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Chapter 6: The Agro-Industrial Complex
Chapter 6: The Agro-Industrial Complex
Sea of Genes
Potatoes would not seem obvious candidates for domestication. Wild tubers are laced with …toxic compounds thought to defend the plants against attacks from dangerous organisms like fungi, bacteria, and human beings. Cooking often bleaks down a plant's chemical defenses…but [tubers] are unaffected by the pot and oven. Andean peoples apparently neutralized them by eating dirt: clay, to be precise. In the altiplano [Andean Plateau], guanacos and vicunas (wild relatives of the llama) lick clay before eating poisonous plants. The toxins in the foliage stick—more technically, the fine clay particles. Bound to dirt, the harmful substances pass though the animals' digestive system without affecting it. Mimicking this process. Indians apparently dunked wild potatoes in a "gravy" made of clay and water. Eventually they bred less lethal varieties, though some of the old, poisonous tubers still remain, favored for their resistance to frost. Bags of clay dust are still sold in mountain markets to accompany them on the table.
Andean Indians ate potatoes boiled, baked, and mashed as people in Europe and North America do. But they also consumed them in forms still little known outside the highlands. Potatoes were boiled, peeled, chopped, and dried to make papas secas; fermented for months in stagnant water to create sticky, odoriferous toqosh; ground to pulp, soaked in a jug, and filtered to produce almidön de papa (potato starch). The most ubiquitous concoction was chuño, made by spreading potatoes outside to freeze on cold nights. As it expands, the ice inside potato cells ruptures cell walls. The potatoes are thawed by morning sun, then frozen again the next night. Repeated freeze-thaw cycles transform the spuds into soft, juicy blobs. Farmers squeeze out the water to produce chuño: stiff Styrofoam-like modules about two-thirds smaller and lighter than the original tubers. Long exposure to the sun turns them gray-black: cooked into a spicy Andean stew, they resemble gnocchi. the potato-flour dumplings favored in central Italy. Chuño can be kept for years without refrigeration, meaning that it can be stored as insurance against bad harvests. It was the food that sustained the conquering Inca armies.
None of this was apparent, of course, to the Spaniards who ventured into the Andes… The conquistadors noticed Indians eating these round objects and despite their suspicion sometimes emulated them. News of the new food spread rapidly. Within three decades, Spanish farmers as far away as the Canary Islands were growing potatoes in quantities enough to export to France and the Netherlands (then part of the Spanish Empire). The first scientific description of the potato appeared in 1596, courtesy of the Swiss naturalist Gaspard Bauhin, "who awarded it the name of Solanum tuberosum esculentum, which later became the modem Solanum tuberosum. …
…The first food Europeans grew from tubers, rather than seed, the potato was regarded with fascinated suspicion: some believed it to be an aphrodisiac, others a cause of fever, leprosy, and scrofula. Ultraconservative Russian Orthodox priests denounced it as an incarnation of evil, using as proof the undeniable fact that potatoes are not mentioned in the Bible. Countering this, the pro-potato English alchemist William Salmon claimed in 1710 that the tubers "nourish the whole Body, restore in Consumptions [cure tuberculosis], and provoke Lust." The philosopher-critic Denis Diderot took a middle stance in his groundbreaking Encyclopedia (1751-65), Europe's first general compendium of Enlightenment thought. "No matter how you prepare it, the root is tasteless and he wrote, "It cannot be regarded as an enjoyable food, but it provides abundant. reasonably healthy food for men who want nothing but sustenance." Diderot viewed the potato as "windy" (it caused gas). Still, he gave it the thumbs-up. "What," he asked, "is windiness to the strong bodies of peasants and laborers?"
With such half-hearted endorsements, it is little wonder that the potato spread slowly outside of the Spanish colonies. When Prussia was hit by famine in 1744, King Frederick the Great, a potato proponent, had to order the peasantry to eat potatoes. In England, farmers denounced S. tuberosum as an advance scout for hated Roman Catholicism. "No Potatoes, No Popery!" was an election slogan in 1765. As late as the British cookbook and household advice writer Isabella Beeton was warning her readers not to drink "the water in which potatoes are boiled."
