The Blindboy Podcast - The History and Social Influence of the Potato

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

The History and Social Influence of the Potato  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Swelter in the heron's headware, you swollen own chucks. Welcome to the Blind Boy podcast. If this is your first time listening, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. There's a back catalogue of almost 500 episodes now. We're nestled in the unpredictable chaos of March. A very aggressive and annoying month.

Because it's warm and cold at the same time, winter is transitioning into spring. So in Ireland, this little island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The longer days mean that the ground is heating up, but the Atlantic Ocean is still cold. So we get these wet, moisture-laden cold Atlantic winds that turn into rain the second they encounter that warmer land. And then on top of that, we get freezing cold northerly breezes.

down from the North Pole, a very annoying month, because the exact atmospheric conditions then become mirrored in our fucking bodies. You put on a jacket because it's raining, but it's too hot to wear a jacket, so then you sweat unnecessarily, but the freezing cold wind chills your sweat, so you're forever aware of it. And it'll continue like this, probably up until the first, the first 10 days of April. Since last week's podcasts,

America and Israel have gone to war with Iran. But then last night, Donald Trump said that the war with Iran is pretty much over and that they'd achieved their objectives, whatever the fuck they are. But at the same time that he said that, they then intensified the war. But I promised you last week

that this week's podcast was going to be about potatoes. And I'm going to stick to. with that. I want to speak about potatoes this week. The reason I'd like to focus on potatoes is because three weeks ago I announced that I'm a parent

that I have two wonderful little children. I have two wonderful little toddlers who are four and two and my life revolves around them entirely. And I'd like to thank everybody for all the

wonderful support of messages that I got from people and I got so many questions about about being a parent and the experience of being a parent and because it's the most important thing in my life I'd like to speak about it more

but I'd like to speak about the experience of being a parent while also respecting the privacy of two little human beings and I suppose what that means is not commenting in any way on their individual personalities. Because I don't know, I don't think as an adult I wouldn't like to listen to public recordings

from my own parents speaking about how I was positive or negative as a child. I just don't think that'd be helpful. But this weekend I planted some potatoes with my two toddlers. So that's why I'd like to focus on potatoes this week. But there's a question someone asked me, and I really want to answer it. And the question was, over the past four years, is there one moment that I really wanted to share on this podcast? And I didn't. And there fucking is.

And I can say it now. So my little children's favourite cartoon. There's two of them. It's on Netflix. It's called Angela's Christmas One and Angela's Christmas 2. Now the thing with toddlers, they don't give a fuck if something is about Christmas. They want to watch it all year round.

So we have to watch Christmas content in June. Because I can't explain to a four-year-old and a two-year-old. It's not Christmas. We're not watching it. We have to fucking watch Christmas content in June. That's just what happens. But I don't care. It's not about sharing the joy and wonder

and being able to put myself using the empathy and going down to the level of, little toddlers and trying to appreciate a piece of television with the same wonder that they have. So here's the thing. Angela's Christmas is an animated movie that's set in Limerick City. So my kids, Shrek, their toy story, their Peppa Pig is a cartoon that just happens to be fucking set in the city that they live in. which is amazing, because then I can take them to the literal places in the cartoon. So they're both obsessed.

They're obsessed with this cartoon, Angela's Christmas. What it is. So the writer Frank McCourt, who was from Limerick, he wrote a book called Angela's Ashes. Massive, won the Pulitzer Prize in literature back in the 90s. Now a lot of people shit on Angela's ashes. A lot of people in limerick said that it was inaccurate. I mean, I'd say it's a piece of auto fiction. I don't think Frank McCourt was telling the 100% truth.

But as a book, as a piece of writing, it's brilliant. Like, it's a first-person memoir. And the opening chapters is Frank McCourt remembering his life when he was, is about three or four years of age. And it's some of the best writing from a child's perspective that I've ever come across. His ability to limit language and sounds and senses down to the innocence and naivety of a little child is phenomenal. So I love reading Angela's ashes. I think it's a wonderful read.

I have a short story in my most recent book. The story is called The Cat. astronaut and it's semi-autobiographical. It's certain memories that I have of being an autistic child. And I was definitely guided by Angela's Ashes. I was guided by Frank McCourt's writing. I used the first chapters of that book as the touchstone of writing from the first person perspective of being a child, the naivety of that.

And he wrote, and it was made into a film. It was about his childhood of utter poverty in Limerick City. I mean, this book was huge. This is so big that there's an episode of the Sopranos where Carmelos Soprano and our friends are having a book night and they're all sitting around reading a book. And one of the books is Angela's Ashes and they're talking about Limerick City in the fucking Sopranos.

But anyway, actually has another bizarre aside. So the golden age of what we'd call box set television HBO shows from the late 90s early 2000s. The Holy Trinity for me is the Sopranos. The Wire. Look, I love the Wire even though I got into a feud with the writer David Simon and fucking Twitter over Zionism

and he called me a shitpiece which I wasn't aware that he was a fucking Zionist. First off, I'll take that. Absolutely. David Simon, who wrote the wire, called me a shitpiece. And I should interpret that as an insult. I'm afraid I can't. Because the fellow who wrote the wire called me a shit piece.

So I'm actually, I'm taking that as, not a compliment, but like, it's like getting a headbutt off David Bowie. Still a headbutt, but it's like, David Bowie gave me a headbutt. Yeah, I'll take that. Absolutely. David Simon, he was being quite Zion. and I think I took a swipe at him on Twitter and then he had a lash at me for being Irish

that was the bit that was disappointing it was kind of just like you Irish you always have an opinion on Israel you need to shut the fuck up I can't remember the exact wording because then he blocked me straight afterwards but it was something it gave me the impression

David Simon is probably the greatest living writer of television all right, the wire is phenomenal but I got the impression from him that he's one of these yanks that just views the Irish as really drunk, brilliant writers and that's it.

