The Potato Series - Part 1

Spuds: What would we do without them?

In fact there was a time when people did without them; it was between 1845 and 1852 in Ireland during what is commonly known as the Great Famine. It was a period of mass starvation, disease and emigration during which the island's population dropped by 20–25 percent. Approximately one million people died and a million more emigrated (creating the Irish Diaspora) ostensibly because of a potato disease commonly known as potato blight. I visited Ireland 20 years ago and was fascinated/horrified by the fact that so many people starved in such a pastoral land, surrounded by a sea teeming with fish. It seems that the poor working class of Ireland had developed a potato dependency. Wikipedia explains…The potato was introduced to Ireland as a garden crop of the gentry. In the first two decades of the eighteenth century, it became a base food of the poor, especially in winter. The expansion of the economy between 1760 and 1815 saw the potato becoming a staple food all the year round for the cottier class. The potato's spread was essential to the development of the cottier system, delivering an extremely cheap workforce, but at the cost of lower living standards; it was essentially a potato wage that shaped the expanding agrarian economy. The expansion of tillage led to an inevitable expansion of the potato acreage, and an expansion of the cottier class. By 1841, there were over half a million cottiers, with 1.75 million dependents. The principal beneficiary of this system was the English consumer. The grazing lands of Ireland had been used to pasture cows for centuries. The British colonized the Irish, transforming much of their countryside into an extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry consumer market at home. The British taste for beef had a devastating impact on the impoverished and disenfranchised people of Ireland who were pushed off the best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of marginal land. The Irish turned to the potato, a crop that could be grown abundantly in less favorable soil. Eventually, cattle took over much of Ireland, leaving the native population virtually dependent on the potato for survival.

I'd be interested to know how the starving masses refrained from poaching the beef on the hoof. Aren't we lucky to live in a time and place in which we aren't dependent upon one source of food to survive.