4 ms·

Isn't the issue more that they had limited means of long-term food storage so there was little point in growing more food than you could eat in a year?

• ip26 7y ago
  Canning, dehydrating, pickling, curing, making alcohol...
  • VBprogrammer 7y ago
    Also, smoking. Worth bearing in mind that salt, one of the primary means of storage was a precious commodity often shipped to the north of Europe from salt pans in the med.
• JackFr 7y ago
  Another issue is that when labor is cheap and plentiful one is less likely to invest in technology. There is a thesis that the Black Plague broke Europe out of a 'Matlthusian Deadlock' that size of the population made labor cheap enough that investing in agricultural technology had low returns, at the same time that same size led to everyone constantly being on the razors edge of famine.
• Amezarak 7y ago
  People have regularly stockpiled multi-year food supplies going back thousands of years. It's just a matter of whether or not there's a political will to do so. That said, obviously, thanks to refrigeration and freezing, we have the capability of storing a much broader range of foods in a healthier way for longer periods of time, assuming that whatever disaster we face doesn't cause the electrical supply to become transient. I am extremely skeptical that we'd deal with a similar event any better. We've optimized too much for efficiency and just-in-time delivery.
• PeterisP 7y ago
  Storing grain for multiple years was possible for a long, long time. The Bible story of Joseph is perhaps an exaggeration or an extraordinary event, but storing grain from "good" years in order to consume it in "bad" years is something we've been doing since prehistoric times, we have archeological evidence that this has been done in Egypt before writing was used.