The blight that is wheat took root 10,000 years ago, when Triticum aestivum, or bread wheat, was domesticated from wild grasses in the “Fertile Crescent” of the Middle East. Initially, the local Neolithics cultivated wheat alongside traditional hunter-gathering and incipient pastoralism (livestock farming). But wheat is a slave-master, demanding in its specific and daily needs, not least the endless — or so it seems to us who have ever grown the stuff — weeding. Wheat locked us into a seasonal cycle of planting, weeding and harvesting from which we have been unable to escape ever since. It also made us more sedentary, both in terms of chaining us to static settlements, and becoming less active. Guarding a wheat field from wild boar requires less energy than hunting wild boar; the lineal ancestor of the couch potato was the campfire bun.

Crop-watching may demand little energy, but it is demanding of time. With fewer hours to hunt and to forage, we settled for a restricted diet. At Abu Hereyra in Syria, archaeology records this shift: when the occupants were hunter-gatherers, they consumed 150 wild plants; as arable farmers, they ate just a handful of crops. Human health deteriorated; the human body changed. Singularly, the jaw shrunk, since the new wheaty diet required less chewing than meat. Human teeth did not reduce proportionately to the smaller jaw, so dental crowding ensued. The diet of starch — wheat’s principal component — caused cavities. And the dietetic value of wheat, which was anyway only modestly nutritious, has declined by as much as 30% under contemporary industrialised agriculture.

The intriguing question is: if wheat-growing altered our corporeal structure, did it alter our brain? Did the systematic rituals and requirements of planting and harvesting wheat change our brains to make us more docile? Organised? Cooperative? Disconnected from nature? Did it turn us away from animism to praise of Ceres, goddess of grain crops, and then to an abstract, monolithic God of whom we ask our daily bread.

What wheat certainly did do was facilitate the rise of the state. As James C. Scott, co-director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, explains in Against the Grain, wheat became the best way to tax the people: “The key to the nexus between grains and states lies, I believe, in the fact that only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable’.”

Wheat-fields are fixed and surveillable; livestock moves about. Counting sheep is easy in bed but for a state flunky on an arid hillside, the accurate checking of ovines (which are, anyway, easy to transport, and therefore to hide) is all but impossible. Similarly, communities reliant on tubers or root vegetables such as yams as their staple were more able to evade taxation since the crop can be left in the ground and harvested when the tax collector has gone home. Such societies rarely developed into states.

But where you have wheat, historically, you have state control or its like. The taxing of wheat enabled the emergence of non-productive elites, who required an armed wing to defend their regime. The food that fuelled the necessary population increase to staff the army, the fist of the state? Wheat. Nutrient poor but energy dense, fodder for the masses, it provided just enough energy and health to work, breed, fight. The early grain states were “population machines” (Scott again), domesticating people as the farmer domesticates the cow herd.

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The most “domesticated” people were slaves, utilised in wheat’s more unpleasant aspects of production. Wheat states were slave states. The Roman writer Lucius Apuleius recorded in Metamorphoses IX the lot of millers:

“Their skins were seamed all over with marks of the lash, their scarred backs were shaded rather than covered with tattered frocks. Some wore only aprons, all were so poorly clothed that their skin was visible through the rents in their rags! Their foreheads were branded with letters, their heads were half-shaved. They had irons on their legs. They were hideously sallow. Their eyes were bleared, sore, and raw, from the smoke of the ovens. They were covered with flour as athletes with dust!”

To prevent the enslaved fleeing the dirty work, law and policing were invoked, even invented. The legal Code of Hammurabi (c1750 BC) has six clauses to punish the escape of slaves.

Western society was eventually organised around the production and consumption of wheat. And so it became the ultimate political tool. Communism’s iconography of a hammer for the proletariat and a wheat-cutting sickle for the peasantry turned out to be one of history’s crueller ironies. The hammer was taken to the workers, the sickle to the peasant. As well as being easy to tax, wheat is easy to confiscate. And since wheat is a subsistence crop, remove it and you have starvation. During the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3, Stalin deliberately deprived the country’s population — who lacked sufficient ardour for rule from Moscow — of wheat. Some 3.9 million Ukrainians, about 13% of the population, perished.

Meanwhile Hitler, a few years later, planned to feed the unformed millions of his master race with wheat tended by Ukrainian slaves, or neger, in the Reich’s terminology.

But the tyranny of wheat can be more subtle than the feeding or impoverishing of the masses in totalitarian grain states, old or new. Since the Second World War, the chief agricultural aim of government (and transnational governments such as the EU) has been productivity: quantity over quality. Wheat farming has become a yield-obsessed industry dependent on labour-reducing but expensive technology. Unsurprisingly, it has become a cereal-killer of small, family farms: a brand-new combine harvester can cost £100,000. Farmers who do fork out for one become indentured to an agribusiness complex, which oversees their production of wheat from cultivation to sale.

