Speaker 1: Cold Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to cool People who did cool stuff.
Speaker 2: Your weekly reminder that Margaret has a cold. No, that's
Speaker 2: just a thing, that's true, Your weekly reminder that there's
Speaker 2: people trying to do good things when there's bad things happening,
Speaker 2: which are the aforementioned cool people. I'm your host, Marta Kildrey,
Speaker 2: and I have a cold, so I'm only sort of
Speaker 2: the host today, partly as a result of that, because
Speaker 2: I've been on Twitter and so I thought to myself,
Speaker 2: I sure would like to talk to my friend Renn.
Speaker 2: Ren Awry is the author of the editor.
Speaker 1: Of the editor of Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Nourishing Resistance, which is ren is like the only
Speaker 2: radical food history that I personally know. But Hi, Ren,
Speaker 2: how are you good?
Speaker 1: How are you doing?
Speaker 2: I have a cold?
Speaker 1: You have colds?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've been coffeeing all day and sneezing all week.
Speaker 2: It's fun, totally.
Speaker 1: I did pretty good. Yeah that sounds not fun.
Speaker 3: I am getting ready in two days to move a
Speaker 3: thousand miles away from where I've been living.
Speaker 1: For the past decades, so it's a big week.
Speaker 3: But I'm excited to be here and to be here
Speaker 3: to talk about a very important food on cool people
Speaker 3: the potato.
Speaker 2: I'm so excited. I Wren pitched this a while ago,
Speaker 2: being like, can I do the history of the potato?
Speaker 2: And for those people who've been listening for a long time,
Speaker 2: they know why this is a particular importance. But if
Speaker 2: you haven't been listening for a long time, you're not
Speaker 2: going to be in on it, and instead you just
Speaker 2: get to learn about why potatoes are interesting or great
Speaker 2: or I actually don't know what we're going to learn today.
Speaker 2: All I know is that I'm going to learn about
Speaker 2: potatoes and be able to mute my mic while I'm
Speaker 2: coughing because Ren will be the one talking so potatoes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think, actually, what got you to decide
Speaker 3: that you want to do this episode is that I
Speaker 3: I'm actually moving to Idaho, which is famous for potatoes.
Speaker 3: But I'm sad to share with people that there is
Speaker 3: no idea in this episode because I went through a
Speaker 3: bunch of archives and I was up there and couldn't
Speaker 3: find anything. So there is kind of like a tie
Speaker 3: in for me too.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, But before we talk about potatoes, what we
Speaker 2: need to talk about is the fact that our producer
Speaker 2: is Sophie Licktterman. Hi Sophie, Sophie, Sophie. Oh no, Sophie
Speaker 2: isn't here. See this is a bit because I knew
Speaker 2: that Sophie wasn't here because she's not on the zoom
Speaker 2: but normally Sophie's here because she's the producer of the show.
Speaker 2: But she's even sicker than I am. I don't know,
Speaker 2: I'm supposed to tell you people that, but it's going
Speaker 2: around and it's not COVID, and everyone's getting negative tests
Speaker 2: on the COVID and positive tests on My throat hurts
Speaker 2: all the time. So that's the news about that. And
Speaker 2: then also probably our audio engineer is Rory Hi. Rory
Speaker 2: Hi Rory, and our theme music was written for us
Speaker 2: by O woman. And I can't tell you one way
Speaker 2: or the other about the relative upper respiratory health of
Speaker 2: either of those individuals, but I can tell you about
Speaker 2: how I'm going to learn about potatoes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it turns out that the political radical history
Speaker 3: of Potatoes is actually extremely complex and broad.
Speaker 1: There's a lot out there. So for this episode, there's
Speaker 1: quite a bit that I'll definitely leave out, and there's
Speaker 1: also a bunch of topics I'm going to talk about.
Speaker 3: That I won't go in as much detail about as
Speaker 3: I might otherwise. So if folks are listening and something
Speaker 3: piques your interest, I encourage you to research it and
Speaker 3: learn more about it. We're gonna be covering a lot
Speaker 3: of ground and going on a whole potato journey.
Speaker 1: But first, before we get into.
Speaker 2: That, wait, what's your favorite kind of potato? Or like,
Speaker 2: what's your favorite way to eat a potato?
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3: Okay, so maybe this is actually the right segue, which
Speaker 3: is that I'm in the middle of moving to Boise, Idaho,
Speaker 3: and French fries.
Speaker 1: There are actually extremely good.
Speaker 3: And I didn't realize that French pries could be a
Speaker 3: food that was like exceptionally good until I spent a
Speaker 3: bunch of time there, And so right now I think
Speaker 3: it's French fries amazing.
Speaker 1: How about you.
Speaker 2: I'm currently on a French fry kick too, because I
Speaker 2: got an air fryar and a French fry cutter oo
Speaker 2: and it's just a like I can have homemade French
Speaker 2: fries that aren't deep fried that tastes like good French
Speaker 2: fries very quickly. So that's my current favorite also, but
Speaker 2: also I'm also eating aligob with potatoes in it off
Speaker 2: mic because my food arrived just when I started recording.
Speaker 2: I'm very professional. Everyone in the audience totally so also
Speaker 2: that form of potato.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great form of potato too. I wanted
Speaker 3: to ask you because I know that you were growing potatoes.
Speaker 2: What I learned about growing potatoes is I am bad
Speaker 2: at it. This is my second year of attempting to
Speaker 2: grow potatoes, and this year I managed to harvest some
Speaker 2: and then they went bad before I ate them, and
Speaker 2: some of them went bad before I pulled them out
Speaker 2: of the ground. And then one friend was like, oh,
Speaker 2: that's potato blake and was like, that's the same stuff
Speaker 2: that you know, kill lay your ancestors, Margaret, But I don't. No, well,
Speaker 2: actually it wasn't a British person in the soil. It
Speaker 2: was actually just a potato. But that's my There was
Speaker 2: no potato, fam and the British are at fault. Joke.
Speaker 2: But I have not eaten potatoes that I've grown, even
Speaker 2: though two different years I've attempted to grow potatoes. So
Speaker 2: I'm a terrible I'm a good prepper in terms of
Speaker 2: a lot of stuff, but I am a terrible gardener.
Speaker 2: And I keep trying and one of these days, because
Speaker 2: I believe very strongly that you should always make a
Speaker 2: habit of at least you should be doing at least
Speaker 2: one thing you're bad at at all times. And I'm
Speaker 2: bad at gardening, and I garden. I did eat a
Speaker 2: lot of tomatoes, which rhyme with potatoes. I grew them
Speaker 2: and then I ate them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And potatoes and tomatoes are, you know, from the
Speaker 3: same general area, opposite sides of the same journal area.
Speaker 1: This is a great segue.
Speaker 2: Actually, is it South America?
Speaker 3: I believe tomatoes originated in Mexico, but potatoes did originally
Speaker 3: come from South America. So the potato is domestic in
Speaker 3: the Andean region of what's now Peru between seventy eight
Speaker 3: hundred and three thousand BCE, depending on who you ask.
Speaker 3: There's really different statistics on this. And while Indian people
Speaker 3: grew tubers for thousands of years before the rise of
Speaker 3: the Inca Empire. Under the Inca, the status of the
Speaker 3: potato actually fell. The Inca were a group of Ketchwas
Speaker 3: speaking elites who rose to power in the Cousco Valley
Speaker 3: starting in the fourteenth century, and they went on to
Speaker 3: control large swaths of the Andes Mountains in the west
Speaker 3: coast of South America in the next two centuries, and
Speaker 3: despite coming from potato growing areas, they didn't value potatoes. Instead,
Speaker 3: they put a really high importance on maize, which they
Speaker 3: used to make the alcoholic drink chicha, and had a
Speaker 3: set of ceremonies and rituals that went along with cultivating
Speaker 3: that maze.
Speaker 2: So they just didn't appreciate their own potatoes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they didn't appreciate their own potatoes. It was kind
Speaker 3: of like a lowly everyday food.
Speaker 2: I guess that's still what it is to most people now.
