Food of the Gods
Plants that shaped human power
Description
In 1992, an American writer named Terence McKenna published a book with a title borrowed from H. G. Wells: Food of the Gods. McKenna was not a botanist or a historian in any credentialed sense — he was an ethnobotanist by inclination, a talker, a collector of plants and hunches. But the book made a claim big enough to be hard to shake off once you have heard it. Human beings, he argued, did not build civilization alone. We built it in partnership with plants and the chemicals inside them, and the specific plants we leaned on changed who we became.
Most histories treat drugs as a footnote — a vice at the edge of the real story of kings, wars and trade. McKenna flips the frame. For him the substances are not at the edge. Coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco, alcohol, opium: these are not decorations on history, they are among its engines. Whole economies, colonies and habits of mind were organized around getting them, taxing them, and deciding who was allowed to have them. The pattern he traces runs from prehistoric bands living in a certain kind of balance to societies obsessed with control — and the drugs, he says, mark the turn.
It is a sweeping, sometimes reckless book, and it does not pretend to be neutral. McKenna has a thesis and he pushes it hard. But the through-line is genuinely unsettling: the story of our species can be read through what we consumed to alter our own minds, and through who got to decide which of those alterations were sacred, which were sold, and which were crimes.
The question we’re asking : What if the plants and chemicals we consumed weren't a sideshow to human history but one of its hidden engines?What we’ll see : A long arc from a lost partnership with nature to the coffee-and-tobacco economies of empire, and what the substances we permit reveal about power.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — Before the Fall, a partnership
McKenna opens deep in prehistory, with a scene most drug histories skip entirely. Long before writing, before agriculture, human bands lived as foragers on the African grasslands, and they lived among plants they ate, feared and experimented with by necessity. Some of those plants did more than feed the body. McKenna's boldest wager is that psilocybin-containing mushrooms, growing in the dung of the wild cattle our ancestors followed, entered the early human diet and stayed there.
His argument is frankly speculative, and he says so. In small doses, he claims, such compounds sharpen vision and alertness — useful for a hunter. In larger doses they dissolve the boundaries of the self and loosen the ego's grip. What interests McKenna is the social consequence. A community that regularly touched that state, he suggests, tended toward what the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and others called partnership culture: relatively egalitarian, oriented toward the group, without the rigid hierarchy and hoarding that came later.
02Chapter 2 — How the archaic ecology of ecstasy broke down
The break, in McKenna's telling, came with drying grasslands and the slow retreat of the mushroom from the human diet. As the psilocybin ecology thinned, he argues, so did the dissolving, group-oriented state of mind it had fostered. The ego reasserted itself. And into the vacuum left by the lost partnership came a different relationship with plants — one built not on communion but on substitution, storage and control.
McKenna reads the rise of agriculture and settled life as the hinge. Once people stored grain, they could hoard; once they could hoard, some had more than others; once some had more, hierarchy hardened. He calls the culture that emerged from this the dominator model — patriarchal, warlike, obsessed with ownership and rank. And crucially, its favored substances were different in kind. The unpredictable, boundary-dissolving mushroom gave way to substances that could be stored, standardized and traded: above all, alcohol.
03Chapter 3 — Sugar, spirits, and the empire of appetite
From prehistory McKenna jumps to the age of exploration, where his thesis meets hard economic record. The spices that drew European ships across the oceans, he argues, were the first great drug hunt of the modern era — pepper, cloves, nutmeg were craved with an intensity that looks, in retrospect, like something close to dependence. The search for them redrew the map. But it was the substances that came after the spices that remade whole populations.
Sugar is his central case. Refined cane sugar, unknown to most Europeans in the medieval period, became by the eighteenth century a mass craving that reorganized the Atlantic world. Plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil ran on enslaved labor to feed the European sweet tooth; sugar, in turn, made the new bitter stimulants palatable. McKenna insists on the link: coffee, tea and chocolate arrived in Europe roughly together in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and sugar was what made them habits rather than curiosities.
04Chapter 4 — The dominator's cabinet of legal drugs
Step back from the specific plants and McKenna's larger argument comes into focus: the drugs a society permits and the ones it forbids are never a neutral matter of health or safety. They are a map of what that society wants to preserve. Tobacco, tea, coffee, alcohol — the substances that pass through customs and are advertised on billboards — are precisely the ones that fit a culture of work, ownership and mild, manageable dependence. They wake you for the shift, calm you after it, and can be taxed on the way.
The drugs a dominator culture fears, by contrast, are the ones McKenna associates with the lost partnership: the boundary-dissolving psychedelics that, on his account, loosen the ego and with it the whole scaffolding of hierarchy and possession. It is no coincidence to him that these are the substances modern states have criminalized most severely, while the addictive stimulants and depressants that keep the machinery running remain legal and even celebrated. The legal cabinet, he argues, is not the safe one — it is the compatible one.
05Conclusion
McKenna ends more or less where Wells's borrowed title pointed: with the suspicion that the substances we treat as trivial have been anything but. The book's spine is a single long movement — from an imagined archaic partnership in which altering the mind was communal and unowned, through the agricultural turn that made plants into property, to the empires of sugar, spirits and stimulants, and finally to a modern cabinet of legal drugs that looks less like a health policy than a portrait of power. Along the way the mushroom, the still, the sugar plantation and the coffee house each get read as more than what they seem.