The Potato Harvest in History

By this weekend the nightly temperatures are going to dip down into the mid 20s (that's Fahrenheit), so this morning I dug up the last of the potatoes and am hardening them off for storage in the root cellar.  Potatoes for me, like for many people who store their food, are a staple winter fare.  They store well with little to no processing just by putting them into a dark, cool root cellar.  Don't even wash them off, the dirt helps to trick the potato into thinking it is deep in the ground waiting for spring to come so it can sprout again.  As long as it is kept dark and cool it will last sometimes as long as into early May before it finally catches onto the ruse and starts sprouting anyway.

 Potatoes are part of the nightshade family, to which tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, tomatillo and several other domestic vegetables belong to.  In the wild most of our nightshades are actually toxic, with deadly nightshade being one of the worst.  The toxins tend to affect the muscles of the body, especially the heart, which is why some granny women still use it in teeny tiny doses for those who suffer from heart problems.  If one is extremely careful, deadly nightshade can be used in place of nitro during a heart attack.  The problem is that even a tiny mis-guess and we kill the heart instead of jump starting it.  This is an 'only for professionals' medicine. 

Another member of the wild nightshade family is well known to we witches, and that is belladonna.  Belladonna gets its name from when Greek women use to take small doses of this poisonous plant to make their eyes dilate.  Dilated eyes means a yearning and it was a fashion statement of the Greek women.  Too bad it was also doing damage to their heart muscle and often lead to death during childbirth because the woman's heart was just too weak to survive the stress.  Some witches still use belladonna as a sleep aid but with so many better and safer ones on the market it would be one most people steer clear of.

 

Back to the potato; while the tubers are not poisonous in themselves, they are still a member of this toxic family and must be stored with care.  If the potato skin turns green, they can begin to produce the same toxins that are in the belladonna plant.  Every year people, especially children, are taken to the hospital because of potato poisoning.  The green skins on the potato are a result of too much light getting to the tuber.  Always store your potatoes in the dark.  Not only will they last longer but you won't have to worry about that nasty green skin that taste like crap anyway.

Potatoes play a very interesting part in human history.  There are books and papers written on the subject, yet few people actually know more than a tiny bit about this plant that shaped the world as it is today.

See, potatoes are the only vegetable that gives back more calories in the consuming than it takes to grow, harvest and process them.  If one were to live before fossil fuel was used to produce our food sources, this would have been a very important bit of information.  We need to eat vegetables for the nutrients they provide, yet we waste calories in growing them.   With the discovery of the "New World", or the Americas, by the Europeans, whole new food sources were opened up to them...including the potato. 

Potatoes can be grown in a very small space (I grow some in garbage cans), and yet produce a lot of food in that very small space.  So in a very small space a large amount of food can be raised that gives more calories to the person eating it than it took to produce it.  It was an amazing wonder gift for the struggling masses back home in Europe.  Most farmers in Europe at that time were growing their food on rented land and would owe a portion of that food to the landlord.  If you wanted more food you needed more land, but the more land you rented, the more food you owed to the landlord.  It was a never ending circle that helped to control the masses. 

Enter the potato.  By planting potatoes in the same amount of space that was once used to raise barley, the renter could get 7 to 8 times as much food from the same space.  Not only did they have enough to pay off the landlord and to eat themselves, but now they had extra to sell and make money.  Money was something that most peasants of the time just didn't have.  That's why they grew food for rent, because they had no money to pay that rent.  Now these people could buy a few luxuries in life and the hungry people in the cities were able to buy food for less money, which gave them more of a disposable income.  All this led to the rise of a new "middle class" in Europe.  More and more people began doing more what they wanted to do instead of what they needed to do to survive.  New businesses opened up and new job opportunities opened up in those businesses.  Europeans went from being in an almost constant state of hunger to being able to live some of their dreams.  And all of this happened in a very short period of time.

Also, because people were healthier, they began having more and more children, and these children lived longer because they had enough to eat.  Cities, that once were simple gathering areas of agricultural markets, or fishing villages, or distant trading posts, suddenly began to grow and grow.  They took up more and more land that was once needed to grow the large amount of grain needed to feed the masses.  Now with the potato, food could be grown on much smaller plots of land and the remainder lands were often sold to expand the ever growing cities.

Some historians even go as far as to say that the potato was what fueled the rise of Western Civilization.  It certainly was the reason for the 100 fold expansion of the European population.