You're silly, brilliant, amazing writers but just fucking get drunk and write something amazing but then shut the fuck up about Palestine please. And then I had to look at his character of Jimmy McNulty in The Wire who's an Irish-American cop who's a genius-level cop

who could have been something so much better but he was just a drunk I came away from the experience disappointed in David Simon thinking at getting the impression that he views Irish people in a very one-dimensional way very a fetishistic way

your drunk lunatics who are great at writing just do that and shut the fuck up about anything serious which first off you can't separate the Irish literary tradition from a revolutionary tradition. Those are one in the same. Hughie Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party, he said straight up that one of the books that radicalized him was a portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce. Not an overtly political novel, but like, I think Huey Newton said what he got from it. The way that Joyce spoke about the oppression of the Catholic Church in that book,

caused him to see parallels with that and the structural oppression of whiteness in America. And David Simon is an excellent writer, but he would not be as good as he is without the work of people like fucking James Joyce. What people say about the wire is it's not just a piece of television,

it's a novel. There's devices all over the wire that are present in Ulysses and also present in The Dead Which is a short story by James Joyce from Dubliners So David Simon wouldn't be as good a writer he is

Without the work of Irish writers before him Anyway he called me a shit piece I've only ever been called a shit piece Once it was by David Simon I'll take that It just felt like a piece It felt like something Bunk would say to McNulty I felt like I was in a bar in the wire at that moment

So I'll take that But also fuck him I expected the person who who has written the wire to have a more or more compassionate view of Israel and Palestine. So I was talking about the Holy Trinity of HBO boxettes

and Angela's ashes. So the Holy Trinity is the Sopranos, the wire, and Oz, okay? And as I mentioned in the Sopranos, there's that episode where Carmela and our mates are talking about Angela's ashes. And then in Oz,

which is the, I've mentioned Oz before, Oz is fucking nuts. Oz was the first great HBO TV show. It's set in a prison. It is bizarre. It started in like 1997. But anyway, in the later seasons of Oz, Frank McCourt's actual brother,

Maliki McCourt from Limerick, actually plays a priest in Oz and he shits himself. And also there's episodes of the Sopranos where the characters are watching Oz on television. This is an unintended tangent. I was supposed to be talking of a parenting.

So the question was, over the past four years, is there anything I really wanted to tell you on this podcast? And I didn't. In the late 90s, early 2000s, the world couldn't get enough of Angela's ashes. So Frank McCourt wrote two books. And then he wrote a children's book. And the children's book was about his mother, Angela,

and stories from her childhood in Limerick. Around 1910 And an Irish animation company called Brown Bag Films They made these Frank McCourt's mother's childhood stories into this cartoon Angela's Christmas 1 and Angela's Christmas 2 Angela's Christmas is about

A little girl called Angela She's about 4 and she lives in Limerick City 1910 And one day she goes to mass In a church inside in town St. Joseph's Church At the top of O'Connell Street in Limerick. It's there in the cartoon

and it's there in Limerick City. And she notices that the baby Jesus inside in the crib isn't wearing any clothes. So she steals the baby Jesus to bring him home, to bring him into bed and put a jumper on him. And my two children love this. And what I love about the cartoon

is they perfectly recreated Limerick in 1910. Like the effort that the animation company, like they didn't even have to. no one's going to notice but they did and that that little detail that attention to detail of recreate recreating limerick city exactly as it was back then and caring enough to do it little seemingly unnecessary details like that signal that this is quality that the people who made this really cared and

cared about making something good for tiny little kids and I love that because there's a lot of a shit out there. Peppa Pegg being an example and I can see little landmarks, little details and then I can bring my children to these places. Like there's a scene where Angela and her brothers, they got to the library in Limerick City, the old Carnegie Library, which is, the building is still there. It hasn't been a library in a hundred years. Now it's the Limerick City Art Gallery. But I can bring my little toddlers there and their eyes light up because they're living. in that city. They're living in Peppa Pig. We don't watch Peppa Pig because English accents, small toddlers who watch Peppa Pig sometimes get English accents. I don't want

that. And I've watched Peppa Pig, she's a bit of a prick. Don't like her attitude. Like, Angela has a friend and they visit her house. And her literal house, it's the place on Perry Squarespace. in Limerick. It's now the People's Museum and it's a perfectly recreated Georgian building but you can walk in there. You can walk into this place that's in the cartoon. So

their Shrek, their toy story is in their own city and we can walk around and continue the fucking adventure in real life and I love doing it and I love the wonder of it and telling them stories and pointing things out. But here's the thing

this is what I wanted to mention on the podcast. So a couple of years back when they were making the cartoon Angelus Christmas too, I was actually approached by the animation company to provide one of the voices in this cartoon because they're thinking, look, we're making a cartoon about Limerick City. We have to ask Blindboy if you'd like to do a voice. I was too busy. I was writing my book. I was making a TV series for BBC. I didn't give his shit about children's TV. Why would I? And I turned down

that opportunity. And it's the greatest regret of my fucking life because it would mean that the cartoon that my kids look at, that they love, that they adore, that their fucking da, me, I could have been a bloody character in it.

