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