, with development of fertilizers like Ammonium Nitrate, pesticides, and other mechanized innovations like the development of tractors, and threshers.

Preservation
Limitations in preservation options reduced the transportability of food which being organic in nature starts putrefying in short time. The organic nature of most food either allowed it to be frozen or dried. Drying substantially altered the nature of the food, while freezing was expensive and exclusive. Food storage changed drastically since the 19th century, with Nicolas François Appert inventing canning in 1809, which contributed significantly to Napolean’s army’s mobility and Europe conquest. Appert himself didn't know how the process of heating canned food helped in its preservation worked, but was later explained by Louis Pasteur. This was followed by breakthroughs by scores of inventors contributing many small advances in cooling machinery leading to the perfection of the refrigerator. This allowed surplus food to be stored in its actual state for many days domestically, and also to be transported overseas on long journeys. Later innovations in packaging design also contributed hugely in optimizing trade.

Human Movement
Various events and inventions in other domains contributed greatly to the food industry, like globalization, colonialism, colonization, international trade and human migration. Globalization, which has its roots in the silk route trades across Asia and Europe, contributed in the spice economy, which thrived for hundreds of years. Colonization, starting with the Spanish conquests of the Americas, resulted in many new food items being introduced to Western countries. After colonization of the Americas, the Spanish distributed the tomatothroughout their colonies in the Caribbean. They also took it to the Philippines, whence it moved to southeast Asia and then the entire Asian continent. The Spanish also brought the potato and tobacco to Europe. Similarly the British Empire introduced tea from China to Sri Lanka, India and Britain and the USA.

Colonialism and the industrial revolution also catalyzed an unprecedented amount of human migration the world over, which gave rose to new consumption requirements and opened up endemic food cultures to new markets.

Alternative power
Shift from traditional energy sources like animal, human, wind and water to steam, coal, fuel and electric also revolutionized the way the food industry expanded over the last century and a half. The industrial revolution triggered the concept of the factory and the mass production of food. It also led to the invention of the railways, automobiles and lastly the aircraft. The last three are of major consequence, as it allowed surplus food to be exchanged between countries through exports and it also allowed fast and networked system of food distribution, thereby preventing widespread famines.

As a result…
However all the above mentioned factors have also contributed in a serious fall out of food wastage which is a result of the ability to acquire surplus food. Since we can acquire much more than we consume, its inevitable that there is a great deal of surplus in the hands of the upper classes in the first world countries who can afford such benefits on the basis of a higher disposable income. Previously we cultivated only as much can be consumed immediately, but the option of preservation has made us uncertain to the consumption amounts, since there is always back up.