The Cost of Food = A Seed

“Cost of Food Expected to Continue to Rise in 2025”

Turn off the news for a minute and turn on your brain.

From the perspective of life itself (plants, seeds, regenerative cycles…YOU), the basic act of food production is always possible. Civilization doesn’t make this fundamental fact of biology easier or harder…it just distorts how we access it (turning it into grain, surplus, taxation, property, etc.). If you step outside this very odd mindset, you’ll see that food is everywhere and always was…seeds, tubers, nuts, fruit, hunting, foraging.

Any human, in any era, could plant a seed or gather wild foods. Seeds save themselves (regeneration is literally built in). Really think about this deeply for a second: the basic abundance of food hasn’t changed from prehistory to now. What does change with civilization is the control of food.

James Scott points out that civilizations narrowed food to grain because grain is legible (easy to count, store, tax, ration, hoard), enables surplus (standing armies, bureaucracies, empires), and makes populations dependent (you can seize a granary…you can’t seize scattered nut groves and rabbit warrens). “Food scarcity” in the civilizational story means something very specific: scarcity of state-managed, taxable grain…NOT actual absence of food in the landscape.

It isn’t hard to see that growing, saving, and replanting seeds (or gathering perennials, or hunting, or fishing) wouldn’t have been significantly easier or harder across eras. What changes is whether you’re permitted to do so. Fences? Enclosures? Tax? Slavery? Monsanto seed patents? These are civilizational interruptions of a regenerative baseline (that will feed you).

Think of it as two logics. Life logic? Regeneration means food is always there. Civilization’s logic? Appropriation means food is turned into scarcity (funneling it through grain, storage, control, and rationing)…dependency.