Speaker 1: Still what it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was going to be a theme that kind
Speaker 3: of it kind of occurs throughout the episode. And the
Speaker 3: Inca Empire I'm going to talk a little bit about
Speaker 3: they're actually pretty interesting. Some scholars have described them as
Speaker 3: a welfare state based on the traditional Andean concept of
Speaker 3: amy or reciprocity. So peasants were required to use two
Speaker 3: thirds of their land to grow food for the Incan
Speaker 3: government and religious establishment, as well as pay a labor
Speaker 3: tax so in which one member from each household would
Speaker 3: work for the government for a certain number of hours
Speaker 3: each year, and in exchange, they'd get stuff like infrastructure, irrigation,
Speaker 3: route materials, religious monuments.
Speaker 1: And really crucially food.
Speaker 3: The Incan government relocated some people from mountainous potato growing
Speaker 3: regions to valleys where maze grew in parts that they
Speaker 3: could send that means back to their communities in the
Speaker 3: mountains and ensure food security in those communities. And these
Speaker 3: distributive policies protected everyday people from mass starvation even when
Speaker 3: crops failed. But the Inca Empire was an empire, right,
Speaker 3: so they were also pretty authoritarian, and they worked really
Speaker 3: hard to maintain power. And the relocation of people from
Speaker 3: these maize growing areas had another probably primary benefit for
Speaker 3: the empire. It allowed Incan rulers to move potential or
Speaker 3: active rebels from newly conquered areas to loyal communities where
Speaker 3: Incan rule was long established as a method of preventing rebellion.
Speaker 3: So actually like shifting population around to prevent rebellion.
Speaker 2: I mean, because it's funny because a lot of what
Speaker 2: you just described, how two thirds of your land has
Speaker 2: to be growing food for the state and things like that,
Speaker 2: like that part sounds a lot like feudalism and serfdom
Speaker 2: and a lot of the like more European concepts, only
Speaker 2: the European concepts didn't have as much of a welfare
Speaker 2: state built in. So this seems like a totally like
Speaker 2: a better deal, a comparable but better deal. Like still
Speaker 2: not how I would choose to live, right, I like
Speaker 2: freedom and all that.
Speaker 3: But that was the impression I got with the reading
Speaker 3: that I did on this, that there were, you know,
Speaker 3: all of the bad things about a conquering empire, but
Speaker 3: then there were also these safety nets that didn't exist
Speaker 3: in other parts of the world at the time. So
Speaker 3: the Inca rulers and sort of like ruling class did
Speaker 3: depend up potatoes to support population growth, feed government workers
Speaker 3: and soldiers, and as an important backup food in times
Speaker 3: of poor harvest. So as of like actual everyday food.
Speaker 3: Even though it didn't have a lot of symbolic importance,
Speaker 3: it had a lot of practical importance. But researchers have
Speaker 3: hypothesized that these potatoes that the Incan government stored were
Speaker 3: from a really narrow range of varieties, like potatoes that
Speaker 3: were good for freeze drying, potatoes that stored well, and
Speaker 3: it was actually peasants in small villages who continued to
Speaker 3: grow this wide variety of potatoes.
Speaker 1: For their own subsistence.
Speaker 3: And I don't know how much you know about potatoes
Speaker 3: in the Andes, but there's like a million different kinds
Speaker 3: and they all look wild and different and like different colors,
Speaker 3: different shapes, And so it was these peasants who were
Speaker 3: keeping that potato biodiversity alive. Cool, and yeah, they grew
Speaker 3: wide range of potatoes, repaired them in many different ways,
Speaker 3: from soups and steice to freeze dried potatoes called tunio,
Speaker 3: which can be stored for decades before being rehydrated and eaten,
Speaker 3: and can also.
Speaker 2: Wait, how are they freeze drying?
Speaker 3: So it's this like complex process that involves, like I
Speaker 3: don't want to like missay, but from what I remember,
Speaker 3: it involves like breaking them apart and like drying them
Speaker 3: in the sun.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna drop.
Speaker 3: Actually, because this episode has so many sources, I'll like
Speaker 3: put a source list on an Instagram or something, and
Speaker 3: there's an article that describes in greater detail.
Speaker 1: How this is made.
Speaker 3: Okay, So yeah, but I read that they could be
Speaker 3: stored for like years, which is pretty cool, and that
Speaker 3: junio could also be ground into flour for baking potato products.
Speaker 2: Cool.
Speaker 3: There's also this sort of like religious aspect as well,
Speaker 3: So rural farmers maintained household shrines to dieties such as
Speaker 3: Ashamama potato mother who watches over the Indian potato fields,
Speaker 3: and to quote potato historian Rebecca Earle, household shrines to
Speaker 3: Pacha Mama and her fertile daughters balanced state level neglect
Speaker 3: of potatoes. The veneration of this feminine dynasty long predated
Speaker 3: the official rituals of the Inca Empire and persists to
Speaker 3: the present and so one sort of like present day
Speaker 3: example of this is the kin to ceremony, which involves,
Speaker 3: according to a Ketchwa elder name Isabella. The article that
Speaker 3: I read that quoted her only gave her first name,
Speaker 3: but it involves giving thanks to Pasha Mama with coca leaves.
Speaker 3: And Pacha Mama is an Andyan diity worshiped as the
Speaker 3: earth mother and is considered the mother of Ashamama.
Speaker 2: This is exciting. I like the Potato Mama.
Speaker 3: There is yeah, totally a potato Mama. And the genocidal
Speaker 3: Spanish conquest of the Andes in present day Peru, which
Speaker 3: was aided by the spread of smallpox, took place over
Speaker 3: the sixteenth century, from the Spaniard's first contact with Incan
Speaker 3: rule in fifteen thirty two to the murder of the
Speaker 3: last Incan emperor, tubac Amaru at their hands in fifteen
Speaker 3: seventy two.
Speaker 2: Well, I was reading on Twitter that this was actually
Speaker 2: a positive thing. Twitter is pretty convinced actually that it. Sorry,
Speaker 2: this is a dry humor joke about a really bad thing.
Speaker 2: Never mind, it's bad. I hate that there's people who
Speaker 2: apologize for this now anyway, Sorry, please continue totally.
Speaker 3: I don't know where you were going with that, but
Speaker 3: I can't continue. Although one thing that I learned is
Speaker 3: that this was this last Incan ruler was tupac Amaru
Speaker 3: the first, and it's tupac Amaru the second who let
Speaker 3: her of vault in seventeen eighty, who is the one that,
Speaker 3: like the rapper tupac is named after cool So there
Speaker 3: were two of them. But food shortages increased under Spanish
Speaker 3: rule because the storehouses that the Inca held were looted
Speaker 3: by the Spanish, and the redistributive policies of the Incan
Speaker 3: state were replaced by the encomanda system, which basically allowed
Speaker 3: Spanish landowners to extract labor from indigenous andy and people
Speaker 3: without recipe prosody. They also neglected that irrigation systems, mountain terraces,
Speaker 3: all of the infrastructure that were previously up kept by
Speaker 3: the Incan state, which made growing and distributing food even harder.
Speaker 3: And the Spanish also started collecting potatoes alongside other food
Speaker 3: as tributes. While the colonizers both exported potatoes to Europe
Speaker 3: and ate them themselves, they were strongly associated with indigenous
Speaker 3: food ways and religious rituals, and because of this, Spanish
Speaker 3: settlers and their descendants considered them a menial food well
Speaker 3: into the modern era. On the flip side, you also
Speaker 3: see that potatoes, especially the diverse variety of potatoes that
Speaker 3: continue to be grown in the Andes, become a symbol
Speaker 3: of indigenous resistance to colonial and sort of like non
Speaker 3: indigenous state rule.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, Were they like stuffing them full of razors
Speaker 2: and throw them at fascist like they did in a
Speaker 2: cable street. I don't know, I'm assuming not. I think
Speaker 2: it's possible. I'm thinking of ways that you could throw
Speaker 2: potatoes at people people.
Speaker 1: Was that happening, Yeah, on the cable street?
Speaker 2: The cable street riots, Okay. One of the things that
Speaker 2: is said, And it might be that this was said
Speaker 2: because they were like Irish and people were just like
Speaker 2: trying to talk trash. But it's cool whether or not
Speaker 2: they made this up about the Irish or not. They
Speaker 2: were like they stuffed potatoes full of razor blades and
Speaker 2: through them at the fascists. So I'm like, yeah, all right, Wow,
Speaker 2: I want it to be true. Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 3: That is something I didn't find in my potato research,
Speaker 3: and I'm curious about it now.
