This spud's for you

My goodness, look at the calendar – National Potato Day is coming up on May 30!

Wait a second, that’s National Potato Day in Peru. Canada appears to follow the U.S. lead, celebrating this tuber tradition on August 19. But if your potatoes aren’t ready to be harvested at that point, you could instead mark National Potato Day in October, as they do in Ireland – where the occasion may have a slightly different historical resonance.

Take your pick. After all, we’re talking about a highly versatile food that can be seasoned – or indeed stuffed – with a wide range of symbolic values and cultural meanings, to suit the tastes of the time and place. This is one of the key points of Rebecca Earle’s new book Feeding the People – the Politics of the Potato (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Far from being a comprehensive historical or botanical study of the crop, it examines the potato as an example of how our beliefs about food, and state influence over our food choices, have changed during the last few hundred years. With its focus on the tension between personal liberty and public health, it happens to be very timely – and it is also quite entertaining.

Historian Rebecca Earle cites Vincent van Gogh’s “The Potato Eaters,” from 1885, as a gloomy and unsettling vision of peasant life. “Lack of dietary choice, whether it derives from outside intervention or from poverty, sits uneasily with the notions of liberty that we have inherited from the Enlightenment,” she writes.

Earle, who is a history professor at the University of Warwick (in Coventry, England), says the potato serves her literary purpose partly because it is a truly international food. It is grown in every single country, and in many of them it is an important staple. China is the world leader in potato production, with an annual harvest of about 100 million tonnes, but per-capita consumption is higher in Europe. The appetite for potatoes is greatest in Turkmenistan, where the average citizen puts away almost 140 kilograms of them per year.

This ubiquitous crop is remarkable, Earle points out, because it has only attained global status relatively recently. It originated “along the spine of mountains that runs from the Andes in Bolivia and Chile northwards through the Rockies,” she says. In this region, the harvesting of wild potatoes dates back about 12,000 years. Domestication of the crop is thought to have occurred here around 7800 B.C. – and it was confined here until the 16th century.

“These mountains, the homeland of potatoes, were also home to the vast Inca empire, whose overthrow by Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century released a whirlwind that blew potatoes to Ireland, India, and beyond,” Earle writes. “The story of the potato’s spread around Europe and the world traces out a new history of the relationship between everyday eating habits and the modern state.”

While this spread of the potato was brought about by the exercise of imperialist power, Earle’s version of the story highlights the early adoption and adaptation of the new crop as a grassroots process. European peasants seized on the potato and bred it to suit local conditions because they recognized its food value, and because they found it to be highly productive even on small plots of land, and on difficult terrain. Moreover, because the potato could be cultivated in kitchen gardens, often by women using hand tools, it had the advantage of “fiscal invisibility,” which meant it could escape the levying of taxes and tithes that were charged on other crops.

Earle says European commoners made good use of the potato for a long time before it attracted attention from officialdom. The ruling class had always understood that preventing the masses from going hungry was a precondition for peace and social stability, but what we now call “food security” had been viewed as a matter of quantity, with little regard for quality. Only during the Enlightenment, in the 18th century, did bewigged policy wonks take an interest in the nutritiousness of the commoner’s diet – primarily for the sake of maintaining vigorous European populations capable of providing strong bodies for military service or agricultural and industrial labour.

“The hardiness and fecundity of long-standing potato-eaters such as the Irish offered a mesmerizing vision of pink-cheeked families subsisting on a food they grew themselves,” writes Earle. Soon, there were many treatises and sermons offering encouragement and instruction in the cultivation of potatoes, ostensibly for the common good. John Howard, the well-heeled Englishman later known as a prison reformer, was one of those who actively promoted potato consumption, even experimenting with new varieties that he hoped might be helpful to “the labouring poor.”

As Britain expanded its empire, it sought to impose potato cultivation throughout the colonies, partly as a symbol of the Mother Country’s cultural superiority. But again, Earle says it was not really a top-down process. Rather, subsistence farmers in some regions embraced this new crop – to the extent that they found it useful – and incorporated it into local cuisine, as eventually occurred in much of India.

IMPEDIMENT TO PROGRESS

In a chapter titled “Capitalist Potatoes,” the author describes a shift that occurred in the 19th century, as the earthy, self-sufficient, potato-eating rural dweller fell out of favour. The potato pendulum swung mightily, and this crop was seen as an impediment to improved agriculture, industrialization, and modern consumerism. The British government, which formerly promoted the potato, now viewed the Irish Potato Famine as proof of this crop’s shortcomings.

