Dan Snow's History Hit - Politics of the Potato

Episode Date: June 24, 2020

Rebecca Earle joined me on the pod to talk about spuds. She took me through the story of this starchy tuber's dramatic career, which has been at the heart of the development of the world we live in today. Jumping from an Enlightenment super-food, to symbol of the British Home Front and even a coercive tool in modern China, this unassuming root vegetable - rich in carbohydrates - has been quite the hot potato. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've got the history of the potato on this podcast. It's important. The little spud. The potato. You all eat them. Lots of people eat them. Well, most of you I expect. But how often do you think about its history? What's it doing on your plate? What's it doing in your mouth when you're chomping on it? It's there because of its history. And yours. Obviously, like everything else. So I've got Rebecca Earle, who's a professor of history at the University of Warwick. She's fantastic. She's written a book on the potato. And she is going to tell us all about it.

Why and how? A bit like coffee. It sprang from a small regional plant to a globally bestriding food source, staple for billions of people. If you wish to stay inside during this hot weather and watch History Hit TV, that'd be great. We've got lots more documentaries just gone online. Hundreds and hundreds of podcasts on there. So please go and check it out.

Go to historyhit.tv. Use the code POD1, P-O-D-1. And you will get a month for free. Then you get one month for just one pound, euro or dollar. So go ahead and check that out. In the meantime, everybody, here is Professor Rebecca Arle. Rebecca, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's a great pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Now, potatoes, they're foundational now in our modern diet. Just remind everybody that in Europe and Eurasia, there were no potatoes until quite recently. that in Europe and Eurasia there were no potatoes until quite recently. That's true, not before about 1550. So it's a consequence of Columbus's arrival in the Americas in 1492. And as a result of European expansion into the Americas in the late 1400s and early 1500s, European conquistadors and actually also some, European conquistadors and some, actually also some West African conquistadors, traveled all the way through Mexico and then down through the spine of the Andes and got all the way

to the Inca Empire. And that's where they met potatoes. And were potatoes very widespread in the Americas or were they just in the Inca Empire? Well, actually, that's really complicated. They're fundamentally a South American Andean crop that grows in Bolivia, grows in Peru, it grows in Chile. There have been all kinds of disputes between Peru and Chile lately about trying to patent the genetic content of certain types of potatoes. So there's been a certain amount of nationalist argy-vargy about whether potatoes are Peruvian, you know, whether this variety is Chilean, but that's where they're mostly from. However, about two years ago or so, some scientists working in Utah in the United States, in the northern reaches of the same mountain range that goes all the way from the Andes up through the Rockies, in the same northern reaches of this same mountain range,

scientists have now found the remains of wild potatoes from, I mean, more than 10,000 years ago. So it seems like there were potatoes in North America too. Were they central to the diet of Americans, you know, long before Europeans turned up? In the areas where they were plentiful and grew, in the Andes, absolutely. So in other parts of the Americas, other foods were the staple crop. So in most of Mexico, for example, it was maize, sweet corn. And in the Caribbean, it was things like manioc or cassava, what we make tapioca from. Those were staples in those regions. Also along the coast of Brazil, manioc, cassava was much more of a staple. But in the Andes, the potato was the absolutely basic food. Maize was around, and maize was a

high-status food. The Incas were very big on maize, but potatoes were what kept people alive. And potatoes, presumably, were very easy to bring across the Atlantic, to store, to plant, to raise in all sorts of different soils and different climate. Is it a wonder food? It's a fantastic food. Anybody can grow potatoes practically anywhere. They're an incredibly adaptable crop. I mean, they're adaptable partly because of the ingenuity of peasant farmers and small cultivators all around the world who figured out ways to make the adaptations that are necessary to allow potatoes to thrive almost everywhere in the world. So you can grow potatoes in

hot climates, you can grow them in cold climates, you can grow them in poor soil and good soil. They're incredibly adaptable. I think that's part of the reason they've been such a successful global food. Are they immediately popular in the 16th century? What do the sources tell us about their take-up, their spread around the rest of the world? Well, there's an old story about the spread of potatoes into Europe, which I think is totally wrong, which says, oh, potatoes arrived in Europe, but peasants were very conservative