 

Now during this great agricultural revolution, Europeans did what they always had done.  They began breeding this new plant to get a bigger and better yield.  They were looking for larger and larger tubers so they could feed even more people with less space.  As these new breeds of potatoes came onto the market, many of the older, or what we now would call heirloom, varieties fell to the wayside.  People wanted to make money and that meant using only the biggest and fastest growing potato on the market.  Soon there were only three main varieties of potatoes being used in Europe, and these three potatoes were fueling what was at that time the biggest population growth in human history (we have since surpassed that with the use of fossil fuels to raise our foods).

If you can't see that history was setting the human race up for a huge fall, then history was probably not your favorite subject.  lol

The lives of so many people were dependant on such a small food source.  What happens if that food source were to fail?

This is exactly what happened.  Because there was so little genetic diversity in the potato crop, it was very susceptible to parasites and disease.  Enter The Blight onto this tragic stage.  The blight is a fungal infection that affects many members of the nightshade family.  I lost my entire seed crop of Cherokee Purple tomatoes to the blight in 2009.  I had to start all over again after raising those seeds for 21 years. 

How the blight usually works is late in a stressed season it begins in infect plants that are not strong enough to withstand it.  This year, with the drought, the Wisconsin potato crop was very stressed and the blight began to spread quickly in Central Wisconsin.  Now adays we have copper based fungicides that can help control the blight and keep it from spreading too far.  The infected plants are destroyed and the soil they grew in is disinfected to make way for next year's crop.  This late season blight is rightly called, 'The Late Blight'.  A person can still get a harvest in after being affected by the late blight but it will be smaller than what it would have been if there was no blight.

The problem isn't really with that harvest.  A smaller yield is something that farmers have to deal with from time to time.  The problem is that the blight actually gets into the seeds or, in the case of potatoes, the tubers.  It lays in wait and as soon as those seeds or tubers are planted the next year, it pops up and kills all the plants, then creates spores to move onto other plants.  This is when the blight becomes 'The Early Blight' because it hits so early in the season the plants have no time to produce any food before they are killed.  If a person has plants that suffer from the late blight it is best to destroy all the seed from the infected plants instead of spreading it the next year.

They did not know this in Europe all those years ago.  They moaned about getting the late blight and the low yields, but then they did what they always did.  They put aside the tubers from those plants to use for the next spring's crop.  The tubers were infected with the blight.  The minute they were planted in the soil the next spring, they infected the soil with the blight.  And because there was no genetic diversity the blight spread like wildfire across the European countryside.  Within just a few years, the crop that fed almost everyone was gone.

Mass starvation happened.  It is estimated that over a million people starved to death in just a few years and another million people migrated to the Americas to find a new life away from the suffering.  It is still to this day the largest mass migration of humans in history.  It was even given a name, "The Great Potato Famine."  Here in the U.S. we call it "The Irish Potato Famine" because it was the largest immigration of Irish to our shores in our history.  But it was also when our first large wave of Germans came as well.  The second and third waves of Germans would come during the great wars, but our first came because they were starving and burying the dead back home.  They needed a new start.

The Great Potato Famine should have taught us many lessons.  The first, and probably the main one would be "don't put all your eggs in one basket."  By cutting down on the genetic diversity of our potato crop, we left it open to disease.  Also because so many people relied on this one food, disaster was bound to happen.  Our diet should always be as diverse as possible.  As should our crops.  Another lesson should be, "what goes up must come down."  No growth, especially fast growth, can last forever.  We should always be ready for when the 'up' cycle ends and the 'down' cycle begins. 

And last but not least we should have learned that humans do not always control history.  We are at the mercies of our biology.  We need to eat, we need to have clean water, we need to have shelter in bad weather...the list is too long to write down all of our needs.  But we do need other things to survive.  We can do all the political posturing we want, we can kill anyone who doesn't believe in our gods, we can think of ourselves as this great being that can shape our destiny, we can see money as good or evil, and wanna be kings as controllers or saviors...but in the end something as insignificant as a potato and a fungus can change the course of history.  

We should never take ourselves too seriously.  We, like every other creature on this planet, sometimes are just along for the ride.  We should do what we can and and make peace with what we can't.  We never know when we will be thrown a loop that will lay us low as a society.  Smile while we still have time.

One of my favorite ways to eat potatoes--as an egg jacket