France was especially slow to adopt the new crop. Into the fray stepped nutritionist, vaccination advocate, and potato proselytizer Antoine-Augustin Parmentier. …Trained as a pharmacist, Parmentier served in the army and was captured five times by the Prussians during the Seven Years' War. As a prisoner he ate little but potatoes for three years, a diet which to his surprise kept him in good health. His effort to understand how this could have happened led Pannentier to become a pioneering nutritional chemist, one of the first to try to figure out what is in food and why it sustains the body. When unseasonable rain and snow in 1769 and 1770 led to crop failures in parts of eastern France, a local academy announced a competition for "Plants that Could in Times of Scarcity be Substituted for Regular Food to Nourish Man." Five of the seven entries touted the potato, Pannentier's essay, the most impassioned and well documented, won the competition. It was the beginning of his career as a potato activist.
His timing was good. Four years after the famine, one of the first acts of the newly anointed king, Louis XVI, was to lift price controls on grain. Bread prices shot up, sparking what became known as the Flour War: more than three hundred civil disturbances in eighty-two towns. Throughout the disturbances Parmentier tirelessly advocated the potato as the solution. Proclaiming that France would stop fighting over bread if the French would eat potatoes, he set up one pro-spud publicity stunt after another: persuading the king to wear potato blossoms; presenting an all-potato dinner to high-society guests;* planting forty acres of potatoes at the edge of Paris, knowing that famished sans culottes would steal them. His efforts were successful. "The potato," announced a later supplement to Diderot's Encyclopedia, "is the fruit that feeds more than half of Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain, Ireland and many other countries." …
…The effects of this transformation were so striking that any general history of Europe without an entry in its index for S. tuberosum should be ignored. Hunger was a familiar presence in the Europe of the Little Ice Age, when cold weather killed crops even as Spanish silver drove up prices. Cities were provisioned reasonably well in most years, their granaries monitored by armed guards, but country people teetered on a precipice. When harvests failed, food riots ensued; thousands occurred across Europe between 1400 and 1700, according to the great French historian Fernand Braudel. Over and over, rioters, often led by women, broke into bakeries, granaries, and flour mills and either stole food outright or forced merchants to accept a "just" price. Ravenous bandits swarmed the highways, seizing grain convoys to cities. Order was restored by violent action.
Braudel cited an eighteenth-century tally of famine in France: forty nationwide calamities between 1500 and 1778, more than one every decade. This appalling figure actually understates the level of scarcity, he "because it omits the hundreds and hundreds of local famines." France was not exceptional; England had seventeen national and big regional famines between 1523 and 1623. Florence, hardly a poor city, "experienced 111 years when people were hunger, and only sixteen 'very good' harvests between 1371 and 1791 "—seven bad years for every bumper year. The continent could not feed itself reliably. It was caught in the Malthusian trap.
