What is the benefit of having surplus food?

Answer 1

In any culture or country, throughout time, people who collected and put extra food into a collective holding area as surplus (extra) food experienced many benefits:

• People did not fear that environmental changes would leave the people to starve.
• People did not fear pestilence, drought, or floods if their collective food supply was stored in a safe, dry place.
• People did not fear that increases in population (new births) within their community would take food from other members.
• People with surplus food means they eat adequately and put only surplus into storage. Therefore, we know adequately fed persons are better able to ward off infection and illnesses.
• New mothers need to be adequately fed to be able to nurse their children, especially throughout history when ALL mothers nursed (no bottles). So again, a community that could create a food surplus meant that everyone was more adequately fed, including pregnant and nursing mothers. Since pregnant and nursing mothers fed well, their newborns and breastfeeding infants to toddlers would be better nourished and protected from illnesses through immunity passed from the mother's milk.
• Some cultures relaxed their work when they had food surpluses. BUT, most communities recognized the need for continued farming and hunting to continue to create more surplus.
• In colonial America, surplus food was kept in Forts. However, after the French and Indian War, Forts were less secure. Also, more families moved onto their own homesteads, only returning to Forts when under attack. Therefore, individual families needed to stock up on their own surplus food stuffs.
• The term "surplus" food came about after the First and Second World Wars, when most Americans had already moved away from farming and into industry (industrial revolution pre 1900). Therefore, millions of Americans had no way to create their own foods. Most city dwellers had family gardens but these produced enough for 1 season or 2 seasons if stretched. WWII, especially, meant companies had produced large amounts of non-perishable foods...which was later a "surplus". The local governments gave out this surplus food to starving families.
• However, because of American's fear of retaliation after dropping the nuclear bombs on Japan in the 1940s, and through the "Cold War" and the "Cuban Missile Crisis" into the 1960s, many families made two areas in or near their homes: 1. a family bomb shelter and 2. a family "storehouse" of extra food. The food was kept in the area designated or constructed as a "bomb shelter", which was usually the home's basement.
• Through the 1960s, American schools also designated an underground area as a bomb shelter. Usually this was also the cafeteria area. So the surplus food was kept in rooms near the cafeteria but within the designated bomb shelter. Many schools still have the distinctive atomic bomb shelter signs posted.

As one negative of having "surplus food" in ancient history was that one tribe or community could attack a neighboring tribe or community to raid and obtain the surplus food the other tribe had. This was where the term "spoils of war" came about. For the conquering tribe, of course, obtaining someone's surplus was a benefit to them.