One example will serve: farmers who participate in the “Climate View” bio-tech programme of chemical giant Monsanto supply harvest data through sensors on combines manufactured by John Deere; Monsanto then sends prescriptions back, telling farmers which product he or she should apply to maximise yield. In his book Perilous Bounty, Tom Philpott recounts an interview with an ex-Monsanto executive who “painted a future in which farmers would essentially outsource their decisions to Monsanto”. There is a Latin phrase for farmers in such corporate controlled agriculture: instrumentum vocale. Talking tools. Slaves.

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Really, one becomes slyly indentured. Back in 1976, Monsanto developed the herbicide Roundup. They then genetically engineered wheat cultivars resistant to their own product, eventually mass-producing the Roundup Ready line of seed in 2019. Yes, you read that right: the grains were developed for their ability to cope with a chemical product that Monsanto wanted to flog. So if the farmer buys Roundup Ready seed, then he or she buys the tied-in Roundup herbicid. And Monsanto cashes in twice.

Chemical use in conventional wheat-growing does much for the coffers of Monsanto (now owned by Bayer), but it is turning swathes of the UK countryside into a coffin for nature. Wheat is the cause of more environmental problems than you can wave a baguette at. Although the lobbyists and the apologists of agribusiness insist that pesticide use has declined over the last quarter of a century, this is not the case when it comes to wheat. Between 2000 and 2016, average spray passes (applications) over wheat increased from 5.5 to 6.6, while the active substances in sprays went from 14.7 to 20.5. Actually, forget  the mgs, and the ratios. The countryside is doused in chemicals.

According to Cornell University’s Environmental Impact Quotient (EIQ), which compares approximate toxicities for pesticides, an EIQ of 7 indicates toxicity to wildlife. The fungicide chlorothalonil, usually bought in the UK as Bravo, has an EIQ of 33; it is widely used on winter and spring wheat. Chlorothalonil is now banned by the EU. Extinction of nature is not confined to the savannah and the jungle. It happens at the cottage door. Five wildflowers — “weeds” to some — associated with cereal and arable farming in the UK are now dead and gone due to chemically addicted  industrialised agriculture: So, farewell, Lamb’s succory, Interrupted brome, Thorowax, Small bur-parsley and Downy hemp-nettle.

The environmental woes of wheat go on and on. Yearly planting requires yearly tilling and this constant churning of earth kills the soil’s living organisms, spumes CO2 from soil-stored carbon, and exacerbates climate change. And I have not even mentioned the negatives of nitrogen as industrial wheat’s mainstay artificial fertiliser, what with its polluting run-offs and its release of nitrous oxide — a greenhouse gas which, pound for pound, warms the planet 300 times as much as carbon dioxide.

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Of course, wheat has its champions. According to agribusiness’s advocates, industrial wheat production must continue if we are to satisfy the stomachs of a growing global population. There is not a grain of truth in this. Farming already provides more than enough food for the future; the problem is simply that the West wastes a third of its food, and less developed countries lose about the same amount due to poor processing and storage. Anyway, in a world going to fat and type 2 diabetes more carbs from Mother’s Pride sliced white are hardly necessary.

Humanity took a wrong turn with wheat. But all is not lost. If the Russian invasion of Ukraine is causing a rethink of our reliance on oil and gas, this too is the moment to sow seeds of doubt about our dependence on the “golden grain”. Why not grass over swathes of the arable prairies of East Anglia — and Ukraine — and stock them with free-range cattle and sheep? Grass requires no lashings of chemicals, and livestock dung is excellent at restoring soil fertility and biodiversity; a single cow can feed 2.2 million insects per year, which means snacks galore for the birds and the bats.

I know, I know, as every vegan will exclaim: “Cows belch methane”! But it is not the cow, it is the how. An outdoor cow, on established grass, with methane-reducing seaweed supplement and low stocking density, is actually sequestering carbon. So, bovines are less of a climate problem than synthetic clothes, given that trainers alone cause 1.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. One can only presume that the Oxford councillors who took the decision recently to go “meat free” are nudists. Or stupid. Or anti-nature. Or all three.

To save the planet, pastoralism is the intelligent solution. The brain is 60% fat, and omega-rich fat from grass-fed meat is excellent for mental health. The sine qua non of free thinking. Beef and liberty! More meat, less wheat!

Over the past year, his unabashed criticism of lockdown policies has turned him into something of a renegade. It is a development that mystifies him; as he sees it, his views have always been mainstream liberal, and it is the world around that has changed.

In the course of our conversation, the retired judge doesn’t hold back. He asserts that it is becoming morally acceptable to ignore Covid regulations, and even warns that a campaign of “civil disobedience” has already begun.

You can read what he really thinks below. And watch our interaction on Lockdown TV — it was a fascinating conversation.

