Here is the excerpt from Sapians where Harari states that humans did not cultivate wheat - it cultivated us!
Love the book but I've been trying to take some of it with a grain of salt. The "biggest fraud" topic was one I've been wondering about recently.
This may be more of an anthropological topic, so you may want to ask in /r/askanthropology.
The statement is true, if overly dramatic. Hunter-gatherers are thought to have spent around 3 hours/day getting food for themselves, as opposed to working "from sun to sun" like the stereotypical farmer. Estimates are based on what current hunter-gatherers do, and modern ones are largely living in areas others don't want to live in, like the Kalahari desert or far northern Canada. More fertile areas likely required less time and effort. The diet was highly varied, with hundreds of different plants and animals in the diet, all rich in vitamins and other things good for you. In contrast, agricultural societies tend to focus on only a few sources of food--wheat, corn, rice, a couple meat sources,- small number of vegetables. And of those, their genetic diversity is minimal--much of the wheat we eat is the same variety. There are thousands of different apple types but only 4 or 5 are regularly eaten today. Furthermore, as our food is selected for speed of growth, size, and ease of transport today, they may suffer in nutrient content.
Hunter-gatherer life expectancy is close to what modern americans' is, leaving aside infant mortality. Children were fewer, too, greatly reducing the burden of menstruatiom, pregnancy, childbirth, and child raising, of women in agricultural communities. Agricultural life expectancy is very much less than that in h-g tribes. Agriculturalists are also shorter and have bad teeth. Tooth decay is extremely rare in h-g.
The correct answer is: It depends. I will divide it into two points, workload and diet of Hunter-Gatherers and then some discussion about farmers to provide full picture.
Previously, there were a lot of claims like that, that Hunter-Gatherers do not have to really work a lot for their food. However, most of such claims were sooner or later proved absolutely wrong.
The simple fact is that there are many kinds of hunter-gatherers in many different environments. Additionally, there are a lot of kinds of farmers in a lot of different environments.
One of major problem with these comparisons that hunter-gatherers are simply too varied. Lets take a look at some very basic classification of societies based on hunting/farming and social complexity:
simple hunter-gatherers
complex hunter-gatherers -- large long lasting source of food, many North American Natives were complex hunter-gatherers, dependent often on rich fish streams, complex hunter-gatherers are structurally much closer to farming societies, just look at distribution of hunter-gatherers
simple horticulturist -- bit more complex than simple hunter-gatherers but not on par in complexity with complex hunter-gatherers or agriculture societies; look at some Amazonian natives, like Jivaro and so, they are even sometimes classified incorrectly as hunter-gatherers.
agriculture societies
histogram of site sizes amongst sample of Hunter-Gatherers
And thats not all, even those classified as "simple hunter-gatherers" vary greatly! There are tons of different environments, some enable small permanent sites, with others, one must migrate. Some hunts more, other gathers more. Some chose to have one permanent village, but create hunting/gathering parties around their region, others just move whole village, either just a few times a year or every day (in a dense rainforest, movement through forest is so complicated, that you are unable to gather food that is just a few kilometers away).
and if we merge fishing and meat
So speaking about typical hunter-gatherer is very complicated, as is speaking about typical early farmer. Some hunter-gatherers might not be that different from early farmers, but both might differ drastically to other hunter-gatherers (I wouldn't say that Inuits have rich and varied diet and that they need to work only a few hours a day).
Another problem is that modern hunter-gatherers my no mean are "typical" hunter-gatherers. Modern hunter-gatherers live in environment usually unsuitable for farming/pastoral population, Khoisan people were clearly displaced by Bantu people and had numerous conflict with them in past. So modern hunter-gatherers are already forming extreme values just because the environment they are living in.
This conclude chapter of complexity of hunter-gatherers classification. Thus it may be true that SOME of them, but not in general.
Now, lets investigate the second point about diet. This is a bit closer to truth. But again, it depends on what you are comparing them to.
One thing that we must rule out is variety. Variety is nonsense and by itself variety won't make you more healthy. If you will eat variety of stuff, which lack the same necessary vitamins, you are screwed. If you eat low variety of stuff, but it has good variety of vitamins and nutrients (energy rich, protein rich for brain, animal proteins were highly priced EVERYWHERE, even amongst apes), you are awesome and happy.
You (well, we, people to be precise) must forget that nonsense that the whole problem is discrete, either you ONLY farm or you ONLY hunt-gather. In fact, hunting was still practised, so was gathering of nutrient rich food, amongst early farmers. You can look at Iroquois, there female started farm, but men did still hunt.
Next, look at farmers. Yeah, we usually have single MAIN crop in our diet, that constitute of most of our energy need. But apart of that, people usually grow small amount of other crops, herbs and so on. This together with rest of hunting and gathering (look at blueberries or mushrooms, people still predominantly gather them, well, at least in my country) maybe changed composition of food and made it highly biased towards the main crop, that is important mainly for energy, but if this reduced some essential stuff, well, we cannot answer that really. It depend on the food in particular. (the "variety" for hunter-gatherers is overdone as well, they didn't strip mined environment, but concentrated on the energy densest and less laborious stuff first, which effectively reduced variety in favour of energy maximization).
However, what farming did is two stuff:
Given that one of most discussed population control in hunter-gatherers (population control is important, as hunter-gatherers are very dependent on right balance of amount of people, anything more put significant stress on environment, anything less may make party not large enough to collect enough food efficiently) is breastfeeding (which decrease fertility), these two changes enabled rapid increase in population density, which increased probability of diseases. Another effect of increased density was this:
Given agriculture, it is much harder to set a new site. New site require much more work to start production (forest clearing, preparing soil...). Now, the efficiency of any work does not grow linearly with amount of people, right? So from some threshold, you get reduced gain for every additional person. This exactly happened in farming society, namely given the required big first investment into new settlement that would decrease density and increase back farming efficiency. This is a bit alleviated by that a lot of new settlements of farming societies were basically hunter-gatherers (even in our society, a lot of colonist colonizing unknown lands hunted much more than older settlements). But still, this means that this decrease food, increase required work, while still keeping all the disadvantages of more diseases (even increasing it, as with lower amount of food, famine and subsequent epidemics is much more probable).
So this point is partially true, but as you can see, there lies a big "Its complicated" behind it and its not that farming is worse or farmers had less varied diet.
Source for data and BIG discussion about hunter gatherers: https://www.amazon.com/Foraging-Spectrum-Diversity-Hunter-Gatherer-Lifeways/dp/0975273884
Paper that says that HG DID have better diet: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/12/4760.short