It was just two or three lines. There's a bit where Angela and our friends are trying to get into Limerick Docks. so that they can get a ship to Australia and I was supposed to play the security guard and have two or three lines and I said no

and I regret that so much because that would have been imagine being a little kid a tiny little toddler and first off it's like there's my favourite cartoon it's set in the city I live in and my dad is in it

and it breaks my heart when I watch that cartoon with the two of them and I'm like fuck it that could have been me. They could have been like, there's dada. Dadda's on the TV. I tried to make up for it years later. The other cartoon that they adore

is called Puffin Rock. Puffin Rock is brilliant. It's set on Schegelig Michael, which is an island on the west coast of Ireland where it's a puffin sanctuary. Those of puffins live there. And if you've seen my most recent documentary,

blind by land of slaves and scholars, you'll know that significant portions of that documentary are set right there on that island, which is very difficult to get out to, very difficult to fill a man. But I was fucking adamant. I'm going to Puffin Rock. I'm going to Puffin Rock

and getting lots of videos of me in Puffin Rock so I can come home to my fucking kids and show them that I was in Puffin Rock. Look at all the puffins. I even went so far as So the person who does the voice over on Puffin Rock Chris O'Dowd who I had Chris on the podcast about a year ago

I even got I even got Chris to record a personal voice message fired them as the voice from Puff and Rock and played it from on my phone of course they didn't give a shit they're like what the fuck you doing playing who the fuck is this this isn't Puff and Rock

this is just a voice of some man on your phone but I was trying to make up for not doing the voice on Angel's Christmas too I don't know if anyone's listening and you might have the opportunity to do a voice on a children's cartoon, take that opportunity in case you yourself one day have children. And loads of people were asking, like, do my children know what I do? So I don't wear my plastic bag around my children, obviously.

But they've seen my books where I'm on the front of it with a bag in my head, and they just call that silly dada. So when I don't have a bag in my head, I'm dada. And then when I do have a bag in my head, they go, that's silly dada, which is brilliant, perfect, that's silly dada. I love it because they came up with it. And also, as I've said over the years, my plastic bag, yes, it allows me to live a life of privacy. And I've now realised it's an autistic intervention. But also my plastic bag is a piece of performance art.

And I've always said that it was inspired by the dada. art movement. Data was a proto-surrealist absurdist art movement of the early 20th century which embraced irrationality and silliness

and foolishness and I've always loved wearing my plastic bag and going on to serious interviews on television looking absolutely ridiculous but speaking about politics or social issues in a way which isn't ridiculous.

And I love the contrast of those two things, to look like a clown, but to not talk like a clown. And I always said to myself, this is Dada, this is a Dada performance piece. And even the name Dada from the movement, from the art movement Dada, the originators that deliberately called it Dada because Dada is inert.

word, Dada and Mama. There are words that children just say regardless of culture. They're the first utterances that tiny little babies have.

So the word data, the art movement means silly. So when they call me silly data, it's like saying silly silly, like ATM machine.

The fuck's an ATM machine. Automated teller machine machine. So I wanted to speak about potatoes this week because of the weekend And I planted some potatoes. I planted three bags of potatoes. And I did this with my two children.

Two sparked their curiosity. They love potatoes. Mashed potatoes, roast potatoes, chips. And a couple of months back, I got to say to them, because they're so young. The food that you eat grows out of the ground. These chips that you're eating, they grew from the soil.

from a potato plant and this was new information they couldn't believe it what do you mean food that you eat grows in the earth what do you mean? I'm like yeah that's what happens

the carrots that you're eating the broccoli the Brussels sprouts these are plants that grow in the earth tomatoes cucumbers all the vegetables that you enjoy are actually plants that you can grow so they're like can we do

that? Like yeah we can just wait a couple of months until it's springtime and we can try and grow some vegetables and that's my favorite part of being a parent. Getting to share in the curiosity and I don't know how much of this ties in with my own autism because of what I've always said about being autistic. I feel as if the curiosity that children have that this never left me. Being autistic has its difficulties. But the one thing I'd never change and what I adore about being autistic is consistent curiosity. So if when my kids are learning something about the world for the first time, something as simple as food that you eat grows from the ground,

and I see the wonder and amazement and curiosity in their eyes and their voices, I then reappraise something that have maybe taken for granted and go, you know what, that is pretty fucking class, isn't it? Isn't that amazing? If they ask me something as simple as why is the sky blue? A four-year-old will ask you why the sky is fucking blue. Well, the air that you breathe in your lungs contains a lot of gas called nitrogen.

And when that sunlight up there shines through the air, it illuminates all that nitrogen. You see that as blue, so that's why the sky is blue. And why is the grass green? and then we go down to the grass and I say well in that grass there's a little chemical called chlorophyll

and when that same sunlight hits the chlorophyll in that grass the chlorophyll is able to use the sunlight to make food for the grass and then it grows but what's the food what do you mean the food

how does the sun make the grass make food but the food is the blue from the sky what do you mean it's the blue from the sky and then in the grass I point to the clover's all the little shamrocks and I said you see that shamrock in the grass but that shamrock can take the nitrogen the blue from the air put it into the soil

and then the grass can eat that but it needs the sunlight to make it eat that and that's why the grass is green that's why the sky is blue and the blue from the sky can go in the soil and make the grass green. And isn't that, that's amazing, that's phenomenal. And when my kids ask me those simple questions, I can re-engage with how utterly wonderful

and fascinating that is. This piece of food, this potato that I'm eating, that grow out of the ground. And I can grow some myself. Isn't that astounding? Yes, let's do that. So I went and learned everything I cut about potatoes, not just growing potatoes, but the importance of potatoes to... human history and civilization

and the reason that I chose potatoes as the vegetable to grow is because I knew that they wouldn't fail see if I said to my kids let's grow some tomatoes or grow some peppers or even cabbages or broccoli certain conditions might get in the way of that but with potatoes you just put them into some soil and they're going to grow

95% chance they're going to grow potatoes will just do their thing just put them down and they'll do their thing wherever the fuck you put them especially in Ireland so that's why I chose them so at the weekend I bought three potato bags

they're just little sacks that you put some peat-free compost into and then you have your seed potatoes which are just I mean you don't even have to get seed potatoes you can get potatoes from the supermarket and use one of them But we got three bags of compost, put seed potatoes into them, can leave them outside, it's March, they'll be fine.

