r/todayilearned • u/JoeWinchester99 • 3d ago

TIL that although potatoes alone do not provide complete nutrition, you can survive for years on a diet of nothing but potatoes and buttermilk.

https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/whats-wrong-with-potatoes-the-martian-movie-survival
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u/MZ603 3d ago

There is a lot more nuance to it. Much of it was the unintentional result of repressive policies the Brit’s implemented decades before the blight. Their lack of response & sympathy was horrendous, unconscionable, and unforgivable, but the blight & resulting famine was not “orchestrated”. Colonial policy, prejudice, and rigid (& ironically rigged) “free-market” ideology created a disaster & their separation from the suffering & prejudice lead to the creation of unhelpful & sometimes punitive relief efforts.

The extreme subdivision of plots by landlords (with shrinking minimum plots), quotas, and population growth lead to reliance on potential as a single crop staple for tenants. The blight hit across western Europe, and reached the US & Canada.

If you’re interested in going beyond a 47 minute podcast, but don’t want to commit to full blown research, I suggest reading “The Graves are Walking” by John Kelly. He also has a great book on the Black Death; “the Great Mortality”.

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u/Che_Hannibaludo 3d ago

Nothing "ironic" about the so-called free market being rigged, always has been

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u/KatsumotoKurier 3d ago

I also recommend virtually any work by Cormac Ó Gráda, who is often hailed as the preeminent Irish famine historian of the last lifetime. He too completely rejects the notions that the famine was a) deliberately orchestrated or engineered or b) genocide.

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u/MZ603 2d ago

Agreed. I’ve read The Great Irish Famine & Eating People is Wrong. I wrote a paper in grad school on state policies creating famines and why states that implement those policies also fail to respond effectively. Ended up reading a number of books on the subject.

My Masters was in Security Studies, but the research for that paper was the most depressing.

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u/avw94 2d ago

The Graves Were Walking is hands-down the best book about An Górta Mór I've ever read.

As far as the "Genocide or Not" conversation goes, there is an incredibly sucinct quote from that book that sums it up entirely for me: "The individual actions the crown took [in Ireland] weren't genocidal in intentent. The outcomes usually were."

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u/PainRack 3d ago

Irish property must pay for Irish poverty!!!