and they wouldn't eat potatoes because they thought they were peculiar. And potatoes weren't mentioned in the Bible, so they thought they were peculiar and potatoes weren't mentioned in the bible so they thought they were you know a sort of satanic crop that nobody should eat so there's a whole story about these kind of very stick-in-the-mud conservative ordinary people who didn't want to have anything to do with this weirdo food from somewhere else and that it was only in the 18th century when far-sighted enlightened aristocrats and public-spirited kings and statesmen started promoting potatoes. So goes the story. It was only in the 18th century that ordinary people decided that this was actually an okay food. So there's

an old story about that, which really gets up my nose because it sort of implies that ordinary people have no entrepreneurial or innovative streak, that change and improvement comes always top down, and that that's the way in which change occurs. And that doesn't match how we think society works in general, and it's certainly not true for potatoes. So the real story that I see it is that when potatoes arrived in Europe in the 1500s and in the 1600s, the people who seemed to have been first to grow them were largely peasants and small farmers, and that it was only hundreds of years later that farsighted aristocrats and enlightened despots started to become interested in them. But it's very interesting reading your book and seeing the similarities between something like potato and coffee. People start attributing remarkable wellness effects to potatoes that go far beyond sustaining a diet. Well, that's true. By the 18th century, when statesmen and aristocrats started

to become interested in what people were eating, they became very interested in potatoes. So prior to the 18th century, most statesmen were not particularly interested in what ordinary people were eating on a day-to-day basis. They were really concerned that people were eating. Everybody from ancient times, every ruler knew that a shortage of food could lead to riot and unrest. So there was lots of concern about the food supply. But whether you were getting your five a day was not a big concern. Machiavelli does not devote any time to talking about the importance

of making sure that the population is eating a healthy diet. But in the 18th century, that changed for a whole variety of reasons. And so states all across Europe started getting very interested in building up robust, hearty populations of hardworking laborers and soldiers who could become the backbone of economic and military and political success. And they lighted on the potato as a particularly suitable food for building up hearty, strong, robust workers. And all kinds of things, as you say, were claimed for the potato, that it was just the absolute wonder food that would keep you alive, that would make you strong and healthy, that would banish famine forever. There were just endless enthusiastic pamphlets and booklets and speeches given about why potatoes were wonderful and everyone should eat more of them. To some extent, perhaps slightly unlike coffee, there's a grain

of truth. Did the arrival of the potato provide a robust added element to the diet that means that less, say, Europeans did die of starvation in the centuries that followed its introduction? Well, there's certainly a whole body of scholarship that claims that. And that says that was nice that you said a grain of truth, because in some ways, it's partly about the difference between potatoes and grains. So Europe relied on grains as its staple foodstuff from ancient times. And so partly the grains were familiar with like wheat or oats or rye, but also what are sometimes called minor grains, you know, millets and the speltz and all of the things that are kind of coming back a bit now. That was the backbone of the European diet. It's a fragile backbone. Those are not

high yielding crops, generally speaking. And potatoes are much more prolific. And they're highly calorific. If you want to get the most calories out of an area of land, you do well to grow potatoes. And they're very good on demanding relatively little water. I mean, they have all sorts of virtues. And so there's a whole body of scholarship that tries to peg the considerable population growth that occurred in Europe from the 1500s to the introduction of the potato. And I think there's some truth in that. I should have said a tuber of truth. One thing, of course, you can't not talk about is the so-called potato famine. Did certain societies like the Irish famously become so dependent on potatoes

that when there was blight, they actually found themselves almost uniquely threatened by famine? Was it so successful that in the absence of it, everyone had stopped growing anything else? Land a Viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal j in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows

or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Well, the Irish case is a particular historical tragedy which didn't come out of nowhere. So, as you said, the potato is a very successful foodstuff and it's spread in Ireland very successfully from the 1600s. There were different views about the role of the potato in Irish society over these centuries. Ireland was, of course, colonized by the British and in the early centuries of colonization, the potato was seen as a problem. It was seen as an obstacle that allowed the Irish to laze around and not work