In a couple of weeks I know they're going to sprout some green things out of the earth. And then around June or July, the potato bags have got these flaps on them. You just open the flap and reach your hand in. And you're going to pull potatoes out of the soil, wash them and you can eat them. and there's about a 95% chance that that's just going to happen. Don't have to fertilize them, don't have to do anything. Podados will simply grow unless they get the blight, which is highly unlikely, but unless they get the blight, they won't,

but they're going to grow 95% certainty. But that same sense of certainty and reliability, knowing that the potatoes are going to definitely flourish in this bag, it's that same certainty that led to like the genocide of the Irish people now I didn't tell my children about that I haven't got into colonialism with the potatoes with them because they're too young

and I'm not going to fucking say Peppa Pig is going to come along and steal your spuds but I find it fascinating that I've chosen potatoes as the thing to grow here in Ireland so I don't disappoint my kids but those same circumstances are what led to the Irish people

completely relying upon the potato as a crop. Now, potatoes don't come from Ireland. Potatoes are indigenous to what we'd now call Peru in South America. They were a staple food of the Incas. The mountains of the Andes, the Andes Mountains, Peru and Bolivia. What makes potatoes so unique is the sheer of amount of calories that they can provide in a tiny growing space.

Potatoes are utterly abundant per plant. What makes potatoes so easy to grow is they're not like seeds, they're tubers. So the potato comes with its own energy. Put it somewhere dark and warm and it will grow. put it in any climate where there's sufficient moisture and it will grow vigorously. But here's the thing when you harvest potatoes, you have to eat them quickly. You can't store potatoes, they go rotten. You have to eat them quickly.

Except in the Andes where they're indigenous, where they've been grown for thousands of years. Now I'm talking about before Spanish colonization of that region. So let's take that the pre-colonial world, right, the old. old world and the new world. So the old world being, let's just say Europe, Europe before colonization of the Americas. The staple crop and how well you could store that staple crop was what, one of the things that could determine how advanced a civilization could become. Let's go 3,000 years ago in, not Europe, fucking, the cradle of civilization, as we call it.

The fertile crescent, which is now Iraq, Iran, where farming began. People started domesticate grasses and you got wheat, grain. Now the thing with growing grain is that if you can store it properly in clay pots and keep rats out and keep air and moisture out, a civilization could have a surplus of grain and then store this for ages. that stored grain that was farmed that became like a type of tax that could be used to sustain a society

because you have to growing all your fucking wheat and now it's in grain storehouses so you can feed people outside of the growing season you can have surplus and that's what caused civilization that's what caused towns to turn into cities 3,000 years ago in South America in the end of the end of the end of the,

the Inca civilization, okay? They had a way to store potatoes for years, for decades if they wanted to, through a process of freeze drying. So up high up in the Andes Mountains, it's freezing cold at nighttime, really, really cold and dry at nighttime. So they would get their potatoes that would normally go off. And they'd freeze the potatoes at nighttime. and then in the daytime the dry heat at the top of the mountains would dry the potatoes out

then they'd freeze them again at night time and then dry them in the daytime and keep going until they're left with a substance called chuno chuno is a Peruvian freeze dried potato that's thousands of years old

that allowed the Inca civilization to get this crap that should go off and now store it and keep it stored for ages and help the advancement of that civilization. This is still eaten today. They still eat Chuno today in Bolivia and in Peru. But what happens around the 1500s?

The Spanish, the Portuguese, they start to violently colonize South America and the Spanish make it over to the Andes and she knows the story that was terrible for the people there because the Spanish brought smallpox diseases on top of violent colonization and collapsed. the Incan society. But by 1545, the main interest that the Spanish had in the Andes, in what we call Peru, was silver. There were mountains with tons and tons of silver.

Back in Europe, there was silver as well. A lot of it came from what we called the Czech Republic. But when the Spanish went over to Peru, they were like, fuck it, there's a lot of silver here. We're going to mine this. We're going to steal this and bring it back to Europe. The Spanish enslaved the indigenous Incan population and made them mine all this silver that the Spanish were exporting.

What fed those miners was the Tuno, the freeze-dried potato. So the Spanish are sending all this silver back. They're also sending potatoes back to Europe too. But when the Spanish, it could be argued that the first way that potatoes had a huge impact on the world outside of South America was it caused inflation. So when all this silver

arrived back from fucking Peru into Europe now there was a hell of a lot more silver that means that silver is less scarce there's more of it and this cause massive inflation, huge inflation. Like we're seeing now with the oil in Iran

price of everything goes up, money loses value. But here's the thing the Spanish bring potatoes back to Europe. And anywhere where you had a wet climate, the potatoes would fucking flourish. They'd be flying it. But the thing is, you couldn't preserve potatoes in Europe. You couldn't do the freeze drying in the 1600s or the late 1500s that the freeze drying, that the Incas were doing, you couldn't do that in Europe because you didn't have these incredibly cold dry nights and hot days.

so the potato became a peasant crop. It became a crop that the poorest people grew and ate immediately, but it couldn't become a cash crop like grain because you couldn't store it. So in Europe the potato was destined to become a peasant food. Now when the potatoes got to Europe, the mainland Europe they caused a population explosion. Because here's the thing. When warfare would break out, so I'm talking 1500s now,

when warfare would break out in Europe. Armies who are coming through an area, they'd have to feed themselves. So the first thing they would always do is they would confiscate any available grain. So if you're in a town or a village and an invading army comes through, they're going to take all the grain in your village

to feed the soldiers and then there was inevitable starvation of the local population. This new fucking food that could grow in the ground, that could grow anywhere. that actually protected against that. So now if you're in Germany or Poland or France and a war breaks out

and the soldiers come in and take all the grain for themselves, the peasants are now growing potatoes and feeding themselves on that. So the usual massive loss of civilian population that you saw from starvation during a war, that wasn't happening. So you get more potatoes equals more calories, equals more people,

and then more labour and more agriculture and industry so there was a massive population explosion because of this new wonder plant that could feed peasants. Early 1600s the potatoes start showing up in Ireland. How did the potatoes get to Ireland? The myth is that Walter Raleigh brought the potatoes to Ireland

in Yawl down in Cork where Walter Raleigh had a huge estate. But that's not the case. What would have happened is the Basque region. So when potatoes came to Spain They didn't grow very well in Spain Because Spain is too fucking dry But north West Spain

The Basque region That's wetter A wetter climate And potatoes started to do well there And Basque fishermen Used to fish off the west coast of Ireland And sometimes they would stop off in Ireland To dry their fish

And they brought potatoes with them And they just started to sprout Around Ireland Now, potatoes did fantastically in Ireland because of the amount of moisture that we have, the type of soil, potatoes absolutely loved Ireland and they grew like weeds and the local people noticed, my God, what's this? So they started growing potatoes and eating them.