Speaker 2: So yeah, anyway, for.
Speaker 1: Sure, Yeah, onward with the Andes.
Speaker 3: Although actually what I'm going to talk about now is
Speaker 3: that while the Andes are considered the heartland of potatoes domestication,
Speaker 3: it feels important to mention that potatoes have actually been
Speaker 3: eaten outside of the Andes for thousands of years.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 3: Wild potatoes grow all along the American Cordillera, which runs
Speaker 3: from Alaska all the way down to Patagonia, and it
Speaker 3: includes the Rockies, the Andies, the Sierra Madres, and a
Speaker 3: bunch of other mountain ranges.
Speaker 2: Like it's native to those, or it's been cultivated there
Speaker 2: or both or nazy sort of.
Speaker 3: Blurry cultivated blurry folks are not totally sure, but we
Speaker 3: do know that potatoes were eaten as far south as
Speaker 3: Chile and as far north as Utah as early as
Speaker 3: thirteen thousand years ago.
Speaker 2: Cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so they actually were all over And interestingly, there
Speaker 3: may have been a second point of potato domestication resulting
Speaker 3: in the Four Corners potato in the southwestern United States.
Speaker 3: It's a tiny spud that varies a lot in shape
Speaker 3: and color, and it was cultivated in what's now Utah
Speaker 3: starting at least eleven thousand years ago. It's long been
Speaker 3: eaten in parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado as well,
Speaker 3: and it actually continues to be grown by Tonay hopey
Speaker 3: Zuni payuten Ute farmers. And in an article I read
Speaker 3: for the Counter written in twenty twenty one, to nay nutritness,
Speaker 3: Cynthia Wilson shured that her mother, to quote the article,
Speaker 3: thought Navajo families may have carried and dispersed the potatoes
Speaker 3: on the Long Walk, the eighteen sixty four forced march
Speaker 3: of thousands of Navajo people from their homeland by the
Speaker 3: US Army. Scattering potatoes would have been a way to
Speaker 3: work the path and ensure a source.
Speaker 1: Of food on the way back.
Speaker 2: That's cool.
Speaker 3: So I thought that was really interesting, and that's the
Speaker 3: one place that I found it, but it felt valuable
Speaker 3: to share.
Speaker 2: No, I like that it's not just like one little
Speaker 2: origin point that I feel like the way the story
Speaker 2: is often told is like there's one little origin point
Speaker 2: and then like white people showed up and then spread
Speaker 2: it everywhere, you.
Speaker 1: Know, totally.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, it was definitely being spread across the Americas,
Speaker 3: at least to some extent, long before the Spaniards ever
Speaker 3: showed up.
Speaker 1: But speaking of you know, white.
Speaker 3: People showing up and then spreading it everywhere, the next
Speaker 3: part of this episode I.
Speaker 2: Thought was gonna be an ad break, but it's not.
Speaker 1: No, it could be an ad break, right.
Speaker 2: But no, we'll do that soon. We'll come up with
Speaker 2: some other terrible interruptions soon.
Speaker 1: Cool.
Speaker 3: We're going to talk about what happened when potatoes arrived
Speaker 3: in Europe, And I do want to mention that the
Speaker 3: next couple sections of the scripts, while they bring in
Speaker 3: a bunch of different sources, depend on the work of
Speaker 3: Rebecca Earl, who wrote not one, but two books on potatoes,
Speaker 3: including the Incredible Feeding the People The Politics of Potatoes.
Speaker 3: So I wanted to make sure to give her a
Speaker 3: shout out. Potatoes are brought to Europe very very shortly
Speaker 3: after the Spanish colonization of the Americas began. And what's
Speaker 3: interesting is there are all these myths about European peasants
Speaker 3: refusing to eat potatoes when they first encountered them, and
Speaker 3: there are some pretty wild reasons given for this. It's
Speaker 3: said that the lumpiness of potatoes indicated that they were
Speaker 3: a vector of leprosy, and another was that the potatoes
Speaker 3: weren't mentioned in the Bible and thus were not properly Christian.
Speaker 3: These myths are not at all true, and there are
Speaker 3: plenty of foods that were eaten in early modern Europe
Speaker 3: that weren't in the Bible.
Speaker 2: I want Christian nationalists to return to this idea that
Speaker 2: their predecessors didn't have. You know, they'll be like, yeah,
Speaker 2: they'll be like, oh, in medieval era they knew better
Speaker 2: than to eat foods that aren't in the Bible. And
Speaker 2: in the Middle Ages they were like, the hell are
Speaker 2: you talking about? It's just a book? Noah, Like, I mean,
Speaker 2: we believe in God or whatever, but like we're not.
Speaker 1: We're also eating cabbages, which aren't in the Bible, you know.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, I just like the Christian nationalists now are
Speaker 2: like kind of further wing nut afield than like the
Speaker 2: average medieval Christian.
Speaker 1: Oh totally, yeah, in a bad way.
Speaker 3: I feel like there was a lot of like wing
Speaker 3: wing nuttery happening in ways that were like kind of
Speaker 3: interesting back then.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, like there's no such thing as sin and
Speaker 2: we all to feed each other. Yeah, anyway, totally.
Speaker 1: I don't actually know exactly what you're referring to.
Speaker 2: The takers in the ranters, I kind of combined.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, totally cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, so these mess are not true at all.
Speaker 3: Peasants and especially peasant women were responsible for cultivating and
Speaker 3: eating like we're the first people in Europe to be responsible.
Speaker 1: For cultivating and eating.
Speaker 3: Potatoes, in part because they were the people who tended
Speaker 3: kitchen and subsistence gardens and oh the like.
Speaker 2: Non market stuff, right, the reproductive labor and so the
Speaker 2: productive labor.
Speaker 1: Then non market stuff. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: So it was like European peasant women who are the
Speaker 3: reason why Europeans started eating potatoes, And there are reports
Speaker 3: have been being grown by Italian peasants by the late
Speaker 3: fifteen eighties. A German cookbook from the mid sixteen hundreds
Speaker 3: noted how ubiquitous potatoes were in peasant gardens by that time.
Speaker 3: Cool and around this time there starts to be evident
Speaker 3: that potatoes are being grown across the European continent.
Speaker 2: But you know what else is across the European continent.
Speaker 1: Ads and services.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're everywhere wherever you go. Although the best ad
Speaker 2: I ever saw on the European continent, although no, it's
Speaker 2: no longer part of the European continent because it was
Speaker 2: in England. But there was this ad on the subway
Speaker 2: whatever they call their subway, the tube or something, I
Speaker 2: don't know. Two and it said it said we put
Speaker 2: the D in bread. And it was an ad for
Speaker 2: like vitamin D bread. But everyone just thinks it's about uses.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Not not great copy.
Speaker 2: No, but maybe these following ads will also have weird
Speaker 2: inferences in them. Let's find out together. Oh boy, we're
Speaker 2: back from those ads. My favorite one was the one
Speaker 2: for gambling, which is always good. This is my way
Speaker 2: of saying, don't gamble. I know that we sometimes advertise that,
Speaker 2: but you shouldn't do it anyway.
Speaker 1: I have no strong feelings on gambling. Either way. But
Speaker 1: I do have strong feelings on potatoes.
Speaker 2: Okay, it's not a moral stands against gambling here, by
Speaker 2: the way, I'm not being like you have sinned, you know.
Speaker 2: It's more of a just a life. It always works out,
Speaker 2: the house always wins in the end. That is the
Speaker 2: way that gambling totally.
Speaker 3: I dislike gambling, But my grandma lived in Las Vegas
Speaker 3: for the last twenty years of her life, so I've
Speaker 3: been around.
Speaker 1: It a lot. Oh, okay, and yeah, but I would agree.
Speaker 3: I personally dislike gambling, but beyond that, don't have any
Speaker 3: strong feelings bet.
Speaker 2: Okay, but potatoes, But potatoes.