as hard as the English would have liked. I mean, there's a wonderful comment from a writer in the 1600s who said something like, what need have they to work who can sustain themselves on potatoes? And he wasn't happy about that. So there was a view that the potato was a bad thing. It allowed the Irish to escape from the discipline of the English colonizing mission and, you know, let them go off and do their own thing and, you know, smoke and drink and eat and have some fun. By the 18th century, when states started to get really interested in these robust healthy populations then Ireland became a sort of poster child for the potato and writers up and down Europe in the 18th century was saying if you have any doubts about how wonderful the potato is

look at Ireland look at all those fat healthy peasants and their ten children all sustaining themselves on potatoes isn't that wonderful and so their potato then was seen as very good, and Ireland was proof positive of how excellent the potato was. By the 19th century, when views about how you organized an economy had changed yet again, the potato lost a good deal of its luster in the eyes of political economists and statesmen, and particularly people sitting in London,

looking at Ireland, didn't see anything good when they saw potatoes. They again saw potatoes the way people had seen them in the 17th century as a way of kind of opting out of the capitalist market economy. Again, they began to see potatoes as a way of not becoming a proletariat, not having to become a wage laborer. You could just grow your potatoes and you could steer clear of having to be, you know, working as an agricultural laborer on somebody else's land. And that didn't look good to London.

It looked good to the Irish, but it didn't look good to London, which is not to say that the Irish wished to be eating nothing but potatoes. But as they got squeezed onto smaller and smaller plots of land by expanding commercial dairy production, etc. Potatoes kept them alive until the blight. So there's a historical context that explains why

the blight was so devastating in Ireland. It's that there were all these small farmers who had tiny plots of land, which they could just about live off because potatoes were so remarkable. But if they'd had more resources, they could have survived the blight. And you can see this because the blight actually affected much of Western Europe. It affected Belgium and the whole of the low countries. And there were significant deaths in those areas, but nothing as catastrophic as happened in Ireland, because in those areas on the continent, even small farmers weren't subsisting solely on potatoes. And it was political forces that made that difference rather than bacteriological ones,

or rather than being due to the different virulence of the potato blight. It was the different circumstances in which people were living, which led to these different outcomes. 20th century, how does the potato fare in the great wars and the battles of ideologies of the early 20th century? I've got a feeling that you're going to tell me potatoes were at the heart of it. Well, as one rather wonderful window display that put it in during the First World War, this was a window display that somebody set up at a pharmacy and I think Iowa that said the potato is a good soldier, eat it uniform and all. So the potato was enlisted all across Europe and when the US joined the war, the US as a healthful food that was less vulnerable than wheat, and that would create healthy soldiers and that would allow the nations

to successfully defeat their enemies. And I mean, this is the case in Germany. It was that Germany had an imperial potato office that oversaw potato supplies, which it said is the most important problem, the most important matter that we must discuss in terms of food. So potatoes were roped into the war effort in the First World War and again also in the Second World War. And there's a wonderful book by a historian called Lizzie Cullingham called The Taste of War that looks at the role of food in the Second World War. And she says more or less that the potato was the taste of war in the Second World War all around the world. We're recording this in the early summer of 2020 and people are worried about food supply and COVID and the

lockdown. It's amazing how much, just anecdotally, how many people I've seen on Instagram, Twitter, just planting potatoes. It's now entered our sort of cultural DNA as what you plant when times are tough because anyone can plant and grow a potato and anyone can eat it, even your kids. Yeah, well in 2008 the United Nations declared it the International Year of Potato. And they did that because they said the potato was an exceptional food security crop. And I think they were right about that. And so I think that when people are going out and planting potatoes, it's both a response to the exceptional circumstances that the world finds itself in right now. to the exceptional circumstances that the world finds itself in right now and also an acknowledgement of the fact that potato is a very easy to grow prolific and suitable crop to cultivate on a

small scale I mean if you decided you were going to grow your own wheat in your back garden you know you wouldn't make much headway but if you plant some potatoes you can get a meaningful crop out of it in a small space and of course who can forget the crop chosen by Matt Damon when he goes as the Martian on Mars. And for some reason, it all made sense to all of us that the first thing you would try and do is grow potatoes. What do potatoes tell us about capitalism and globalisation at the moment? What does the world look like through the lens of the potato? The Chinese are the world's biggest producers and consumers of potatoes right now, which is pretty remarkable for a crop that wasn't even present in that part of the world 500 years