But by 1586, this is when you start to see the beginnings of very destructive colonization of Ireland by the British. even though the Normans came over in the 1100s, right, things didn't start getting really bad until the plantation of Munster by Elizabeth I. 1586 and this was an attempt to just literally take over the region of Munster, kick the Irish people off their land and replace those Irish people with English Protestant farmers, settler colonialism. So the native Irish are now completely disenfranchised, their land is gone

and they're growing potatoes and whatever bit of land they have. Well, the English settlers, they're trying to grow wheat. But here's the thing, that wasn't working very well. Because the English wheat farming practices and wheat itself didn't grow very well in Munster. So those English Protestant, they would have been from Devon around the north of England.

They weren't doing a very good job at being colonial farmers because their staple crop wasn't growing. So then you get the plantation of Ulster in 1609 and the difference is with the plantation of Ulster, those Protestant

colonizers were from Scotland and the Scottish weren't growing wheat. They were growing oats. So the Scottish planters in the north in Ulster they're growing oats and those oats grow very well

in the north of Ireland because the climate and the soil is so similar to Scotland and there's an argument to be made like even today if you look at the north of Ireland you've got unionists there you've got the orange order

you have a population of people who descend from colonizers who are still very much present as a group with a group identity and a cohesion and a sense of we are separate. We are Ulster Scots.

We come from Scottish people. The Ulster plantation was one of the most was the most successful English attempt at canonisation on Ireland, the Ulster plantation and you still see it today. And one argument is because

they were growing fucking oats. Because they were growing oats that worked for them. Whereas the English Protestants who tried to colonise the south of Ireland, they couldn't grow their wheat. So then Cramwell comes in, 1649, right, about 50 years afterwards. Cramwell comes in. Now, I don't want to get too, I don't want to focus too much on the colonization aspect of this,

purely because I've done that on previous podcasts. But Oliver Cranwell was an evil fucker. Oliver Cranwell, his thing was ethnic cleansing. and genocide of the Irish people. Very, very bad man. So Cromwell goes for his fucking a new conquest, right? Really hardcore conquest.

Lensder, Munster, bits of Ulster. Now, Ulster had already worked, you see. So Cromwell is like, we're going to do it again and we're going to make it work down south. We're going to confiscate all this land. We're going to kick the

indigenous Irish people off their land and we're going to create a settler colonial, we're going to replace the Irish people with yeomen, with English soldiers who are going to be granted small farms to grow their fucking wheat. The Irish are banished to the west of Ireland to connoct because the land there is shit, it's bogs, it's rocky. So the Irish are sent over there as a peasant class where they're growing their fucking potatoes because potatoes will grow anywhere. So what happens now to Cramwell's attempt at replacing the population with these small English farmers? What happens? So a lot of the farmer soldiers, they didn't have experience as

farmers, even though they've just been granted land. The ones that tried it, they couldn't grow the wheat here. Ireland itself was a dangerous fucking place for a bunch of small English farmers. They were getting attacked and killed. So a lot of those small English farmers that Cromwell attempted to plant here, they just said fuck that. And they sold their small plots to large landlords who were living in England

or living up in Dublin. So full settler colonisation wasn't working. So what would have been 100 small farms of English Protestant settlers, Those 100 farms turn into one giant area owned by one English landlord. They're absentee. They're not living on the land. They just have this huge amount of land now.

So now you see full scale colonial extraction. This is the early 1700s now. And England has started to, the British Empire starts to become a thing. England is colonising the Caribbean. So the few small English landlords in Ireland they now get their huge farm areas, the massive massive areas and they decide we're just going to put cattle here because they need a lot of salted beef over in the West Indies

so the south of Ireland becomes dominated by these massive large estates where it's just cattle and beef being exported from places like cork and being salted down there and sent to Jamaica and Barbados and all the English slave colonies. In the meantime, the indigenous Irish population who'd been expelled to like to connoct, they have fuck-all land. So they're growing potatoes

and living on a diet of just potatoes and milk. And this is actually a brilliant diet. There's a huge amount of calories. Potatoes and milk led to an incredibly healthy population. The English plan of having English Protestant settlers work in the land that the big landowners own. That's not working now because the English, their diet is cheese and bread.

So they start to leave. And what emerges is this massive Irish Catholic peasant class that live on potatoes and milk that work the land that's owned by these massive English absentee landlords. The Irish are impoverished peasants. renting from these landlords with tiny little bits of land and growing potatoes in marginal land, ditches, bogs, mountains, anywhere where cattle couldn't graze or grain couldn't be grown,

the potato was doing its thing. But for the Brits, this had the unintended consequence of a massive population explosion of the Catholic Irish. So even though the Irish are peasants, and they have fuck-all land, There was a farming system called the Rundale system. It's an indigenous Irish farm of land management, which it's sometimes called a primitive form of communism,

where the land is collectively owned in a village. And it's subdivided in plots. So if a farmer has six children, that bit of land that the farmer has is now divided, amongst all of those six children, smaller and smaller. But because potatoes were the staple crop, and you could grow loads of potatoes on a tiny amount of land, like potatoes produced, I think, four times as much calories per acre than grain.

So you could divide the land smaller and smaller, and people were still very, very well-fed. A tiny plot could feed a family. People started to get married earlier. People were healthy, they were living on. milk and potatoes and then you saw this massive massive population explosion. In 1700 the population of Ireland was 2 million. By 1841, the population of Ireland was 8 million people.