Speaker 3: I do have strong feelings about Potatoes caught on in
Speaker 3: Europe among the peasantry because they're a smart way to
Speaker 3: feed a lot of people. They're incredibly water efficient, they
Speaker 3: grow in many different climates. A hector of potatoes, which
Speaker 3: is about an acre and a half, provides triple the
Speaker 3: calories that a hector of wheat oats does, and in
Speaker 3: addition to calories on protein, potatoes are packed with important
Speaker 3: nutrients like vitamin C. But potatoes became popular for another
Speaker 3: reason as well. To quote Earle, using a phrase from
Speaker 3: anthropologist James C. Scott, who sometimes identified as an anarchist
Speaker 3: and who's a very interesting thinker. Potatoes and other tubers
Speaker 3: are state evating, and to explain.
Speaker 1: By Scott calls potatoes databating. I want to actually quote
Speaker 1: him directly because I think he says it best.
Speaker 3: So Scott says, in general, roots and tubers such as yams,
Speaker 3: sweet potatoes, potatoes, and cassava maniac yaka are nearly appropriation proof.
Speaker 3: Sure they ripe, and they can be safely left in
Speaker 3: the ground from to two years and dug up piecemeal
Speaker 3: as needed.
Speaker 1: There is thus no grainary to plunder.
Speaker 3: If the army or the taxman wants your potatoes, for example,
Speaker 3: they will have to dig them up one by one.
Speaker 2: That's cool, yeah, and also more proof that I really
Speaker 2: failed that the potatoes. I wasn't sure. I thought I
Speaker 2: had left them in the ground too long. Apparently that
Speaker 2: is not the case. Apparently there's just something wrong with them.
Speaker 3: Well, maybe you did have a potato blight, because the
Speaker 3: potato blight and the way that the British government approached
Speaker 3: the famine were real.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh, we'll talk about this a little more a little bit, okay, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I love the idea that the potato like your
Speaker 1: idea that the potato blight.
Speaker 2: Didn't exist, better famine didn't exist. The potato famine isn't
Speaker 2: the potatoes fault. It is the British. It is the
Speaker 2: British famine. The potato blight is real. Yeah, we'll get
Speaker 2: to it.
Speaker 1: I'm just teasing you.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But Scott also talks about potatoes being easier to conceal
Speaker 3: the other crops because they're grown underground, and this will
Speaker 3: come up again a little bit later when we are
Speaker 3: talking about Ireland in a while. So potatoes played a
Speaker 3: stativating role in parts of early modern Europe. At first,
Speaker 3: many European states weren't interested in potatoes grown by peasants
Speaker 3: for subsistence, and therefore they weren't taxed or tithes for
Speaker 3: decades after they started being grown. And it may also
Speaker 3: been hard for tax collectors and other officials to quantify
Speaker 3: who was growing potatoes or how many potatoes they were growing,
Speaker 3: for all of those reasons that Scott mentioned. Right, they're
Speaker 3: easy to conceal, they're easy to dig up when you
Speaker 3: need them, and you don't have to always store them.
Speaker 2: You to convince them to eat the berries. Oh yeah, no,
Speaker 2: I'm growing it for the berries. Here, eat these berries
Speaker 2: because they're toxic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then you won't have to pay any taxes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, I know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it probably won't surprise you knowing all that,
Speaker 3: right that landlords were often against potato cultivation at this time,
Speaker 3: and this is partially because they thought the fields were
Speaker 3: better used to produce st maarketable crops like wheaten oats.
Speaker 3: In seventeen ninety seven, an English estate manager recommended that
Speaker 3: peasants who planted potatoes and fields that could otherwise be
Speaker 3: used for growing commercial crops be fined ten pounds per acre,
Speaker 3: which is a ton of money at that time.
Speaker 1: But landlords also worried that if peasants.
Speaker 3: Could feed themselves by growing potatoes, they'd be less likely
Speaker 3: to labor in the landlord's field. Hell yeah, And the
Speaker 3: latter was the case in Sweden, where an eighteenth century
Speaker 3: campaign to promote potato growing was thwarted by landlords.
Speaker 2: I'm really excited that the potatoes even cooler than I
Speaker 2: thought it is.
Speaker 3: Although it kind of swings the other way. In just
Speaker 3: a moment, you'll see this happen. Okay, it does become Yeah,
Speaker 3: a tool of state buildings.
Speaker 2: And we're just going to end the episode here. It's
Speaker 2: been really great having you on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's all we need to know.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, no, okay, okay.
Speaker 3: Well, and interestingly, Karl Marx, despite having quite a different
Speaker 3: political orientation from these landlords that I mentioned, was also
Speaker 3: skeptical potato. Writing in the eighteen fifties, he compared French
Speaker 3: peasants to potatoes in a sack, and with this metaphor
Speaker 3: he was describing how, according at least to his analysis,
Speaker 3: the self sufficiency of small rural farmers kept them isolated
Speaker 3: from both one another and other laboring classes, and precluded
Speaker 3: the development of political organizing and class consciousness.
Speaker 2: Which, okay, I love this because it's one of the
Speaker 2: most famously incorrect things that Karl Marx ever postulated, with
Speaker 2: the idea that like, rural poor people are inherently like
Speaker 2: are going to side with the bourgeoisie in any class
Speaker 2: conflict or whatever, right, and this has screwed things up
Speaker 2: throughout history, the fact that some Marxists have believed this
Speaker 2: over time. But then it's interesting because you could see
Speaker 2: it now too, right, Like we now currently in the
Speaker 2: United States have this idea that like all rural people
Speaker 2: are inherently right wing, and we kind of give them
Speaker 2: to the right wing, you know. But the most famous
Speaker 2: Marxist revolution in history, well all both the China and Russia.
Speaker 2: I believe I know less about the Chinese Revolution. All
Speaker 2: peasants is not just workers in the city anyway, whatever,
Speaker 2: So I'm glad Marx is wrong.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was definitely wrong on that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, take that guy who's been dead for a long time.
Speaker 2: Totally you didn't get to see the future.
Speaker 1: Yeah, at least as hard as we know. Yeah, that's true,
Speaker 1: or it was very bad at it.
Speaker 2: Vampire Marks.
Speaker 3: I think I just interpreted you saying see the future
Speaker 3: as him like actually like being able to like look
Speaker 3: in a crystal ball.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, that makes sense.
Speaker 3: But now I'm realizing that you were just talking about
Speaker 3: how he didn't live to see how things played out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but either way, totally not much of an oracle.
Speaker 2: He wanted to get into it, but it was like
Speaker 2: too magic for him, so he was like, yep, you
Speaker 2: got to stick to my materialism anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, too bad. Like maybe yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this has been a totally interesting aside to all
Speaker 2: seven people anyway.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, So I was just talking about how when
Speaker 3: potatoes were first grown by European peasants, they weren't really tithed,
Speaker 3: your text. But as spuds became more established and commercially
Speaker 3: viable in Europe, that started to change.
Speaker 1: So there are all these.
Speaker 3: Records of potato related tithe disputes from England, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium,
Speaker 3: and France in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,
Speaker 3: and in some places peasants argued that potatoes were too
Speaker 3: new of a crop to tax, while in other places
Speaker 3: they claim that potatoes had been grown without being taxed
Speaker 3: or tithed for like years upon years. So there's different
Speaker 3: approaches that peasants are taking to kind of argue about
Speaker 3: whether they should argue against being taxed on potatoes that
Speaker 3: are really kind of opposite.
Speaker 2: It's like gas station drugs though, right you're like, oh,
Speaker 2: well this isn't regulated because we don't know what it
Speaker 2: does yet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally exactly, actually a perfect comparison. Weirdly, and so,
Speaker 3: as peasants continue to grow potatoes for sustenance in many
Speaker 3: places and other places, they were becoming a commercial crop.
Speaker 1: Potatoes although it's possible that this.
Speaker 3: Actually referred to sweet potatoes, historians aren't completely sure had
Speaker 3: been grown commercially since the late fifteen hundreds in the
Speaker 3: Canary Islands, from which they were important to parts of Europe.
Speaker 3: Potato market started in northern England, Scotland and Ireland in
Speaker 3: the late seventeenth century, and Earl argues that the eruption
Speaker 3: of the disputes in the eighteenth century is likely evidence
Speaker 3: that potatoes are being grown and sold far more widely
Speaker 3: than they had been in previous decades.
Speaker 2: That makes sense. They figured out how to market it eventually,
Speaker 2: am and.
Speaker 3: They like are coming to the attention of the people
Speaker 3: who are collecting the taxes and stuff.