“In Ireland,” writes Earle, “the potato’s superlative power to convert earth and light into calories made it possible for rural families to live on the minute patches of land onto which they were squeezed as commercial wheat, dairy, and meat production expanded under Britain’s colonial rule. By the 1840s some 40 percent of the population subsisted almost entirely on potatoes, or potatoes with a bit of buttermilk if they possessed enough land to pasture a cow. Poor men in rural Ireland ate between three and five kilos of potatoes a day and little else…. Most of the potatoes grown in 19th century Ireland were a single yellow-fleshed variety known as Irish Lumper. Reliance on a single cultivar greatly increases vulnerability to disease. When the crop failed in 1845, 1848, and 1849, over a million people died.”

The death toll was so high partly because the British government was in no hurry to provide aid, and actually saw this crisis as an opportunity to transform surviving subsistence farmers into wage workers. “The potato famine, viewed from the perspective of Westminster, usefully obliged the able-bodied Irish to join the rural proletariat,” writes Earle.

The 19th century also brought advances in nutrition science, with a new focus on protein. Excessive consumption of carb-heavy spuds was now thought to make you slow and lumpy, whereas meat would make you strong and energetic. However, the pendulum swung back again in the 20th century, as war-era rationing of preferred foods made potatoes a home-front staple in Britain and America. “Eat potatoes with their starch, help the fighters on their march,” read a patriotic verse in a First World War cookbook. “Eat potatoes, save the wheat, drive the Kaiser to defeat.”

In the post-war period, global food security was more widely recognized as necessary for the maintenance of peace, but international development efforts focused on grains, which could be stockpiled and shipped long distances. Only late in the century was there more of an appreciation for the role of subsistence and small-scale agriculture – including potato production – as a means of feeding the world.

This went hand-in-hand with a recognition of the value of genetic diversity in potatoes. The International Potato Centre (El Centro Internacional de la Papa, or CIP), in Lima, has played an important role in this regard, as a seed bank and a source of expertise in potato breeding. “Its many publications stress the connections between potatoes and a vivid and living indigenous culture that dates back millennia,” writes Earle, adding that the CIP has even signed a “native potato repatriation agreement” with one indigenous group. “From this perspective, traditional agricultural practices are an essential part of the potato’s modern relevance.”

One of the examples she cites is the complex layout of potato plots containing dozens of different varieties, based on site-specific suitability. “Matching particular seed potatoes to the soil and environmental requirements of specific pieces of land requires a vast body of practical agronomic knowledge, and leads to ongoing experimentation,” she says. “This sort of constant evaluation and innovation is responsible for the remarkable diversity of potato varieties in the Andes. In the 1960s agronomists thought that Peru possessed some 1,400 native potato varieties; current estimates put the figure somewhere between 2,700 and 4,500.”

In addition to proclaiming their National Potato Day, the Peruvian government lobbied for the proclamation of an International Year of the Potato, and the UN finally obliged in 2008. During that year, UN communications emphasized the potato’s importance in maintaining food security, partly because it is primarily a local food, rather than an internationally-traded commodity. Grain crops, by contrast, are subject to price fluctuations which are a major cause of hunger in the developing world. The importance of peasant agriculture is now widely recognized, says Earle, but we still struggle to square this with ideas of personal choice and autonomy that first took root in the Enlightenment.

If I were seeking to find fault with this book, I could point to some academic jargon, and also a tendency to frame arguments in relation to the writings of specific historians who will be unfamiliar to the general reader. However, it is to Earle’s credit that she takes her scholarly task very seriously. She did not set out to create a rollicking good tale, but to fill some knowledge gaps and advance discourse on a few key points. The book is meant to be useful, as is evident from the extensive endnotes, bibliography, and index, which take up nearly 100 pages.

It also includes a number of historically interesting recipes, which are indexed separately. You may not feel the need to try preparing “A Mess for 25 Soldiers” (which calls for six pounds of potatoes and six pounds of brisket), but you will certainly gain new insight into the humble spud, and an appreciation for small growers who are attempting to sustain and spread varieties other than the industrial mainstays. DL