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Lumifer comments on Open thread, Sep. 14 - Sep. 20, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: MrMind 14 September 2015 07:10AM

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Comment author: Lumifer 16 September 2015 06:51:05PM *  5 points [-]

Grain is just food that happened to possess two essential features:

  • Making it was sufficiently productive, that is, a group of humans could grow more grain than they themselves would need;

  • It could be stored for a long time with only minor spoilage. Having reserves of stored food to survive things like winters, droughts, and plagues of locusts is rather essential for a burgeoning civilization. Besides, without non-perishable food it's hard to have cities.

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 20 September 2015 08:29:18PM 1 point [-]

You left out an important property:

  • Making it requires that the makers stay in the same place for a large fraction of the year. Furthermore, if they are forced to leave for any reason, all the effort they have expended so far is wasted and they probably can't try again until next year.
Comment author: Lumifer 21 September 2015 03:11:05PM 0 points [-]

That's a relevant feature for figuring out the consequences of depending on grain production. I'm not sure it's a relevant feature for the purposes of deciding why growing grains became so popular.

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