The Changing Shape of Agriculture

Human foodways developed alongside agriculture, that revolutionary technology. To understand the variety of what is eaten in monsoon Asia, it is essential to take in the formation and the shifts of the farming cultures that underlie it.

Through the Palaeolithic, which accounts for most of the history of anatomically modern humans, people lived on the move, taking meat, wild plants and fruit by hunting and gathering.

The turning point was the Neolithic. Plants began to be domesticated across the world; in monsoon Asia, rice cultivation started in the Yangtze basin of China, and millet crops such as foxtail and broomcorn millet in the Yellow River basin. In warmer areas such as Southeast Asia, a composite way of living developed that combined root-crop cultivation with hunting and gathering.

After the Neolithic, agriculture became the centre of life and began to change the shape of society itself. Paddy rice in particular demanded collective work — irrigation, transplanting, harvest — and pushed people into organisation. In Japan, systematic paddy cultivation arrived in the early Yayoi period, later became the basis of taxation under the ritsuryō state, and grew into something intensive and large in scale.

These farming cultures divided into several lineages according to climate and terrain, and developed while influencing one another. Following the classification of the botanist Sasuke Nakao, several cultural spheres can be made out within monsoon Asia.

The first is millet farming culture. This covers the cultivation of foxtail millet, broomcorn millet and beans centred on the Yellow River basin in northern China, and of rice in the Yangtze basin to the south. In the west, around the Indus civilisation, wheat, pulses and cotton were grown. It should be said that “millet” here is a broad concept: it takes in not only foxtail and broomcorn millet but rice as well, which at the time was grown mixed with other grains — that is, staple grains in general. Rice cultivation, which began in the Yangtze basin, was one wing of this millet farming culture; as the technology developed it took on a life of its own as paddy rice and spread widely through monsoon Asia.

The second is root-crop farming culture. This is the composite type that developed in warm regions such as Southeast Asia, combining tuber cultivation with hunting and gathering. The foodways of the Pacific islands, of southern India and of Sri Lanka belong to this sphere as well. Among some indigenous peoples of Taiwan, a food culture with tubers as the staple is said to survive to this day.

The third is laurel-forest culture. This is the culture of the evergreen broadleaf forest belt, running from southern China through the mountains of the southern Himalayan foothills and on into western Japan. Its marks are the cultivation of tea, the use of lacquer, and fermented foods such as nattō, narezushi and fish sauce.

These are of course only types. Actual cultures show their own particular mixtures from place to place, and they have influenced one another ceaselessly through trade and the movement of people. Even within the Japanese archipelago, alongside paddy rice there have been many living farming cultures — the hunting culture represented by the matagi of the northeast, the millet culture of the Hokuriku coast, the tuber culture of southern Kyushu. Hence the saying that the culture changes once you cross a mountain.

Forms of agriculture like these became the ground not only for what people ate, but for how their communities were arranged and how they understood nature. On top of that ground, the formation of states, the spread of religion, and ideas such as food as medicine were layered one over another, and the complex, far-reaching food system of monsoon Asia was built up.