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."
Also it has a spore that swims. So if it's wet & rainy, which Ireland usually is, all that water is a highway to late blight meltdown city.
So a country of 8M people lost all their groceries in a week. And almost nobody had savings or backup food.
Meanwhile Ireland was also growing lots of grain!
But the people who owned most of the land kept exporting it, while subsistence farmers who rented from them starved.
It's important to note that Ireland wasn't alone in getting hit with late blight. This disease, caused by Phytophthora infestans, was going all over Europe at the time.
But Ireland was the only place that wound up with a famine so deep it changed the shape of the country.
In conclusion, man do I wish it were as simple as "late blight caused the Irish potato famine."
But it never is.
And that's why it's important to have a food system where everyday people have a say.
Qybat@sarahtaber It wasn't just the land ownership issue. The response from Parliament was held back by a strong commitment at the time to market-based solutions, and a social commitment to the old Protestant work ethic - giving starving people food was seen as morally wrong because it would lead them into indolonce and dependency. The first food aid had to be purchased and delivered in secret, because if it were made public there would have been immediate opposition to helping the 'slothful' Irish.
@sarahtaber As actual charity was seen as morally wrong, Parliament instead tried to run public works projects - hiring people to build new roads and such infrastructure, so that they would have money that they could use to buy food. The idea being that market forces would then act to deliver food. It didn't work very well, as trying to organise large-scale construction projects in a famine isn't easy - and the jobs naturally went to those in good health who could best wield a shovel.
snottwow what a read. I admit to being very ignorant about all of that. Thank you.
George Potter@sarahtaber there's a great Extra History video series on youtube about the Irish Famine, it is quite good in that it spends most of the time explaining how the situation was compounded by British colonial administrators who saw the famine as an opportunity to remake Ireland, and disregarded any opportunity for famine relief that didn't support their vision for remaking Irish society, and nevermind if tens of thousands starved as a result.
John TimaeusIt was all about 'Trevelyan's corn'. Exporting wheat and barley while the people working the land starved.
6x6@sarahtaber We were never taught that it happened so fast. Maybe the national trauma led to details like that being left out of the schools curriculum.
Glenn Fleishman@sarahtaber that’s very Stranger Things
@glennf Thank you, agriculture is Like That way more often than it seems like it should be
Trux@sarahtaber I've seen a field affected by light blight in person. All the plants were curled over and black, you think it was burned. It happened in a matter of days, a very sobering sight indeed.
Elisabeth Olson@sarahtaber When I was in Ireland last year, I got a couple weather alerts for "Blight weather" on my phone. It was wild to realize how relevant that is to the Irish even today.
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 🌾
@sarahtaber I'd thought to myself that rice would probably like our boggy garden! But as a home gardener with a small space, cereal crops don't seem like they'd provide much food for the effort. Certainly something to keep in mind if we ever try growing at a larger scale.
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.
@sarahtaber That looks a great deal like what I'd call "bubble and squeak."