Sarah TaberY'all know what day it is 🍀
In the US, St. Patrick's Day is strongly tied to the event that led so many Irish people to emigrate here: the famine of 1847.
Food systems & supply chains make history.
I'm working to build a better food system here in the southern US. Both regions share rich land that can grow plenty of good food- and a history of deep rural poverty, thanks to what could generously be described as "poor leadership."
There's also a lot of ingenuity in both.
So today we're doing another round!
For every donation to the link below, I'll post one (1) fact about agriculture in Ireland- before, during, & after 1847.
There's WAY more than potatoes. Like what's going on with these fully-grown, halfling-sized cows.
And we're off!
1/ Ireland has a long history of smallish cattle. Here's a guy posing with a bull, with some forced perspective to make this compact king look like full-sized.
Why small cows? They weigh less.
That's a big plus in Ireland. When it's rainy, big heavy cows can easily tear up sod with their weight. Next thing you know the pasture is a music festival-style mudpit. The grass can take years to grow back right.
You can avoid all of that just by having smaller cows!
2/ This answers a question I'd had for a long time. When we learned about the 1847 famine in schools, the textbooks would say "People got almost all their calories from potatoes, and their fat and protein from a little bit of dairy." But I knew cows are big honkin' animals that need lots of space and food.
If people were living on tiny plots, how were they keeping cows?
Oh the cows were little. That helps a lot.
3/ If you're eating a lot of potatoes & dairy, you gotta find a way to make it interesting!
Enter colcannon: mashed potatoes with greens and ideally (IMO) as much milk/butter as possible.
4/ There's a song about colcannon! Fittingly called "Colcannon."
It's a little sappy but I think for a thing that stood between a lot of people & starvation, this is permissible.
The Black Family - Colcannon | The Late Late Show | RTÉ One
5/ After emigrating to the US, a lot of people kept using colcannon as a side dish along with corned beef (a working-class friendly main dish in 19th century US) or other heartier options.
But for people living on small plots in Ireland, it often served as the main dish.
Dinner break! Keep 'em coming folks, will be back with more farm & food system facts shortly.
6/ What did people in Ireland eat before potatoes?
By all accounts, lots & LOTS of dairy. The weather's good for growing lush grass, which keeps cows well-fed enough to milk most of the year.
Drinkable yogurt-type beverages, curds, clabbered cream, and lots & lots of butter.
7/ But there's a problem: dairy is perishable. Hard aged cheeses have a longer shelf life. But those take dry conditions (part of why they're popular in the Mediterranean).
What's a dairy farmer in cold, rainy Ireland to do?
Bog butter, apparently!
8/ Starch came from oats- the grain most tolerant to wet weather- and root crops like turnips.
Ireland's food history didn't start with the potato! Potatoes arrived into a food system that had already been fully formed since the Bronze Age.
9/ Potatoes arrived from the Americas in the late 1500s/early 1600s.
And that was right around when England began seizing large amounts of land to set up plantations. (In Ireland, plantations = land grants the monarch gave to English gentry.)
11/ But by 1815, a few things had changed.
The population of Ireland skyrocketed from 1M in 1600 to 8M in 1840.
The super-high yield/acre of potatoes had a lot to do with it: adding the potato to Ireland's crop mix just allowed the land to support more people.
12/ At the same time, grain was having an export boom because of the Napoleonic Wars.
France, which was normally a grain powerhouse, was short on both labor and functional farmland to grow grain.
Suddenly, anyone who owned large acreage could make lots of money exporting grain.
Even after the Napoleonic War ended, English families who owned estates in Ireland got used to the income from exporting grain.
England had various controls on exporting grain, to keep food affordable. But those laws didn't apply in Ireland.
(A quarter = a little over 1/4 ton.)
So English estate owners & their local managers had strong financial reasons to dedicate as little of their land as possible to subsistence farmers' personal plots, and as much of it as they could to grain destined for export.
The population boom, combined with the grain export boom, pushed Irish tenants' personal plots to minuscule size.
By 1845 40% of Irish tenant farmers' plots were under 15 acres per family. 24% were under 2 hectares- which WOW, is NOT enough to support a family. AT ALL.
Most people wound up growing a potato variety that became known as the "Irish Lumper."
It's a knobby little guy that thrives on poor, wet soils.
Usually when you live on potatoes, you either have them in a root cellar or dig a day's worth out of the ground at a time.
One day, everybody went to their cellar or garden. And all the potatoes were slimy and rotten.
Potato late blight is what the crop scientists call an explosive disease. The time from first symptoms to "your entire crop has melted down" is very short- days or hours.
It hits so fast, there's a distinctive smell to it. The smell of "entire potato field in distress."
legumancer Davy@sarahtaber oh my goodness, this is the first time I have ever heard of a crop that thrives on wet soils. (I'm in Ireland trying to turn our patch of mud into something we can grow food in.)
@legumancer Haha similar struggle over here. We had farmers in Appalachia turning themselves inside out for years trying to find crops that would be happy in small mountainside fields that are soggy much of the year.
Then some Hmong folks moved in. They're happily growing traditional Laotian mountain rice there, just like God intended 🌾
Eric LawtonWe English are good at giving other people's land to ourselves.
(I'm now a settler on the traditional territories of the Mississauga branch of the Ojibwa Nation.)
Bill Ricker@sarahtaber
Interesting that the _first_ English plantations were under Queen Mary I ?! I'd missed that!