It was the potato that did that. If it was wheat, if it was barley, if it was oats, people would have died, people would have starved on such small plots. But with potatoes that didn't happen, so you had this massive, massive explosion of the peasant Irish population who were living on potatoes. The Irish are coping basically, coping brilliantly with this new plant called the potato. They're coping fucking excellently under this system of colonisation where the land is being taken away and used for pasture, for grazing. But it created a very dangerous situation. Now you have millions of people solely reliant

on just one crap. Potato and then one cow that you get the milk from and you feed the potatoes too. Coupled with the fact that the potato itself is not indigenous to Ireland. It's a monoculture. There was mostly one

variety of potato in Ireland by the 1830s called the Lumpur Potato. This was the potato that flourished wonderfully in Ireland. All of the potatoes are related to each other are genetically similar. Contrast that with Peru and Bolivia. where potatoes are from, where they're indigenous. You've got hundreds of different potato varieties growing in a single area.

They're resistant to pests, to diseases. If a pest or a disease comes in, it's not going to impact all of the potatoes at once because you have the vigor of biodiversity. In Peru and Bolivia, you've got biodiversity of potatoes. In Ireland, you don't. The potato doesn't belong in Ireland. So you've just got one fucking variety, and all of the potatoes are the same. genetic lineage. So there's a fungus that impacts potatoes called the blight. And where does this

fungus come from? It comes from Peru. It comes from where the potatoes are indigenous. Did potato blight in Peru cause a gigantic famine and destroy all the potatoes? No, because you've got genetic diversity. You've got biodiversity. So when the blight hits, it only hits some potatoes and other potatoes are resistant. So biodiversity protects. against that fungus against the blight but in 1845 blight arrives into fucking Ireland most likely it arrived in Ireland

via bird shit fertiliser islands off South America were made entirely of bird shit and this was imported into Ireland and into Europe as a fertiliser because artificial fertiliser didn't exist so it's likely that the blight come over that way when the blight came to Ireland in 1845

it took out all the potatoes Every fucking potato in the country was impacted by the blight that was also spread. Because of the climate of Ireland, the wetness of Ireland, the warmth of the summer. That spread the blight in a way that it wouldn't spread in the Andes. So now 8 million people have no fucking food to eat. The peasant population and their tiny bits of land who were just relying on potatoes, now they're all dying because from 1845 up until 49

every year there's potato blight, there's famine. Now for my English listeners you're going, what the fuck? Because you hear this a lot from English people and from American people who simply don't understand. How does an entire population, would you not eat something else? Can you not have carrots? Can you not grow carrots?

Can you not eat bread? Can you not eat grain? You can't grow these vegetables on the tiny plots of land that you have The only thing that will grow is potatoes, because you've got no fucking land. There was loads of food in Ireland, fucking loads. Grain was being grown, there was cattle, there was butter, there was pork, there was fucking tons of food.

But Ireland, by the mid-1840s, was fully colonised. It was the breadbasket of the British fucking empire. Tons of food was being produced and grown exclusively for export. most of the land in the country was owned by these giant English landlords. Most of them didn't even live in Ireland. So Britain as well had enacted these things called the corn laws. There were tariffs. So Britain wanted to keep the price of British grain, wheat, barley,

wants to keep the price of this really high to protect British farmers, right? And the way that you keep the price of grain high is you don't allow any influence. imports from outside. China's doing this the past week. With the Iran war kicking off, right, and the price of oil gone up, China has basically said we're not exporting any fucking fuel. Any oil that's in the country stays in the country. So if you were an Irish person in the 1840s and you had any money to try and buy grain, to buy bread, if you were lucky enough to have that money, you couldn't afford it because it was being artificially inflated. Could the British government have relieved and brought in a bunch of cheap grain from outside to feed the Irish.

Yes, they could have, but they didn't. So while a famine was going on and the peasant population that were relying on potatoes while the potatoes were dying, they couldn't afford any other food. They couldn't fish because they didn't own the land. They were fucked. The British weren't importing any food to relieve the famine. The poor people that were starving to death. couldn't afford their rent anymore to the English landlord so they were evicted.

The English ruling class, people like Charles Trevelyan, were deeply religious. They just simply believed that the famine was a curse brought upon the Irish by God because the Irish were so filthy and savage. Long story short, in the course of about 10 years, the population of Ireland went from 8 million people to under 4 million people through a combination of death and emigration. And the non-interventionist policies of Britain, the fact that this was allowed to happen, that's why in Ireland people would call it a genocide. That's why people would call it a genocide,

especially comments people like Charles Trevelyan saying that this is, this is like divine justice from God on a savage population. That's why people in Ireland call it a genocide. But that's the significance of the potato in Ireland. And even today, just today, in the news, An Irish woman was awarded 23,000 pounds today. She was working for an accountancy farm over in Leeds. And her boss, who was English, you should just shout at her the word potato, potato, in an Irish accent, nonstop.

She was awarded 23,000 today because of racial discrimination. And you might be thinking, why? Because an English man shouted the word potato at her in an English accent. That's the weight that that carries. And I guarantee you throughout this episode, there's a bunch of English people listening who just love the fact that they got to hear the word potato in an Irish accent

389 times or however many times I said the word potato. And that's fine because most of you don't understand because you're not thought this shit in school. But that's what it means. That's what potatoes mean to Irish people. But aside from all that, it's an utterly fascinating plant. It's a fascinating plant. and what I find so fascinating

what has my curiosity tingling is that's what I chose to plant with my children that's what I chose and I didn't make that I'm not telling them about this colonization shit they're four and fucking two they don't need it they just want to see photosynthesis

that's what this is about not going to start getting heavy on potatoes with them has nothing to do with that I chose to plant three little bags of potatoes because of their reliability. I just don't want to disappoint my kids. And I know in Ireland, in unpredictable March, in the frost that might happen next week,

that's probably going to happen next week, there might be snow next week, no matter how much rain, I know that those three bags of potatoes, they're going to turn into fucking potato plants and we're going to be harvesting potatoes there in July. I know that's going to happen, unless I get blight, highly unlikely. But the same conditions, the same conditions 200 years ago,

that meant that peasant farmer had to feed his family. You know, I'm reflecting on the privilege that for me, it's about not disappointing my toddlers. Other crops, I can't guarantee success. Podadoes, I can. I don't even have to fucking do anything. Nothing. Don't have to fertilize them.