Podcast version:

On civil disobedience:

“Sometimes the most public spirited thing that you can do with despotic laws like these is to ignore them. I think that if the government persists long enough with locking people down, depending on the severity of the lockdown, civil disobedience is likely to be the result. It will be discrete civil disobedience in the classic English way — I don’t think that we are likely to go onto the streets waving banners. I think we will just calmly decide that we are not going to pay any attention to this. There are some things you have to pay attention to: you can’t go to a shop if it’s closed. On the other hand, you can invite friends round for a drink, whatever Mr Hancock says. People are doing that to some extent already.

“Everyone will have their own different threshold. But I think that in the eyes of many people who disapprove of the lockdown, and some people who approve of it, we’ve reached that point quite a long time ago.”

On the ethics of law-breaking:

“I feel sad that we have the kind of laws which public-spirited people may need to break. I have always taken a line on this, which is probably different from that of most of my former colleagues. I do not believe that there is a moral obligation to obey the law… You have to have a high degree of respect, both for the object that the law is trying to achieve, and for the way that it’s been achieved. Some laws invite breach. I think this is one of them.”

On sacrificing civil liberties:

“[Thomas] Hobbes believed in the absolute state — it didn’t have to be a monarchy, but it had to be absolute. He said that there was nothing short of the state actually killing people that the state should not be entitled to do. He was not, let us say, a believer in liberty. This is because of his experience of the anarchy which flowed from the civil war in England. Hobbes believed that we resign our freedoms unconditionally and permanently into the hands of the state, in return for security. Now, this is a model which ever since the rise of a recognisable form of modern Liberalism in the middle of the 19th century, has been almost universally rejected. But we have tended to revert to it during the current crisis. And I think that that is a very striking and very sinister development.

On the dangers of public fear:

“John Stuart Mill regarded public sentiment and public fear as the principal threat to a liberal democracy. The tendency would be for it to influence policies in a way that whittles away the island within which we are entitled to control our lives to next to nothing. That’s what he regarded as the big danger. It didn’t happen in his own lifetime; it has happened in many countries in the 20th century, and it’s happening in Britain now.”

On the fragility of democracy:

“Democracy is inherently fragile. We have an idea that it’s a very robust system. But democracies have existed for about 150 years. In this country, I think you could say that they existed from the second half of the of the 19th century — they are not the norm. Democracies were regarded in ancient times as inherently self-destructive ways of government. Because, said Aristotle, democracies naturally turn themselves into tyranny. Because the populace will always be a sucker for a demagogue who will turn himself into an absolute ruler…

“Now, it is quite remarkable that Aristotle’s gloomy predictions about the fate of democracies have been falsified by the experience of the West ever since the beginning of democracy. And I think one needs to ask why that is. In my view, the reason is this: Aristotle was basically right about the tendencies, but we have managed to avoid it by a shared political culture of restraint. And this culture of restraint, which because it depends on the collective mentality of our societies, is extremely fragile, quite easy to destroy and extremely difficult to recreate.”

On being a liberal:

“I regard myself as a liberal with a small L. Until the Covid outbreak, that was a very middle of the road position to be in. Since the outbreak, it’s become controversial, even in some people’s minds extreme. This is, I think, some indication of how far our national conversation has moved.”

On what the Government should learn:

“My first proposal is that governments should not treat information as a tool for manipulating public behaviour. They should be calmer than the majority of their citizens; they should be completely objective. My second lesson would be that governments dealing with scientific issues should not allow themselves to be influenced by a single caucus of scientists. They should always test what they are being told in a way that, for instance, judges test expert opinion by producing a counter expert, and working out which set of views stacks up best.”

On his critics:

“I would very much have preferred the kind of points that I have been consistently making for the last year to have been made by just about anybody else. Those colleagues or former colleagues who disapprove of what I’ve been doing have got a perfectly good point. But there are some issues which are so central to the dilemmas of our time, which are so important, where I think that you have to be prepared to stand up and be counted.

Within a few years of even the most successful show in the world opening, only traces of that show will be left behind, and the best record of what made it extraordinary will only exist in people’s memories. A playtext might be published, leaving a record of what was said, and the production might transfer and run in the West End for a while, but it will always close eventually. Revivals will happen, new versions for new times, and the creatives who were part of the first productions will go on and do other things, but they’re rarely, if ever, seen together again.

Imagine a world where bands only ever played their latest albums, and all previous albums could only be heard on bootleg live recordings, no one could ever hear the real thing again. That’s the theatre.

Bearing this in mind, you can understand the elation of many when it was announced on St George’s Day that Ian Rickson was going to direct Mark Rylance in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem again next year, over a decade after they first told that story together. For a great number of theatregoers, Jerusalem ranks as the most extraordinary night they’ve spent in a theatre, Rylance’s towering, Eric Cantona-like portrayal of the lead character, Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, the most compelling thing they’ve witnessed.