As the sweet potato and maize did in China, the potato (and maize, to a lesser extent) helped Europe escape Malthus. When the agricultural economist Arthur Young toured eastern England in the 1760s he saw a farming world that was on the verge of a new era. A careful investigator, Young interviewed farmers, recording their methods and the size of their harvests. According to his figures, the average yearly harvest in eastern England from an acre of wheat, barley, and oats was between 1,300 and 1,500 pounds. By contrast, an acre of potatoes yielded more than 25,000 pounds—about eighteen times as much.* Growing potatoes especially helped England's poor, Young believed. "It is to be wished, that all persons who have it in their power to render this root more common among them, would even themselves in it." Potatoes, he proclaimed, "cannot be too much promoted. "
Potatoes didn't replace grain but complemented it. Every year, farmers left fallow as much as half of their grain land, to replenish the land and fight weeds (they were plowed under in summer). Now smallholders could grow potatoes on the fallow land, controlling weeds by hoeing. Because potatoes were so productive, the effective result was, in terms of calories, to double Europe's food supply. "For the first time in the history of western Europe, a definitive solution had been found to the food problem," the Belgian historian Chris Vandenbroeke concluded. (The German historian Joachim Radkau was blunter: the key environmental innovations of the eighteenth century, he wrote, were "the potato and coitus interruptus.") Potatoes (and, again, maize) became to much of Europe what they were in the Andes—an ever-dependable staple, something eaten at every meal. Roughly 40 percent of the Irish ate no solid food other than potatoes; the figure was between 10 and 30 percent in the Netherlands, Belgium, Prussia, and perhaps Poland. Routine famine almost disappeared in potato country, a two-thousand-mile band that stretched from Ireland in the west to Russia's Ural Mountains in the east. At long last, the continent could, with the arrival of the potato, produce its own dinner.
Although the potato raised farm production overall, its greater benefit was to make that production more reliable. Before S. tuberosum, summer was usually a hungry time, with stored grain supplies running low before the fall harvest. Potatoes, which mature in as little as three months, could be planted in April and dug up during the thin months of July and August. And because they were gathered early, they were unlikely to be affected by an unseasonable fall—the kind of weather that ruined wheat harvests. In war-torn areas, potatoes could be left in the ground for months, making them harder to steal by foraging soldiers. (Armies in those days did not march with rations but took their food, usually by force, from local farmers.) Young's interview subjects used most of their potatoes for animal feed. In bad years, they had been forced to choose whether to feed their animals or themselves. Now they didn't have to make the choice.
The economist Adam Smith… was equally taken with the potato. He was impressed to see that the Irish remained exceptionally healthy despite eating little else: "The chairmen, porters, and coal-heavers in London, and those unfortunate women who live by prostitution—the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions—are said to be, the greater part of them, from the lowest rank of people in Ireland, who are generally fed with this root." Today we know why: the potato can better sustain life than any other food when eaten as the sole item of diet. It has all essential nutrients except vitamins A and D, which can be supplied by milk; the diet of the Irish poor in Smith's day consisted largely of potatoes and milk. And Ireland was full of poor folk; England had conquered it in the seventeenth century and seized much of the best land for its own citizens. Many of the Irish were forced to become sharecroppers, paid for their work by being allowed to farm little scraps of wet land for themselves. Because little but potatoes could thrive in this stingy soil, Ireland's sharecroppers were among Europe's most impoverished people. Yet they were also among its most well-nourished, because they ate potatoes. Smith drew out the logical consequences: if potatoes ever became, "like rice in some rice countries, the common and favorite vegetable food of the people," he wrote, "the same quantity of cultivated land would maintain a much greater number of people." Ineluctably, Smith believed, "Population would increase." …
… In the century after the potato's introduction Europe's numbers roughly doubled. The Irish, who ate more potatoes than anyone else, had the biggest boom; the nation grew from perhaps 1.5 million in the early 1600s to about 8.5 million two centuries later. … The increase occurred not because potato eaters had more children but because more of their children survived. Part of the impact was direct: potatoes prevented deaths from famine. The greater impact, though, was indirect: better-nourished people were less likely to die of infectious disease, the era's main killer. Norway was an example. Cold climate had long made it vulnerable to famine, which stuck nationwide in 1742, 1762, 1773, 1785, and 1809. Then came the potato, The average death rate changed relatively little, but the big spikes vanished. When they were smoothed out, Norwegian numbers soared. … Such stories were all over the continent. …
…According to the two "most conservative" estimate, S. tuberosum was responsible for about an eighth of Europe's population increase. … One way to think of this calculation is to say that it suggests the introduction of the potato was as important to the modem era as, say, the invention of the steam engine.
Excerpts taken from 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles Mann, Vintage, 2011.
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