They're in the bags. They're going to look after. themselves and by July I'm gonna open up a flap and be eating some spuds and if blight does happen it won't then we're whipping out the peppa pig taking out the peppa pig with her English accent and my children are going to learn a couple of things about the famine they won't I'm joking all right let's have an ocarina pause 50 minutes into the who gives a fuck who cares 50 minutes into the podcast I didn't want to fucking interrupt myself It's four in the morning.

I have to make pancakes. I'll be up making pancakes and being crawled on and screamed at in two hours. And I won't sleep for a day. This is my life. And I'm glad I can tell you that this is my life. All right. Most of the information in this week's podcast comes from a book called The History and Social Influence of the Potato,

which, you know, it was written in the 50s, but it's still considered. The dominant text on the fucking history of the, the potato. This is an exhaustive text. It's massive. This thing is huge. It weighs about two kilograms. And I'm going to hit myself into the head with it and you're going to hear an advert for some shit. All right? Here we go. I did this last week. I wasn't too happy with it. Do you know, it's all about how I hit it. It's actually the smaller books that have a snap on them. Those are the ones I don't like slapping myself with. With this, I'll just give it a gentle thud. I'll pretend that it's David Bowie giving me. a headbutt. That's what I'd pretend.

Ow. That's my impression of David Bowie giving me a head butt. With your long blonde hair and your eyes of blue, the only thing I ever got from you was sorrow. Sorrow. Ow. That's David Bowie.

Very poorly song rendition of David Bowie's song. That's actually not his song. That's a cover version from the album Pinups. Wonderful David Bowie album. It's his cover album that he released in 74. And that song, Sorrow, it's the first time he used that, that deep voice that you had from his later career. Because before that, he sounded like a singer called Anthony Noole.

Check out a cunt called Anthony Noole. he would have been not vaudevillian what would you call it that East End English working class type of song that was sung in pubs

on upright pianos in the 40s and 50s there was a singer called Anthony Noley and listened to his stuff from the 50s and 60s and it's just Bowie it's just Bowie

Bowie's voice is a mixture of Anthony Nollie and a Canadian singer called Scott Walker I love him. I love Scott Walker. He's someone who would have started off as like a heartthrob musician in the 60s, like Justin Bieber of the 60s, and then disappeared for years. Definitely, I'd say there was a bit of autism with him.

Disappeared for about 10 years and then came back with the strangest music. And by the end of his career, Scott Walker's latest albums, he wasn't even using interest. he used to bring like a huge big side of beef into the studio and he'd slapped the beef. He'd slap the beef and make a song out of it. And he had mad lyrics. One of his lyrics was I'll Punch a Donkey in the Streets of Galway. I'm actually doing a radio show and there's this this fucking online radio station called NTS, which is, I suppose. be a bit of a hipster radio station.

So they have me on as a resident DJ quarterly for the year of 2026 and I'm going to do four episodes. The first one will be fucking April I think. But I can do whatever I want.

I can do whatever the fuck I want on it. So I'm going to be doing some. I might play a bit of Scott Walker. I don't know what I'm going to do. But I love music as you know. I fucking adore music. I'm an absolute music nerd. And I don't get to speak about music on this podcast

because I don't like speaking about music without showing me the actual music. And we can't do that here because it'll get taken down. But I'll let you know when I'm doing my NTS bullshit. All right, here. Where's the ad, here's some adverts. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, whatever has you listening to this podcast, please consider paying me directly for my work, keeping this podcast listener funded. This is a listener funded podcast. This is my job. It's how I earn a living. It's how I buy all my equipment. It's how I rent out my studio space. It's how I pay my bills. This is my sole source of income. This is what I do for a living. I love this job. I love it so much. I have unending gratitude. and humility that I get to show up each week and tell you the history of fucking potatoes.

My God. So if you do like this podcast, all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. Listen for free. Listen for free because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free.

Everybody gets the exact same podcast. I get to earn a living. And it means that we're not behold. into advertisers. If advertisers come on here, it's on my terms, but they can't tell me what to talk about or influence the content in any way. Patriot com forward slash the Blind Buy Podcast. Right, my next gig is in Cork. This month, the 26th of this month, is it, yeah, the 26th of this month, which is a Thursday. I'm at the Cork podcast festival. That gig is nearly sold out. Then in April On the 4th of April.

I'm in Castle Blaney, right? Very few tickets left for that. Limerick on the 9th of April, University Concert Hall. Come along to that, it's Limerick. It's a homecoming gig. Please come down to Limerick to the University Concert Hall for that gig. Then, Vicker Street, Dublin, on the 20th of April. That'll be gone soon, all right?

Then my rescheduled gig in Galway. at Leisure Land, glamorous Leisureland, is going to be on the 25th of April. That's the rescheduled gig. I tried my best to get Tommy Ternan for that one. Tommy's not available. I got the chicken pox a couple of weeks back. Me and Tommy were going to do that gig. I had to cancel the gig at the last minute because I got chicken pox.

Now it's rescheduled, but Tommy is booked on that fucking night, unfortunately. But I'll find someone else I may have crack. It'll be grand. In Berlin, in June, right? I'm doing two nights. There's only tickets left for the second one, which is on the 20th of June in Berlin at the Babylon Theatre. Montefuck. I'll get a day off there now and enjoy Berlin.