Camel's nose in tent, i guess.
Interesting that the _first_ English plantations were under Queen Mary I ?! I'd missed that!
Camel's nose in tent, i guess.
@BRicker I mean there'd been Anglo-Norman fiefdoms in Ireland since the 1200s or so, just due to how close the two islands are. But they were pretty limited. Serious, systematic colonization led by the Crown began with Mary I IIRC.
Bill Ricker@sarahtaber @BRicker thanks. Noting this for later
Dave Wilburn 
@sarahtaber maybe not too surprising. One of Ireland's most important myths concerns an invasion of Ulster to steal a bull.
Ireland also has one of the lowest rates of lactose intolerance on the planet. Which, sadly, I somehow did not inherit.
mem_somerville@DaveMWilburn @sarahtaber I think it's even more than that. I genetically require milk and cheese and potatoes now.
Cavyherd@mem_somerville @DaveMWilburn @sarahtaber
Well, I mean it's a scientific fact that if you pour enough butter and/or cheese on it, you turn anydamnthing into food.
Anthony Sorace@sarahtaber There’s tons of great Irish cheese today, is that whole tradition just newer?
@a Nope I think there's pretty much always been cheese, it's just not the superhard long-keeping kinds that tend to show up in the Mediterranean.
Andrew Laurence@sarahtaber 👋 Wasn’t there thing about how the potato crop failure wasn’t *that* bad, but it was the landowners switching to (beef?) and throwing out the sharecroppers that actually led to the immigration wave?
@atlauren we're getting there!
@sarahtaber I like colcannon. They also sing about boxty, which my dad sought out whenever he could....Not easy to get though.
At one place in Ireland, the woman said to him: "All the old grannies are dead."
LOL.
@mem_somerville wow that is a RUTHLESS response, love her
My only prior exposue to colcannon was in the form of @neolithicsheep's oxen 😂
I was in Ireland, in Kerry, in the pre-EU days, when they were a lot less wealthy.
I went into a café. They asked "are you here for lunch?".
I said "yes", expecting a menu.
They just brought lunch.
A big pile of mashed potatoes with sides of corned beef and cabbage. With a big mug of strong tea.
Delicious and enough to last me 8 hours before I was hungry again.
Serge 🔻@sarahtaber looks very similar to Dutch stamppot. A dish that is still very popular and that also essentially came from incredible poverty in the 18th and 19th century in The Netherlands. There’s a bit more variety, but it’s still always mostly potato. Cheap and filling.
Qybat@sarahtaber That looks a great deal like what I'd call "bubble and squeak."
@sarahtaber In the New Territories outside of the city of Hong Kong proper, many farmers left, abandoning their small cows. To this day, the now feral cows roam the hills at night, trampling around the few houses in the area, and often show up on Sundays in the public areas where people have Hong Kong-style barbecues after their weekly hikes.
https://www.localiiz.com/post/culture-history-wild-cattle-cows-buffalo-hong-kong
https://www.localiiz.com/post/culture-history-wild-cattle-cows-buffalo-hong-kong
mamhoff@sarahtaber small cattle are also super relevant for fighting climate change today. They can live on wetter land, allowing the water line to be raised in converted bogland.
Not that we should necessarily eat meat, or reconvert bogland to bog, but bog preserving practice that matches the food habits people have today is important...
Even if it's only for dairy, the big advantage of meat/dairy is converting living matter (grass & browse) that humans can't eat/digest into food that humans can eat: meat/dairy. Factory farming is a sustainability nightmare, but there are a lot of land restoration practices that are enhanced by the presence of hoofed animals.
There'a lot of work going on with buffalo (bison) in #Indigenous communities up in N US/S Canada by some of the First Nations up there.
donkey herder, fowl friend@sarahtaber what an ingenious “halter,” too! It looks like there’s a Y of chains going from the nose ring to the horns, and then the lead rope is clipped to the nose ring. I’m guessing this gives the handler a bit more control (but I still wouldn’t want to lead any size bull around!)
@sarahtaber interesting!
Andrew Reid@sarahtaber Many years ago I stumbled across an amazing (and amazingly engaging) documentary about the potato blight, which covered some of the issues you mention.
As the story is told, the potato blight was, in addition to its many geopolitical aftershocks, also central to the origin of plant pathology. (I am not in a position to assess this claim, ofc.)
It's "Hot Potatos", dir. John de Graaf.
Hot Potatoes | Bullfrog Films: 1-800-543-3764: Environmental DVDs and Educational DVDs
Explores the dangers of potato blight and the chemicals used to control it. From Bullfrog Films, the leading source of DVDs & videos about the environment, ecology, sustainable development, globalization, indigenous peoples, cultural diversity, and performing arts, music and dance.
Michael ☕️@sarahtaber
When posting threads like this, you should change your name to "Sarah Tuber."
Very interesting, thanks!
McSquank ain't feeling it@sarahtaber thanks for this thread
eestileib (she/hers)Fantastic thread, thanks Sarah!
Nicole ParsonsThe rich people behind planned famines like the Irish Great Famine never get the notoriety & infamy they deserve in history books.
The Irish Potato Famine was a public policy failure as much as a crop blight.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
Whenever there's a crisis, you can count on aristocrats to continue to extract profit for themselves & absolve themselves of any responsibility to help.
ʙᴇɴ ᴄᴏᴛᴛᴇяɪʟʟ@sarahtaber Lots of relatives buried in the family graveyard in county mayo due to the blight.