ago. And the potato has now become part of official government strategy in China to achieve food security. And that has something to do with market liberalization in China and the way in which, well, I guess what people sometimes call state capitalism is being implemented by the Chinese government. So their approach to encouraging potato consumption includes a lot of, you know, sort of top-down directives and also direct government support for potato farms, for factories that are making processed potato products, etc. But it's also framed in a language which I think is very familiar and recognizable to us in Britain, for example, which is the language of choice. It's the language of neoliberal consumerism, which stresses that your identity is intimately connected to the consumer choices that you make, and that who you are is really built up out of all of the choices that you make. And it's connected to ideas that go back to the 18th century about autonomy,

that being an autonomous individual somehow should involve the capacity to make your own decisions to form your own opinions and to make your own choices and that associates freedom in some way with the capacity and the ability to choose for yourself right and these are essential liberal ideas and they connect to the way in which the potato is being marketed, even in China now. So in China now, there's a big push to be getting people to eat more potatoes, but it's framed as an individual consumer health choice that you personally might be wishing to make in order to benefit your own wellbeing, to improve yourself.

They're not saying everybody now must eat potatoes. They're saying you, you would be much happier if you ate potatoes. You'd be healthier and better off. And so you should choose potatoes. I'm being stupid, but is rice suffering in the great battle against potatoes? Well, like other grains, rice is not as robust a source of food as the potato. I mean, I don't want to make it sound like I think the potato is the greatest food in the universe, but it is a more robust crop for food security than rice for sure. And also, white refined rice is not super nutritious in some ways.

I mean, the industrial processing that leads to polished white rice removes a lot of vitamins. So there are some nutritional advantages to getting people off white rice as well. So the Chinese state would like potatoes to join rice and to join sorghum and other grains and crops as a staple rather than just as a side vegetable. My sense is that the potato was more a side vegetable in China. It was something that people ate not as their staple, but as a vegetable to accompany your rice or other starches. And that's what the government would partly like to change. Little did I know that my kids are model Chinese communist children. They eat potato with potato and sometimes

with a dessert of potato. It's a late. Is this an occasion where I'm talking to a historian about something and not getting incredibly depressed about climate breakdown? Because is growing potatoes less bad for the world than those vast amounts of land put over to paddy fields, for example, or other monocultures? I think they are better in lots of ways. They use a lot less water, for example. I think the litres of water per hectare that potatoes demand is quite low. And they have other advantages in terms of not just climate, but also food sovereignty, people sometimes call it, the ability of people locally to have some control over their own food supply.

Because, well, as I was saying before, when I was saying that you could grow potatoes in your back garden and you could get a meaningful harvest, whereas you couldn't really do that with rice or, you know, with oats. The potatoes can successfully be grown by individuals on a very small scale. So you don't need to access your potatoes from, you know, the global market. You don't need to access your potatoes from the global market. You don't need to get your potatoes from some kind of enormous global international trade. I mean, we often do if we're getting our potatoes from the supermarket, they may be coming from somewhere else. But even so, a lot of potatoes are grown locally. Most potatoes are consumed in the locales where they're grown. They don't go all around the world the way maize does or the way wheat does or the way sugar does.

So they allow a certain amount of local autonomy, which I think is connected also to the climate, because you don't have to be shipping these foods all around the world. Possibly a source of optimism. So we can think of what is Matt Lucas's little song about thanking the potato for all kinds of things. Well, I'm now going to thank you because the great privilege of this job is spending 20 minutes, half an hour talking about the history of something like the potato, getting completely engrossed and enthusiastic about it with one of the world's leading experts. So thank you very much. Your brilliant book is called? It's called Feeding the People, The Politics of the Potato.

Feeding the People. And it's sitting on my bedside table right at the moment. So everyone go out and buy it. Thank you very much, Rebecca Earle, for coming on the podcast. It's a great pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense.

But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it,

I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.