I didn't get to see much of it the last time. Stayed in a hotel that had bulletproof glass. July, Sheffield, there, over in fucking Sheffield. I want to go to Sheffield and drink a pint of something awful, something local and something awful. That's what I want to do. So that's the 5th of July there in... Is it Sheffield City Hall? It's part of the Crossed Wires Festival.

Then October, my almost sold out tour there of England, Scotland and Wales. Brighton, Cardiff, Coventry, Bristol, Guildford, London, Glasgow, Gateshead and Nottingham. Come along to those wonderful gigs and that is where'd you get those tickets? Fane.com.uk forward slash the blind by podcast. I suppose I'm responding to questions a bit this week. questions that I got when I told you that I had kids and another big question that was given to me is I said three weeks ago that when it comes to parenting I said my love is like the sunshine

and when it comes to my kids I just make sure that that my love is absolutely unconditional nothing that my kids can do is going to change the amount that I love them to get love regardless just the way that the sun is there regardless. And potatoes tie into that. And I tell you why.

And this is a fascinating thing. This is something I love about potatoes. I mentioned at the start that a potato itself holds all the nutrients that it needs to grow. Okay? And that's one of the things that makes potatoes so successful when you throw them into the ground. It has its own nutrients in its body.

Those seed potatoes, that I put into the bags. I don't have to fertilise them. They have the energy within them to grow and to sprout. But did you ever fucking leave a bag of potatoes in a dark cupboard? Did you ever forget about a bag of potatoes?

And then you open that cupboard and you look in and you go, what the fuck is this? Jesus Christ! The fuck is this? Like a bag of devil's testicles. You open the cupboard and the potatoes is this wrinkly thing

and then there's thousands of these alien like tentacles growing out of the potato and it's terrifying and you don't want to fucking touch it it's repulsive that potato is trying to grow in a poor environment

that potato still wants to live it still wants to become a potato plant but it's in the dark there's no moisture and it sends out its tentacles we'll call them, in search of water, in search of light, in search of the things it needs to become a healthy potato plant, but it cannot do that in that environment. That potato just needs the

unconditional love of soil and water and sunlight. That's it. But it doesn't have these things in the cupboard. It still tries, but it doesn't have these things. And it turns into a dysfunctional distortion of what a potato can be. Well, a guiding principle that I use for my own mental health, from my own growth, and now for my two little toddlers is

the psychologist Carl Rogers has a wonderful theory. Now it's from the fucking 1950s. It's a psychotherapeutic theory. Almost philosophical. It's called organismic valuing. So when it comes to a human being to a little child,

if I want to plant that little child in a potato bag with plenty of moisture and compost and sunshine well the conditions that that child needs from its environment from its caregivers is

unconditional positive regard so it means that when it comes to my love the child experiences acceptance regardless of their behaviour or their achievement they get unconditional love Right. No amount of my love is conditional based on obedience and their performance or conformity.

Right? And what that does then is that the child, they learn to trust their internal feelings and needs. And then the second thing is emotional attunement. To respond to the child's feelings and experiences using empathy. I mean, how I use empathy is, is, the curiosity. Can we grow up potatoes? Of course we can. Why is the sky blue? I'm going to tell you why the sky is blue. I'm not going to dismiss that as ridiculous. You're interested in why the sky is blue. I'm going to tell you. I'm going to validate their curiosity and feelings. And then I'm taking my little child's internal experience. I'm taking it seriously rather than dismissing

it. And then the hope there is that they develop like an... accurate awareness of their own emotions and motivations because I'm showing them that it's safe. It's safe and okay to explore and validate emotions rather than dismiss them or call them silly or not pay attention to those emotions. Number three, I don't want to create conditions of worth. Okay? To teach a little child that they're only valued when they behave in a certain way that I approve of. That could be the potato business, you know. I'm actually, I'm quite excited about growing these

potatoes. I'm very enthosed about this. Okay? And so are my kids. But in a week's time when a sprout shows, and one of them goes, I'm not interested anymore. I don't want to be part of the potato growing. That's absolutely fine. I'll accept that. I won't be offended by it. I'm not going to be disappointed by it. You don't want to get involved in the potato growing. Oh, Okay, absolutely fine. I won't set a condition of worth. There's no conditions to their worthiness or conditions to my love. And if I can do that, hopefully they can grow into somebody who doesn't pursue external

approval for their own sense of worth. That worth comes from inside, genuine self-esteem. That's organismic valuing according to the... Carl Rogers, that a little human will grow towards unconditional positive regard, empathy and emotional understanding and freedom to explore and develop. But the potato that's stuck in the cupboard and is still trying to grow, but it's in the dark without moisture, looking for the light. That reminds me a bit of a little human, a little tiny child who might have parents, whose love is conditional,

a type of emotional immaturity on the part of the parent where the child only receives love depending on how they behave. You know, children are very fucking loud. They scream and shout, they've got a lot of energy. That can be tiring and draining. As an emotionally mature adult, I have to accept and acknowledge

that that's a healthy way for a child to be. and if I start demanding silence or quietness, then the child can learn that they're only loved when they're quiet. They learn to suppress their personality or if I'm controlling over their interests or disapproving because they're not into the potato growing or whatever, not listening to emotions,

dismissing their emotions. As a parent there, I'd be like that cupboard. That's a little potato trying to grow, but I'm creating an environment there. An environment where growth can't happen in a healthy way. And then you end up with teenagers with a lot of tentacles hanging out of them. A healthy little human potato will have an openness to experience, be able to trust and understand their own feelings, and have a flexible personality.

Whereas the opposite of that is a dependence on external approval and a disconnection from their authentic feelings, you know? So I think potatoes are a wonderful, wonderful metaphor for organismic valuing there. Just fuck a potato into a cupboard, see what happens. All it's doing is trying to grow. If that same potato was in the soil, it would turn into a wonderful potato plant, a bountiful potato plant. Put it into a cupboard and it turns into a weird looking alien thing.

A dysfunctional potato. All right, dog bless. It's now five in the morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'll catch you next week.