Speaker 2: So it's it's also like bitcoin.
Speaker 1: Totally exactly, so many things.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: In the seventeen hundreds, in the midst of the European Enlightenment,
Speaker 3: the reputation of potatoes started to change. So during the
Speaker 3: Enlightenment there's new ideas that are emerging that suggests that
Speaker 3: having a robust, healthy populace would actually increase the economic
Speaker 3: and political power of the nation state. And the question
Speaker 3: arose of how these politicians and rulers should feed a
Speaker 3: lot of peapeople nutritiously and cheaply, and the potato was
Speaker 3: one of the main answers that people came to. It
Speaker 3: was familiar, it had high yields, it was easy to
Speaker 3: grow and cook, and it could double as animal feed.
Speaker 3: Potato boosters wrote treatises and newspaper articles and had a
Speaker 3: particular obsession with developing the perfect recipe for potato bread.
Speaker 3: In seventeen ninety four, during the French Revolution, the formerly
Speaker 3: royal Tulreise gardens in the heart of Paris were replanted
Speaker 3: with potatoes.
Speaker 2: Oh hell yeah.
Speaker 3: So once potatoes came to be promoted by the state
Speaker 3: and the capitalist class, they became a symbol of exploitation.
Speaker 3: And these sentiments bubbled up during the Swing riots, which
Speaker 3: were uprisings.
Speaker 1: Have you heard of these the Swing riots?
Speaker 2: No, I'm saying, oh about the whole thing that happened
Speaker 2: during the late early modern era, where like there were
Speaker 2: all these revolts against monarchies and stuff, and they seemed
Speaker 2: really cool. But instead they just put in like capitalist
Speaker 2: exploiters instead of like the aristocrats won and the nobles
Speaker 2: were out. Weren't actually like funder the nobles for the
Speaker 2: peasant was usually better, not always but anyway, so I'm like,
Speaker 2: that's my o shitting is that I'm like, ah, many
Speaker 2: such cases where you know, things look like freedom and
Speaker 2: then actually are just capitalism.
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is like a huge like era of
Speaker 3: like consolidating the contemporary nation state. Right, So yeah, that
Speaker 3: kind of threads through all of this. But you see
Speaker 3: these sort of anti potato sentiments bubble up during the
Speaker 3: Swing Riots, which were these uprisings that spread across England
Speaker 3: in eighteen thirty in response to worsening conditions of the
Speaker 3: agricultural working class.
Speaker 1: And these protesters are.
Speaker 3: Demanded, among other things, higher wages and the eradication of
Speaker 3: threshing machines because they replaced human labors, many of whom
Speaker 3: really really needed this extra work to survive. In one village,
Speaker 3: the protesting laborers banner read we will not live upon potatoes,
Speaker 3: and workers in another village argued this point with landed
Speaker 3: farmers when they met in a local church, and that
Speaker 3: meeting actually wasted in a wage increase. But of course
Speaker 3: these English laborers actually were eating potatoes. They weren't opposed
Speaker 3: to the tubers being.
Speaker 1: Part of their diet, right.
Speaker 3: What they were opposed to was potatoes replacing their daily bread, right, so, actually,
Speaker 3: like when they could expropriate potatoes for food, English labors
Speaker 3: did so in eighteen hundred, rioters rated a potato warehouse
Speaker 3: in Birmingham and then sold the potatoes at what they
Speaker 3: considered a fair price. And it was also common practice
Speaker 3: for the poor to plunder potatoes from the gardens of
Speaker 3: well off neighbors.
Speaker 2: You like, can't even be mad, you know, You're like, yeah, totally,
Speaker 2: some kid cave stole my potatoes out of my five
Speaker 2: gallon buckets on my porch. Would be like, eh, needed
Speaker 2: the potato more than me.
Speaker 3: They needed the potato, yeah, for sure. And then all
Speaker 3: the way over in the Russian Empire, state authorities started
Speaker 3: pressuring peasants into cultivating potatoes with a particular zeal starting
Speaker 3: in the eighteen thirties after a number of poor harvests,
Speaker 3: and this led to the Russian potato riots, which spread
Speaker 3: across Central Russia and the Urals in eighteen thirty four
Speaker 3: in the beginning of the eighteen forties, And I actually
Speaker 3: really wanted this to be like a whole section of
Speaker 3: this episode, but unfortunately almost all of what I could
Speaker 3: find either comes from a short Wikipedia article or is
Speaker 3: in Russian, and the little that I have been able
Speaker 3: to glean is that the riots were entangled with struggles
Speaker 3: against serfdom.
Speaker 1: There's this sort of relationship.
Speaker 3: Happening between being unfree and being forced by the state
Speaker 3: to plant potatoes, and that in some regions there may
Speaker 3: have been over half a million peasants involved. They seem
Speaker 3: to destroy fields of planted potatoes as a primary form
Speaker 3: of revault, and according to one article that I was
Speaker 3: able to translate, thank you to Deeple, there was a
Speaker 3: religious aspect as well. Many of the serfs believe that
Speaker 3: the act of planting potatoes was either in service to
Speaker 3: or an omen of the coming anti Christ.
Speaker 2: Whoa unholy potatoes? Potatoes just getting cooler.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's this really wild stuff.
Speaker 2: Is in vodka mostly made from potatoes, I think it
Speaker 2: is now, Yeah, oh, but it didn't used to be.
Speaker 1: I don't know what the history. I know it can
Speaker 1: be made from different like it can be made from
Speaker 1: grain as.
Speaker 3: Well, I believe, okay, and I think potatoes have become
Speaker 3: a pretty significant part of the Slavic diet at this
Speaker 3: point in time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's just I'm fascinated by how like so
Speaker 2: many cultures have the potato as a staple food, like
Speaker 2: to the point where it's like hard to imagine that
Speaker 2: cuisine without it, you know, totally. I mean tomatoes are
Speaker 2: the other one like this, right, but like it's just
Speaker 2: so interesting to you know, when everyone was only eating
Speaker 2: like beets and I don't know, in my mind the
Speaker 2: European people before they found the New World or whatever,
Speaker 2: just eight beats but turnips. I don't know anyway, I
Speaker 2: don't actually know these things. I'm just that's my impression.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't actually know about beets, but yeah, I
Speaker 3: think a lot of wheat and oats and cabbages.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, it makes sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, potatoes are really nutritious and easy to grow, and
Speaker 3: so I think that it makes a lot of sense
Speaker 3: that they would have come to be used by a
Speaker 3: lot of different.
Speaker 2: Cuisines and the devil wants us to eat them in
Speaker 2: Russia totally.
Speaker 3: And I want to learn so much more about the
Speaker 3: Russian potato uprising and potato riots, and so I'm hoping
Speaker 3: that someday more will get translated into English about it
Speaker 3: because I just want to know more. But I wasn't
Speaker 3: able to find too much, so Unfortunately, that's the little
Speaker 3: that I was able to find.
Speaker 2: If anyone is listening and knows more about this or
Speaker 2: really likes reading Russian, should they reach out to you if.
Speaker 1: They would like to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would love to hear from anyone who is
Speaker 3: passionate about potatoes and can read Russian.
Speaker 2: So how can they do that?
Speaker 1: Yeah? On my Instagram it's just at rand Away cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just my name anyway, Okay.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So potatoes also promoted during the European colonization of
Speaker 3: parts of Africa, Asia, New Zealand, islands in the Indian
Speaker 3: Ocean and elsewhere. So there is this whole tie in
Speaker 3: with colonization, which also started to happen during this like
Speaker 3: Enlightenment capitalist era.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, pro colonial thinkers argued that European agriculture was superior
Speaker 3: to agriculture and colonized areas, and that in itself gave
Speaker 3: the colonizers the right to rule. Perhaps such as potatoes
Speaker 3: were introduced as part of betterment programs that replace traditional,
Speaker 3: time tested agricultural techniques with European ones.
Speaker 2: The downside of the potatoes really kicking in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they didn't do much betterment.
Speaker 3: They almost always increased food instability.
Speaker 1: In hunger.
