An Edible History of Humanity (13 page)
Read An Edible History of Humanity Online
Authors: Tom Standage
A series of famines in the eighteenth century earned the potato some friends in high places. When the crops failed in 1740,
Frederick the Great of Prussia urged wider cultivation of potatoes among his subjects. His government distributed a handbook
explaining how to grow the new crop and distributed free seed potatoes. Other European governments did the same, making promotion
of the potato official policy. In Russia, Catherine the Great’s medical advisers convinced her that the potato could be an
antidote to starvation; governments in Bohemia and Hungary also advocated its cultivation. Sometimes potato advocacy was backed
by force: Austrian peasants were threatened with forty lashes if they refused to embrace it. Warfare also helped to change
attitudes. During their campaigns in northern Europe in the 1670s and 1680s, Louis XIV’s armies encountered potatoes in Flanders
and the Rhineland, where they were being grown in some quantity by this time. One observer noted that “the French Army found
great support thereby by feeding the common Soldiers most plenteously; it is both delicious and wholesome.”
Austrian, French, and Russian soldiers who fought in Prussia during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) saw how potatoes (planted
at Frederick the Great’s urging) sustained the local population, and they advocated their cultivation when they returned home.
One advantage of the potato during war time was that it remained hidden safely underground; even if an army camped on a field
of potatoes, the farmer could still harvest them afterward.
One man’s experience of potatoes during the Seven Years’ War inspired him to become the potato’s greatest champion. Antoine-Augustin
Parmentier, a French scientist, served as a pharmacist in the French army. After being captured by the Prussians he spent
three years in prison, and for much of that time he was given nothing more than potatoes to eat. He concluded that they were
a nourishing and healthy food, and when the war ended and he returned to France he became a vocal potato advocate. After yet
another poor harvest in 1770, when a prize was offered for the best essay on “foodstuffs capable of reducing the calamities
of famine,” Parmentier won with a eulogy to the potato. Even though potatoes were still widely believed to be poisonous and
to cause disease, he won backing for his views in 1771 from the medical faculty at the Sorbonne university in Paris, which
ruled that the potato was indeed fit for human consumption. Shortly afterward Parmentier published a detailed scientific analysis
of the merits of the potato. But support among the scientific community was one thing; after years of effort, Parmentier found
that convincing people to cultivate and eat potatoes was quite another.
So he organized a series of publicity stunts. In 1785, at a banquet to celebrate the birthday of Louis XVI, Parmentier presented
the king and queen with a bouquet of potato flowers, whereupon the king pinned one of the flowers to his lapel, and Marie-Antoinette
put a garland in her hair. When the guests sat down to eat, several of the dishes included potatoes. With the endorsement
of the king and queen, eating potatoes and wearing potato flowers soon became fashionable among the aristocracy. Parmentier
also hosted several dinners of his own, serving potatoes prepared in a variety of ways to emphasize their versatility. (The
American statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin was among the celebrities invited to these dinners.) But Parmentier’s greatest
trick was to post armed guards around the fields just outside Paris, given to him by the king, where he was growing potatoes.
This aroused the interest of the local people, who wondered what valuable crop could possibly require such security measures.
Once the crop was ready, Parmentier ordered the guards to withdraw, and the locals duly rushed in and stole the potatoes.
As hostility toward the potato finally crumbled, the king is said to have told Parmentier: “France will thank you some day
for having found bread for the poor.” But it was only some years later, after the French Revolution (during which Louis XVI
and Marie-Antoinette were guillotined), that the king’s prediction proved correct. In 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte instituted the
order of the Legion d’Honneur, and Parmentier was among its first recipients. His service to the potato is remembered today
in the form of several potato-based dishes that bear his name.
It was a similar if less poetic story elsewhere in Eu rope: The combination of famine, war, and government promotion meant
that by 1800, the potato had established itself as an important new foodstuff. Sir Frederick Eden, an English writer and social
researcher, wrote that in Lancashire “it is a constant standing dish, at every meal, breakfast excepted, at the tables of
the Rich, as well as the Poor . . . potatoes are perhaps as strong an instance of the extension of human enjoyment as can
be mentioned.” The potato was hailed as “the greatest blessing that the soil produces,” “the miracle of agriculture,” and
“that most valuable of roots.” After bad wheat harvests in 1793 and 1794, many people dropped their opposition to potatoes
in 1795. That year the
Times
of London even printed recipes for potato soup and for bread with maize and potatoes. One factor that counted in the potato’s
favor was the high status of white bread, made from wheat, compared with brown bread, made from rye, oats, and barley. English
workers who had become wealthy enough to switch from brown to white bread during the eighteenth century were very reluctant
to switch back again. When times were hard, they would sooner eat potatoes.
In his book
The Wealth of Nations
, published in 1776, the Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith observed that “the food produced by a field of potatoes
is not inferior in quantity to that produced by a field of rice, and much superior to what is produced by a field of wheat.”
Even allowing for the fact that potatoes contained a large amount of water, he noted, “an acre of potatoes will still produce
six thousand weight of solid nourishment, three times the quantity produced by the acre of wheat.” His praise of the potato
continued with words that now seem prophetic: “Should this root ever become in any part of Europe, like rice in some rice
countries, the common and favorite vegetable food of the people, so as to occupy the same proportion of the lands in tillage
which wheat and other sorts of grain for human food do at present, the same quantity of cultivated land would maintain a much
greater number of people, and . . . population would increase.”
