Worldbuilding: Growing Cultures

Unless you’re dealing with a Star Trek-ish future where people can use replicators to construct food out of stray atoms, your society has to feed itself. This is going to have effects on your characters, your world, and what conflicts might show up in the plot.

For most of history, acquiring food has occupied the vast majority of the population. Hunting and gathering, herding, fishing, agriculture – to this day, a lot of people on the planet are busy with all of these. In a modern society you might just run into hiccups in the food supply; less wheat one year, more strawberries the next. Go back a century or more and things get tighter. Especially in areas with locusts. A common pattern in locust-prone areas is a year or two of drought wrecking crops, and then when rain finally comes… locust outbreak. Ow.

Go forward a century or so, and food might be tight again, depending on exactly when and where you are. Space colonies and spaceships won’t have the resources of a whole planet. A settlement on Mars won’t have all the living things of Earth; everything down to the settlers’ atmosphere will have to be cracked out of local rocks and carefully prevented from escaping. It can be done, especially if you brought hydrogen along to combine with electricity and carbon dioxide and make available water, but it’s going to take time and work. You can grow some food hydroponically, but for some food plants you’ll have to make soil that microbes can colonize. And fishing is going to be… interesting. Of the, “First we need to build the waterproof tank” variety.

Any stable culture depends on people knowing that if they do X, Y, and Z, they will most likely be able to feed themselves. What they do can differ; nomad survival strategies lean toward “move and fight for new pasture” while agriculturalists are “stay put and try more”, and fishermen often see if they can sail farther, or develop new lines and nets. But they know How Things Are Done that usually works. Usually.

…And then too often you get layers of bureaucrats who are convinced that it can’t be that hard, after all, it’s “just” working with your hands, anyone can do that….

(For the record, no. Not anyone can. It takes a lot of knowhow and hard work to pull off most food-creating. Just ask anyone who’s tried to feed themselves from a backyard garden. With something besides zucchini.)

Have an idea what your world’s cultures eat, where, and where they get their exotic imports from. There are entire books written on the differences between wheat-growing and rice-growing cultural areas, for example. Wheat can be grown by a lone farmer but rice generally takes organized groups for irrigation – and the irrigation creates perfect conditions for malarial mosquitoes. Which further affects what people do, wear, and how many mothers and children survive birth. Good arguments can be made that Oliver Cromwell being as hard-headed and sometimes vicious as he was handling Ireland can be directly traced back to growing up in the fens of England – an area so prone to malaria and lethal with it that farmers were infamous for going up to the highlands for one wife after another as they died trying to bear children. Seven or more wives in as many years was not unheard of. Imagine growing up in a culture where the men shrug, bury the last wife, and go buy another one….

Ahem. And this is why anti-malarials are A Good Thing.

Know how your characters’ society is getting their food. It makes a difference!

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