Speaker 2: This is like how when I found out that the
Speaker 2: piano is like one of the most important colonial like
Speaker 2: destruction of non enlightenment, Like it is a colonial object
Speaker 2: that goes around and destroys folk music. And it makes
Speaker 2: me so sad because piano is literally my favorite instrument
Speaker 2: I love. I love it so much. And then I'm
Speaker 2: just like, anyway, the potato doing the same thing where
Speaker 2: it's like, oh, look at this superior technology we have that,
Speaker 2: you know, okay.
Speaker 3: And I think anything that's like as widely grown as
Speaker 3: the potato is going to be both right, it's going
Speaker 3: to be like a food to resist, you know, a
Speaker 3: tool of like resistance against colonization and against capitalists, and
Speaker 3: it's also going.
Speaker 1: To be used by them.
Speaker 3: And so British and French colonizers in Kenya and Burkino
Speaker 3: Fosso forced locals to grow potatoes and Kenya. These policies
Speaker 3: were coupled with the confiscation of Kenya land by white colonists.
Speaker 3: And one woman who was a child in the Belgian Congo,
Speaker 3: a colony that lasted from the late nineteenth century until
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty, shared that colonial officials would often tell men
Speaker 3: to prepare a plant a field of potatoes, and if
Speaker 3: these Congolese men didn't complete the task, they'd be arrested.
Speaker 3: So it was certainly used as a tool of colonization.
Speaker 3: We're also going to come back to that in the
Speaker 3: second part of the episode. Okay, but potatoes also played
Speaker 3: a significant role in the British colonization of India, which
Speaker 3: began in the mid seventeen hundreds, and in India, where
Speaker 3: potatoes arrived in the seventeenth century, the British heavily promoted
Speaker 3: the potato as the superior food stuff, an answer to famine.
Speaker 2: They did. They promote it by advertising it.
Speaker 1: You know, they actually did promote it by advertising it.
Speaker 1: So this is great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so much like the British Empire, we promote potatoes
Speaker 2: through advertise. Oh it sounds bad when you say it
Speaker 2: like that.
Speaker 1: No, not like the British Empire.
Speaker 2: Resistance potatoes. This podcast is proudly brought to you by
Speaker 2: potatoes as a form of resistance instead of potatoes as
Speaker 2: a form of colonization. Remember, if you're using potatoes to colonize,
Speaker 2: you're doing it wrong. And here's the other ads and
Speaker 2: we're back. Sorry, I know you were like kind of
Speaker 2: in the middle of a sentence when you said that
Speaker 2: I was just I mean like waiting to like leap
Speaker 2: in at any possible segue moment. So you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So, in addition to being seen as this superior
Speaker 3: food stuff and an answer to famine, it was also
Speaker 3: seen as a way to bulk up the population and
Speaker 3: provide the British with additional colonial labor slump. A lot
Speaker 3: of these themes just kind of echo throughout so records
Speaker 3: from the late eighteenth century so is that in Mumbai,
Speaker 3: which was called Bombay at the time, the British East
Speaker 3: India Company accepted potatoes from the usual crop transit taxes,
Speaker 3: and in Bengal they distributed free seeds to peasants across
Speaker 3: the subcontinent. They also financially rewarded peasants to group potatoes.
Speaker 3: But much like in other parts of the world, British
Speaker 3: rule was super destructive to the Indian food system. Under it,
Speaker 3: essential staples were exported and India's irrigation system was allowed
Speaker 3: to decay. And unlike in Britain, where poor laws offered
Speaker 3: some hunger relief, the colonial government refused to provide Indians
Speaker 3: with food even in times of famine. Instead, they continued
Speaker 3: to levy taxes and blame famines on Indians for not
Speaker 3: practicing the quote unquote right kind of agriculture.
Speaker 2: Boo yeah, boo.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Unequivocal bad feelings about that. And while potatoes were eventually
Speaker 3: assimilated into Indian cuisine much like the food that you're
Speaker 3: eating right now, the tubers never replaced rice as the
Speaker 3: main staple as British colonizers intended them to.
Speaker 1: Instead, they were used in place.
Speaker 3: Of traditional gourds and became part of iconic homegrown dishes
Speaker 3: like aluposto and masaladosa. What's really interesting, and this is
Speaker 3: just kind of a tidbit, is that anti colonial Indian
Speaker 3: writers and thinkers in the early twentieth century promoted potatoes
Speaker 3: as a nutrient rich vegetable that would allow its eaters
Speaker 3: to grow stronger and militantly resist British rule. So even
Speaker 3: though they were promoted and imposed by the colonizers, potatoes
Speaker 3: were reclaimed to become part of Indian food ways, and
Speaker 3: this happened in other parts of the colonized world as well.
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess that's like it's weird to talk
Speaker 2: about a plant as a technology. But like it doesn't
Speaker 2: seem totally alien from that, where it's just like, well,
Speaker 2: on some level, if there's potatoes are a really good
Speaker 2: food technology, they are a really good way of getting
Speaker 2: calories out of a small amount of effort and land,
Speaker 2: So it totally it makes sense. It's kind of like,
Speaker 2: no one's going to be like, I don't know, I
Speaker 2: don't want to fight them with guns. Their guns are British.
Speaker 2: I'm going to fight them with swords, right, people are like, no,
Speaker 2: I want the gun, you know, I mean obviously gun
Speaker 2: in this case was actually developed in the East, not
Speaker 2: the West, but anyway, well gunpowder but anyway, whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but potatoes right, like, because they are so yeah,
Speaker 3: they just have such a widespread history and are using
Speaker 3: all sorts of different ways.
Speaker 2: And they're so useful.
Speaker 1: It makes sense they're so useful and so delicious.
Speaker 3: And so we're going to talk more about the relationship
Speaker 3: between potatoes and overseas European colonization in part two of
Speaker 3: this episode. We're going to talk about South Africa then,
Speaker 3: but first I want to discuss a European island that
Speaker 3: was famously colonized by the British and is famously associated
Speaker 3: with potatoes.
Speaker 2: It's Ireland.
Speaker 3: It's Ireland, and I haven't really mentioned Ireland in this
Speaker 3: episode yet, even though there's crossovers between what was happening
Speaker 3: in Ireland and other parts of Europe, because it's getting
Speaker 3: its own section, okay, And to do this, I'm going
Speaker 3: to start by offering a brief and simplified, very oversimplified
Speaker 3: summary of why the potato became so important in Ireland.
Speaker 3: According to tradition, the potato was brought to Ireland around
Speaker 3: fifteen eighty five, and by sixteen thirty five it was
Speaker 3: established enough for colonists in the United States to refer
Speaker 3: to it as the quote unquote Irish potato. It became
Speaker 3: a really important food stuff in Ireland for a few reasons. Traditionally,
Speaker 3: the Irish were pastoralists, with the diet that prized dairy
Speaker 3: since a lot of land in Ireland isn't great for agriculture,
Speaker 3: and these traditional food ways became less and less possible
Speaker 3: under English colonization. The sixteen sixty three Catalog passed by
Speaker 3: the British Parliament place to high tariff on cows expert
Speaker 3: from Ireland, and soon after there was a British embargo
Speaker 3: on importing cows, pigs, and sheep as well as their
Speaker 3: meat from Ireland altogether.
Speaker 2: Was this pretty much to get because they wanted them
Speaker 2: to stop being pastoralists, so they'd stop being like, quote
Speaker 2: unquote lazy. I think it was. I think you're the
Speaker 2: person who pitched this idea to me a couple of
Speaker 2: years ago. I want to run it past you and
Speaker 2: see if I'm wrong or okay? Which is that basically?
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess there was some colonization happening, but
Speaker 2: you know, for a long time, the average Irish peasant
Speaker 2: was like, I'm broke, but I got a cow, so
Speaker 2: I guess I'm all right. I eat cheese and milk
Speaker 2: or whatever, right, and like it's fine. And therefore I
Speaker 2: don't want to be more industrious into the like later capitalists,
Speaker 2: but sort of civilizational industrial framework, right, I just want
Speaker 2: to like hang out and be almost nomadic and hang
Speaker 2: out with my cow. And so that was like the
Speaker 2: thing that they had to kind of destroy in order
Speaker 2: to get people to be like good workers. Are you
Speaker 2: the one who told me this? Am I completely wrong?
Speaker 3: Like it seemed as possible that I was the one.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure, but you are onto something here.