FROM COLUNBUS TO MALTHUS
Three centuries after Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, the ensuing exchange of plants, diseases, and people had transformed
the world’s population and its distribution. Smallpox, chicken pox, influenza, typhus, measles, and other Old World diseases—many
of them consequences of human proximity to domesticated animals such as pigs, cows, and chickens that had been unknown in
the New World—had decimated the native peoples of the Americas, who lacked immunity to such diseases, paving the way for European
conquest. Estimates of the size of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas vary from 9 million to 112 million, but a
consensus figure of 50 million, which had been reduced by disease and warfare to some 8 million by 1650, gives an idea of
the scale of the destruction. Even as their invisible biological allies wiped out the indigenous peoples of the Americas,
Europeans began importing slaves from Africa on a vast scale to work on sugar plantations. The demographics of Africa and
the Americas were transformed. But the Columbian Exchange also helped to alter the demographics of Eurasia.
In China, the arrival of maize and sweet potatoes contributed to the increase in population from 140 million in 1650 to 400
million in 1850. Since maize could be grown in areas that were too dry for rice, and on hillsides that could not be irrigated,
it added to the food supply and allowed people to live in new places. The uplands of the Yangtze basin were deforested to
make way for the production of indigo and jute, for example, and the peasants who grew them lived on maize and sweet potatoes,
which grew well in the hills. Another practice that allowed food production to keep pace with a growing population was that
of multiple cropping. When rice is grown in paddies, it absorbs most of its nutrients from water rather than soil, so it can
be repeatedly cropped on the same land without the need to leave the land fallow to allow the soil to recover. Farmers in
southern China could sometimes produce two or even three crops a year from a single plot of land.
In Europe, meanwhile, the new crops played a part in enabling the population to grow from 103 million in 1650 to 274 million
in 1850. During the sixteenth century, Europe’s staple crops, wheat and rye, produced about half as much food per hectare
(measured by weight) as maize did in the Americas, and about a quarter as much as rice did in southern Asia. So the arrival
of maize and potatoes in Europe provided a way to produce much more food from the same amount of land. The most striking example
was that of Ireland, where the population increased from around 500,000 in 1660 to 9 million in 1840—something that would
not have been possible without the potato. Without it, the whole country could only have produced enough wheat to support
5 million people. Potatoes meant that there was enough food to support nearly twice this number, even as wheat continued to
be grown for export. Potatoes could be grown on European land that was unsuitable for wheat, and were far more reliable. Being
better fed made people healthier and more resistant to disease, causing the death rate to fall and the birth rate to rise.
And what potatoes did in the north of Europe, maize did in the south: the populations of Spain and Italy almost doubled during
the eighteenth century.
As well as adopting the new crops, European farmers increased production by bringing more land under cultivation and developing
new agricultural techniques. In particular, they introduced crop rotations involving clover and turnips (most famously, in
Britain, the “Norfolk four-course rotation” of turnips, barley, clover, and wheat). Turnips were grown on land that would
otherwise have been left fallow, and then fed to animals, whose manure enhanced the barley yields the following year. Feeding
animals with turnips also meant that land used for pasture could instead be used to grow crops for human consumption. Similarly,
growing clover helped to restore the fertility of the soil to ensure a good wheat harvest in the following year. Another innovation
was the adoption of the seed drill, a horse-drawn device which placed seeds into holes in the soil at a precise depth. Sowing
seeds in this way, rather than scattering them in the traditional manner, meant that crops were properly spaced in neat rows,
making weeding easier and ensuring that adjacent plants did not compete for nutrients. Again, this helped to increase the
yields of cereal crops.
By the end of the eighteenth century, however, there were signs that the European surge in agricultural productivity could
no longer keep up with population growth. The problem was most noticeable in En gland, which had been more successful than
other European countries in increasing its food production, and so had more difficulty maintaining the pace it had set itself
once the population expanded. During the first half of the century, England had exported grain to continental Europe; but
after 1750 the growing population, and a succession of bad harvests, led to shortages and higher prices. Agricultural output
was still growing (by around 0.5 percent a year), but only at about half the rate of population growth (around 1 percent a
year), so the amount of food per head was falling. The same thing was happening across Europe: anthropometric research shows
that European adults born between 1770 and 1820 were, on average, noticeably shorter than previous generations had been.
In China, rice production could be increased using more labor and more multiple cropping. But that was not an option for Europe-an
crops, so the obvious thing to do was to bring even more land under cultivation. The problem was that the supply of land was
finite, and it was needed for other things besides agriculture: to grow wood for construction and fuel, and to accommodate
Europe’s growing cities. Again, the problem was particularly acute in England, where urbanization had been most rapid. People
began to worry that the population would soon outstrip the food supply. The problem was elegantly summarized by the English
economist Thomas Malthus, who published
An Essay on the Principle of Population
in 1798. It was an extraordinarily influential work, and its main argument runs as follows:
The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when
unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with
numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second. By that law of our nature which makes food
necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly
operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily
be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.
Malthus thought that this predicament, which is now known as a “Malthusian trap,” was inescapable. Given the chance, the population
would double every twenty-five years or so, and then double again after the same interval, increasing in a geometric ratio;
and despite the rapid increase in agricultural productivity of the preceding decades it was difficult to see how food production
could possibly keep up. Even if food production could somehow be doubled from its level in the 1790s, that would only buy
another twenty-five years’ breathing space; it was hard to imagine how it could be doubled again. “During the next period
of doubling, where will the food be found to satisfy the importunate demands of the increasing numbers?” Malthus asked. “Where
is the fresh land to turn up?” Rapid population growth had, Malthus noted, been possible in the North American colonies, but
that was because the population was relatively small in relation to the abundant land available.