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These kinds of shows rarely come round again. The key creatives are too busy, with too many projects and calls on their time, and they’ve done the thing, anyway — they’re happy to move on. But Rylance and Rickson are going to revisit their greatest work, while still at the peak of their powers, after a decade when everything and nothing seems to have changed in England. It’s a truly amazing opportunity for audiences to experience something many of us thought was gone.

Jerusalem tells the story of a man about to be evicted from his caravan in a Wiltshire wood by the Kennet and Avon council. It’s about people living on the wild edges of society, and people who’ve fallen into the meat grinder of precarious rural life. It’s about the lure of the lawless, the country’s rebel spirit. It’s about England, in an ambitious way that few writers attempt and even fewer avoid embarrassing themselves in the course of attempting. But Butterworth did it triumphantly. Very few theatremakers living now will ever produce anything as good as this show was in its first production.

There’s a bit of the Tyson Furys about the play. Fury, widely thought to be the world’s best heavyweight boxer, is principally interesting to me because, like the folk singer John Martyn, he shows us that talent, like love, doesn’t always behave well, but lands wherever it falls instead, indiscriminate as lightning or Covid-19. It’s the idea Peter Shaffer explored in Amadeus — that genius is not necessarily accompanied by refinement, modesty, self-awareness, common sense. Genius just happens — sometimes to a boxer in a Bolton gym, sometimes to a folk singer with heroin and alcohol dependency issues, sometimes to a sex-crazed Austrian man-child. And sometimes it emerges in a play that seems to celebrate troubling things (one major plotline in Jerusalem centres on the whereabouts of the local May queen, who has gone missing on the day the new May queen should be crowned).

I had my own reservations about Jerusalem after I first saw it a decade ago. Growing up in Wiltshire, where the play is set, I and many others felt that Butterworth’s high octane, technicolour version of our world seemed in part like an effacement of our reality, which really had more in common with the work of Shane Meadows than the world of this play.

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Jerusalem didn’t set out to represent our reality, of course — with its comedy vicar and Morris dancing, the play is more reminiscent of Alan Bennett or Martin McDonagh’s subversion of theatrical tropes in plays such as Habeas Corpus or The Beauty Queen of Leenane, its real references are in the theatre more than they’re in the real world. However, in a culture that paid no attention whatsoever to the world we came from, to feel that the one story set among us didn’t quite tell us right was a strange thing.

People who contributed to workshops during the play’s development have told me that the man they think Rooster is based on used to hang around the gates of a Wiltshire school, causing parents to drive in at the end of the day and collect their kids rather than letting them walk home, and ended up going to prison for several years for offences which were not entirely unrelated to this behaviour. To some, the play also effaces the impact of what he did. But this brings me back to Tyson Fury — Butterworth wasn’t trying to respectfully chronicle a Wiltshire community. He was writing about England’s rebel heart, asserting that the centre of our identity is actually to be found at the margins, in the woods, like Robin Hood.

Michael Billington has written of Jerusalem as a year zero for a golden period in contemporary British playwriting — so how will the play look to us, as it returns to an English theatre scene it so electrified once before? I think its darker themes will seem more prominent than they originally did. The MeToo movement and Jimmy Savile will make the unsettling story of the May Queen at the heart of the play ring out very clear indeed, and I wonder if that will turn the play into more of a challenge, a provocation to those who see it and enjoy it — a way of asking what exactly it is that they enjoy.

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Perhaps the play will even seem like an exploration of the darkness and deformity at the heart of England, in the tradition of the late, great Irish writer William Trevor’s novels, like the Whitbread Prize-winning Felicia’s Journey, which laid bare the rottenness that ran through so much of English life long before we’d heard the whole truth about Savile. I also think the play could seem sadder as well.

The hope glimpsed at the end of the play, that one day on this benighted island someone might find Drake’s drum, begin to beat it, and rescue us from the state we’re in, seems to me to have been more or less extinguished by a decade of austerity, a realisation of the climate crisis and the arrival of the coronavirus. Jerusalem might seem now like a story about people who, if they were in our capital, would all live in places like Grenfell Tower, and a man who hasn’t woken up yet to the hopelessness of that predicament, who is still left beating the same old drum.

What Jerusalem will show us above all is the England that is under threat. Here we all are, being obedient and doing what the state says, remaining indoors and preparing to accept unprecedented surveillance into our lives, as the price, poignantly enough, for our liberty.

Jerusalem seems to me like a howl in the face of that: an insistence that there are parts of us all, the part we recognise in Rooster Byron, that still can’t be policed. We’re going to need to work out how to protect and cultivate that aspect of ourselves, as we adapt to this new normal. Returning to Butterworth’s great play will afford us an opportunity to think about that.