Speaker 2: Okay, for sure, I came up with it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you totally actually independently. Yeah, all of these historians
Speaker 3: are actually quoting you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the thing that people didn't know. I've been
Speaker 2: around for a long time. Okay, yep, yeah.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you're totally down the right track here.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: And to make matters worse.
Speaker 3: Between fifteen eighty seven and sixteen ninety one, nearly twelve
Speaker 3: million acres of land were redistributed. I'm laughing because it's
Speaker 3: so horrible, or redistributed to wealthy English and Scottish planters. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and this drastically cut down on the land. The Irish
Speaker 3: had to grape livestock and eat grains like oats and
Speaker 3: barley out of the earth. So while it's true that
Speaker 3: there was a huge population boom in Ireland in the
Speaker 3: eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that drove demand for land, there
Speaker 3: actually would have been enough for everyone if it was
Speaker 3: divided equally.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: And the land distributions that happened under.
Speaker 3: Oliver Cromwell, an English statesman who became Lord Protected, which
Speaker 3: was basically dictator of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland for
Speaker 3: nearly five years in the sixteen fifties were particularly brutal.
Speaker 2: He's like the poster boy of this thing I was
Speaker 2: talking about about when the aristocracy comes into power. It's actually,
Speaker 2: if anything, a lateral at best. It's a lateral move. Yeah,
Speaker 2: because like you'd think that Cromwell coming into power is
Speaker 2: not a king. They're like, haha, we don't have a
Speaker 2: king anymore. We have this lord protector. And then he
Speaker 2: like turns around and genocides Ireland like and also was
Speaker 2: terrible to England, but I care less about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah anyway, totally and then they like got a king back.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, totally didn't work either. Yeah, it didn't.
Speaker 1: Work at all. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And so to quote Margaret Hickey, who wrote a food
Speaker 3: history called Ireland's Green Larder a great book if you're
Speaker 3: interested in food in Ireland. But Margaret Hickey writes, Cromwell
Speaker 3: drove the native Irish westward to the inhospitable lands of Connaught,
Speaker 3: which were exposed to the first force of the weather
Speaker 3: coming in off the Atlantic, and with wild mountainous land
Speaker 3: unsuitable for tillage. His famous malediction to Heller to Connot
Speaker 3: was a grim envoy.
Speaker 2: Whoa to Heller to cannock. That's fucking intense to heller
Speaker 2: to cannock.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And this led to a situation where by the
Speaker 3: eighteenth century, few if any Irish peasants owned their own land,
Speaker 3: and in some cases they would simply purchase the right
Speaker 3: to plant and harvest crops on a piece of land
Speaker 3: for a single growing season, which was referred to as
Speaker 3: a conacre system. There was one crop, however, that grew
Speaker 3: well even in the poor and boggy soil of Western
Speaker 3: Ireland and could be grown on tiny patches of land,
Speaker 3: our friend.
Speaker 1: The potato.
Speaker 2: Potato.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So potatoes had shown themselves to be indispensable when other
Speaker 3: crops failed, as well as during Cromwell's occupation, when crops
Speaker 3: were burned, but the potatoes tuck safely underground were untouched.
Speaker 1: By the fire.
Speaker 2: Okay, so there's that.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 2: I think it was a bunch of Mexican students were
Speaker 2: murdered by the state a couple years ago, and the
Speaker 2: slogan they tried to bury it. They didn't know that
Speaker 2: we were seeds came out. Yeah, and then I've seen
Speaker 2: people now since do they tried to bury us they
Speaker 2: didn't know we were potatoes?
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, yeah, once again.
Speaker 3: Having them underground saved Ireland potatoes from Cromwell.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, and.
Speaker 3: The Irish presentry grew potatoes and raised rich beds known
Speaker 3: as lazy beds. And these lazy beds, once they were
Speaker 3: dug and planted, needed little work, which was really important
Speaker 3: right because it allowed landless labors to have time for
Speaker 3: other tasks, which was essential because they also usually had
Speaker 3: to work for their landlords. Leftover potatoes could be fed
Speaker 3: to chickens and pigs, whose eggs and meat were sold
Speaker 3: for rent, money and other necessities, and as a bonus,
Speaker 3: according to our friend James C. Scott, because they were
Speaker 3: grown in small mounds and English horsemen risked breaking his
Speaker 3: mount's leg galloping through the field and then to get
Speaker 3: back to what you were mentioning. Earlier opinions on the
Speaker 3: Irish diet by Anglo elites followed the general potato trends
Speaker 3: we've discussed previously. So English politician Charles Petty, who had
Speaker 3: large estates in Ireland towards the end of the seventeenth century,
Speaker 3: thought that potatoes engendered Irish laziness. He believed that potatoes
Speaker 3: made it possible for Irish peasants to work for only.
Speaker 1: Two hours a day, which I honestly don't believe is true,
Speaker 1: but he believed it.
Speaker 2: If your main thing you do is grow potatoes, you
Speaker 2: could grow a lot of potatoes at two hours a day.
Speaker 1: Oh totally.
Speaker 3: But I also feel like they probably had to do
Speaker 3: so many other things to survive, and if they were
Speaker 3: like working for their landlord, you know, and all this
Speaker 3: other stuff.
Speaker 1: He also believed that the English.
Speaker 3: Crown would have been able to tax the Irish twice
Speaker 3: as much and turn them into more productive members of
Speaker 3: the laboring classes that their diet didn't center on potatoes.
Speaker 2: This is something that he and Marx had in common. Yeah, well,
Speaker 2: rather Engles. Engles was like specifically concerned with how the
Speaker 2: Irish needed to get like more industrious and civilized so
Speaker 2: that they could become proper communists, even though they were
Speaker 2: like literally already to socialist anyway. Whatever. I just don't
Speaker 2: like angles, and I don't like what he has to
Speaker 2: say about the Irish totally anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, and you see this like it kind of
Speaker 1: flip flops. Right.
Speaker 3: So, during the Enlightenment, when potatoes were the answer to everything,
Speaker 3: Irish peasants were celebrated by writers and thinkers and other
Speaker 3: parts of Europe for.
Speaker 1: Their fortitude and how many children they were.
Speaker 3: Able to produce, which those thinkers attributed to their potato
Speaker 3: based diet.
Speaker 1: Okay, and then we see it.
Speaker 3: Switched back right in the nineteenth century, at least according
Speaker 3: to some thinkers in some places, and the Irish are
Speaker 3: once again considered backwards and emblematic of an unproductive surplus population.
Speaker 3: John Ramsay McCullough, a Scottish economist, writing in eighteen twenty four,
Speaker 3: made an argument that sounds a lot like the wind
Speaker 3: marks made and apparently angles made a similar argument as
Speaker 3: well about French peasants a few decades later. McCullough argued
Speaker 3: that the self sufficiency that potato growing allowed for isolated
Speaker 3: the Royal Irish from the outside world, and that their
Speaker 3: ignorance meant that they weren't even aware of how bleak.
Speaker 1: Their lives work.
Speaker 2: They don't know that they're supposed to be sad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this isolation and food autonomy, according to mcculu, prevented
Speaker 3: Irish peasants from rising up against the English. And one
Speaker 3: of the most interesting things about his argument is that
Speaker 3: he was very wrong. Okay, And to find out why
Speaker 3: he was wrong. You're going to have to listen to
Speaker 3: Wednesday's episode.
Speaker 1: What because that's where we're going to leave things for today.
Speaker 2: I don't get to find out why he's wrong. Okay, Well,
Speaker 2: I'm excited to find out why he's wrong, because I mean,
Speaker 2: I know about several of the rebellions. But okay, well,
Speaker 2: I'm excited about it. Okay, But if people want to
Speaker 2: know more about food and radical culture and all of
Speaker 2: those things, is there a book that they could read?
Speaker 1: Yeah? So I added an anthology called Nourishing Resistance, Stories
Speaker 1: of Food, Protest and Mutual Aid and it's out from
Speaker 1: PM Press.
Speaker 3: It's been out for about a year now, a little
Speaker 3: over a year, and you can pick get up from
Speaker 3: them or wherever books are sold.
