What we eat today is the outcome of a long journey. Over hundreds of thousands of years our diet changed again and again, passing through five great revolutions that shaped human society and culture as much as they shaped our plates. Understanding these revolutions helps us see not only where we came from, but also where our food system is heading.
The First Revolution: Becoming Hunters
The first stage in the evolution of human nutrition was the shift from gatherers to hunter gatherers, when humans began eating food from animals. This is the earliest stage of our nutritional history. Homo sapiens appeared about 200,000 years ago, but the move toward consuming animal foods goes back further into prehistory.
Researchers broadly agree on three points. First, our origins were plant based. At some point, humans began adding animal foods to their diets. Second, this shift happened a very long time ago, at least a few million years in the lineage that led to us. Third, the transition to eating animal foods had a profound influence on our development, including the growth of the human brain.
Although today most people assume that protein was the main reason humans consumed animal foods, evidence suggests otherwise. Hunter gatherers often preferred fatty parts of the animal such as marrow, spinal cord, or brain. These organs contain omega 3 fatty acids in a form most available to the body, crucial for brain growth and function. Fat, rather than protein, may have been the true prize.
So why has protein become the focus of modern nutrition? This is the result of historical politics. After World War II, a nutritional crisis in Africa was mistakenly blamed only on lack of protein. This event, later called “the great protein fiasco,” shaped international nutrition policy and fixed protein at the center of dietary recommendations. In reality, the Western world today faces a problem of excess protein rather than shortage.
The Second Revolution: Agriculture
For most of human history, people ate plants gathered directly from the wild. The great shift came with the decision to store food. Once food could be stored, it changed not only diets but also societies. Those who held surpluses had power over those who did not. Inequality, social classes, and new political structures grew from this moment.
The Agricultural Revolution, around 10,000 years ago, brought settled villages, cultivated fields, and diets based on dry grains such as wheat, barley, chickpeas, and lentils. This process was autocatalytic, meaning it fed itself: permanent settlements led to population growth, which required more farming, which reinforced the move away from hunting and gathering.
Grains were easy to store, but difficult to digest. To make them edible, humans developed processing techniques such as sprouting and fermentation. Fermentation traditions gave us foods like sourdough bread and Ethiopian injera. These processes broke down the natural defenses of seeds and made them nutritious.
Over time, agriculture became more intensive and monocultural. This reduced biodiversity, depleted soils, and narrowed diets. And although global grain production grew enormously, even today about 11 to 13 percent of the world’s population lives with food insecurity.
The Third Revolution: Secondary Products
About 4,000 to 6,000 years ago, humans began using animals not only for meat but also for plowing, transport, and milk. These new uses reshaped agriculture and trade.
Milk, however, presented a challenge. Infants produce lactase, the enzyme that breaks down milk sugar, but in most people this ability fades after weaning. In places where milk was essential for survival, genetic mutations appeared that allowed adults to keep producing lactase. Over generations, this gave those people an evolutionary advantage.
This explains why lactose tolerance varies so widely today. In Scandinavia only about 10 percent of people are lactose intolerant. In parts of Africa and South America rates reach 50 to 80 percent. In Israel, about 80 percent of people experience some degree of lactose intolerance.
The Fourth Revolution: Sugar
The discovery of the Americas and the rise of colonialism brought the sugar revolution. Sugarcane, once rare and expensive, spread rapidly and reshaped the world. Its history is inseparable from slavery. Between the 15th and 19th centuries, more than 12 million Africans were transported to the Americas to work in sugar plantations.
By the mid 19th century sugar had shifted from a luxury of the rich to a staple of the poor. In Britain, sugar consumption increased fortyfold within 150 years. Sugar became the symbol of capitalism itself: poor workers in one part of the world producing cheap calories for poor workers elsewhere.
Alongside sugar came cocoa, coffee, and tea. All were colonial crops that became everyday goods only when sweetened. Later, the invention of refined white flour and polished rice added new forms of processed starch to the global diet.
The transition to a sugar based industrial diet was complete.
The Fifth Revolution: The Food Industry
Today we live in the fifth revolution, which I call the reign of the food industry. Most people eat industrially processed food and depend on corporations to supply it. These same corporations often shape the regulations meant to control them.
In Israel, five companies already control nearly half of the food market. This concentration erases local food traditions and disconnects us from regional crops and knowledge. Instead, people everywhere consume similar processed products filled with stabilizers, preservatives, thickeners, and other additives. Research shows these substances affect our health, although the long term effects are not fully understood.
Conclusion: Food Sovereignty
The story of human nutrition is the story of our growing distance from food. As hunter gatherers we knew exactly where food came from. With agriculture we began to store it. Later we moved into villages and cities. Today most people have little idea what their food is made of, where it came from, or what processes it has undergone before reaching their plate.
This distance threatens our health, our environment, and our communities.
That is why movements around the world, led by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and many grassroots groups, call for food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means that people have access to nourishing food suited to their culture, produced sustainably, and that they have the right to define their own food and agricultural systems.
So perhaps it is time to ask more often: Where does our food come from? What has it been through? And where is it taking us?
Truly, food for thought.