Speaker 2: You should go in and ask a store to carry
Speaker 2: it if they don't already carry it, because then it
Speaker 2: makes them more likely to carry it in the future.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But yeah, okay, I'm so excited. As soon as you
Speaker 2: agreed to do a history of potatoes, I was like,
Speaker 2: because I, okay, coming into it, I had assumed a
Speaker 2: couple things. One, I like potatoes. I knew that. I
Speaker 2: also assumed potatoes. I know a little bit about how
Speaker 2: potatoes tied into Irish history about you know, being able
Speaker 2: to grow things where you can't really grow things, and
Speaker 2: it sort of allowed the Irish to survive colonization as
Speaker 2: well as they did for a long time. But I
Speaker 2: also sort of had guessed this idea of like the
Speaker 2: potato as an agent of colonization, right, But I was
Speaker 2: just sort of guessing that based on like, well, I
Speaker 2: don't know, it doesn't come from Europe, you know, like
Speaker 2: and it clearly spread everywhere. But that was a kind
Speaker 2: of an oversimplified way of understanding things. And I really
Speaker 2: I find it interesting this idea that like there's things
Speaker 2: that can like spread and be good everywhere, that doesn't
Speaker 2: make them agents of colonization. Like is there a word
Speaker 2: for this idea? Where like because the potato has been
Speaker 2: both it seems like, right, yeah, is there a word
Speaker 2: for when things spread besides like cultural appreciation as that
Speaker 2: of cultural appropriation, But is there a word for just
Speaker 2: like the way that things spread around the world that
Speaker 2: isn't that's like bottom up and like not oppressive, you know,
Speaker 2: I don't.
Speaker 3: Know that word if there is, But I think you
Speaker 3: see this a lot with food, right, Like food has
Speaker 3: been spreading all over the world for thousands and thousands
Speaker 3: of years. Yeah, And sometimes it is because of conquest
Speaker 3: and colonization.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's not.
Speaker 3: And even within those complexities or even within like deeply
Speaker 3: fucked up situations, that spread of food can can be
Speaker 3: a positive outcome.
Speaker 1: Which is not to say.
Speaker 3: That the colonization bad, genocide bad, but like the spreading
Speaker 3: of food in and of itself is something that's been
Speaker 3: happening for a.
Speaker 1: Very long time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so yeah, I think about that a lot,
Speaker 3: this sort of like differentiation between sort of the the
Speaker 3: absolute evils of conquest and colonization and everything that comes
Speaker 3: along with it, and the way that food spreading around
Speaker 3: the world can actually lead to like not just good
Speaker 3: things in terms of people having more options of what
Speaker 3: to eat, but like really beautiful things like different beloved
Speaker 3: foods being created, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And there's like kind of like a cultural sharing
Speaker 2: that is like really natural that you see also with like,
Speaker 2: I mean, religion is another really good example of obviously
Speaker 2: we're all aware of how religion can be used to
Speaker 2: be part of or be the primary thing of colonization,
Speaker 2: right and like totally yeah, but you can also see
Speaker 2: it in all of these, especially maybe like polytheistic cultures,
Speaker 2: but maybe not even just polytheistic cultures, but like the
Speaker 2: slow spread and inner weaving of like different deities and
Speaker 2: like ways of thinking about things that isn't necessarily the
Speaker 2: result of like conquering, you know. And I've liked talked
Speaker 2: with about being really excited about you know, where their
Speaker 2: culture's polytheistic stuff interacts with this other continence polytheistic stuff
Speaker 2: and like totally yeah, and so food doing that too
Speaker 2: makes so much sense, and like songs and music, and
Speaker 2: it's like part of why colonization is so bad, right,
Speaker 2: is because like the answer to that isn't nationalism. The
Speaker 2: answer to that isn't like, you know, whatever you're born,
Speaker 2: that's what you have to eat. You know, I don't
Speaker 2: even know what I would eat, ida I have to
Speaker 2: eat whatever. I mean, I was trying to come up.
Speaker 2: I was gonna say potatoes because Irish, but that's not true, right,
Speaker 2: you know, yeah, totally. So then apparently beats, but I'm
Speaker 2: probably wrong about that, and so like cabbages, and I
Speaker 2: don't know.
Speaker 1: You know what I might not know.
Speaker 3: So I did get the chance to take a course
Speaker 3: that was like food history in the Global Middle Ages.
Speaker 3: It touched on so many different foods, and I can't
Speaker 3: remember anything about beats, and I'm now wondering if that's
Speaker 3: because I don't.
Speaker 1: Like beats very much.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so I like mentally blocked out like anything
Speaker 3: that had to do with beats, because now I'm curious.
Speaker 1: Now I'm going to go down a rabbit hole about
Speaker 1: beats after this episode.
Speaker 2: Oh, I'm probably conflating turnips, radishes and beats, all of
Speaker 2: the things that, like if Mario pulls it out of
Speaker 2: the ground and Mario two, then like then it's all
Speaker 2: the same plant.
Speaker 1: I have no idea because apparently I blocked it out
Speaker 1: of my brain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it makes sense.
Speaker 3: But that's what I like so much about about looking
Speaker 3: at food and other aspects of culture, right, is that
Speaker 3: they are so complex. There aren't like simplified easy stories.
Speaker 3: You have to get into the weeds.
Speaker 2: Yeah, ah, the weeds. Eh yeah, yep. All right, Well,
Speaker 2: if you want to what do I want to plug?
Speaker 2: I'm done with tour, That's what I want to plug.
Speaker 2: I'm home. I'm not home yet. I'm recording this the
Speaker 2: last day of being on tour, and I but if
Speaker 2: you want to read my book The Sapling Cage that
Speaker 2: I just went on tour with. You can do that
Speaker 2: by typing in the Sapling Cage and whatever. I don't know,
Speaker 2: you can figure how to buy it. There's also an
Speaker 2: audio version of it if you like hearing people talk,
Speaker 2: which you might because you made it this far into
Speaker 2: a podcast, and also I have a substack. And also
Speaker 2: we got to take care of each other because really
Speaker 2: bad times is batting at least in the United States,
Speaker 2: I mean obviously everywhere, and it's a really important time
Speaker 2: for people to get involved. Like this is a really
Speaker 2: good time to kind of stop internet activisting or like
Speaker 2: stop having that be your primary activisting, and it's a
Speaker 2: really good time to start talking with the people around
Speaker 2: you and thinking about what you want to accomplish, how
Speaker 2: you want to accomplish, and getting together and doing that
Speaker 2: with the people that you care about. I think that,
Speaker 2: you know, one of the examples of a cool people
Speaker 2: who do cool stuff that I haven't covered yet, and
Speaker 2: I probably should even know it's way more recent than
Speaker 2: I usually cover, is last time Trump took office, he
Speaker 2: tried to pass a Muslim ban, and people shut down
Speaker 2: airports and mass you know, and I don't know all
Speaker 2: the details about it right now, because I didn't script
Speaker 2: any of this. I'm just spitting this off the top
Speaker 2: of my head. But there is threats of mass deportations,
Speaker 2: and there's threats of all kinds of stuff. A lot
Speaker 2: of people are in a lot of really specific trouble
Speaker 2: right now, and it's a good time to get organized.
Speaker 2: And when I say get organized, I don't necessarily mean
Speaker 2: go join the following three letter acronym organization or whatever,
Speaker 2: but maybe but also just going and getting together with
Speaker 2: your friends and thinking about what you want to do,
Speaker 2: or even not, as if you don't feel like your
Speaker 2: friends are into it, the people who are interested in
Speaker 2: the same stuff around you, you know, go find go
Speaker 2: volunteer at a food bank or food not bombs, Go
Speaker 2: work with my find out who's helping migrants where you
Speaker 2: live and go join them, or I don't know, do stuff.
Speaker 2: That's my plug. I don't know why I do know
Speaker 2: I'm plugging it. But anyone ad if I try and
Speaker 2: make you do a rousing conclusion, I guess I could
Speaker 2: have done the rousing conclusion.
Speaker 1: I don't have a rising conclusion for this part, but.
Speaker 2: Oh you have one for the second part. Okay.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know if I have one for the
Speaker 3: second part either, but now I feel the pressure's on.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, when we come back Wednesday, Ren will I
Speaker 2: figured out arousing conclusion and I get to find out
Speaker 2: what happened and you all get to find out too.
Speaker 2: So we'll see you all on Wednesday.
Speaker 1: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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