There’s an abundance of calories all around us and it feels easier to gain weight than not today. But unlike the long term slog of problems from living in times of abundance, few things will grind society to a halt much quicker than hunger.
Today’s Moment of Science… the Irish Potato Famine.
You would be easily forgiven for calling late blight a fungus. But Phytophthora infestans, roughly translating to ‘attack plant,’ is an oomycete hailing from the Chromista kingdom. Oomycota is a phylum of eukaryotic organisms that behave kinda like fungus with the spores and whatnot. However their cell walls are made of cellulose rather than chitin, the telltale stuff of fungus.
This highly annoying member of the circle of life reproduces both asexually and sexually via a system of spores and oospores. The spores are super persistent, traveling for long distances on the wind to infect the next tuber. Potatoes turn brown, mushy, slimy, and reportedly produce an odor that smells of decay. Some varieties of potato are better suited to resist it than others.
The Irish lumper potato was not.
But first, we gotta talk about Ireland in the 1800s. Because as fucking usual, shit was going down with the English.
After the Irish Rebellion of 1798 ultimately failed, the Acts of Union 1800 merged Ireland and Great Britain into one country, at least on paper. In reality, Britain governed Ireland as a colony to be plundered.
Britain had a history of Penal laws dating back to the late 1600s designed to make life miserable for the Catholics. Stopping just short of outlawing the faith, at various points it was illegal for Catholics to vote, hold public office, marry protestants, have a firearm, join the military, teach, become a lawyer, or adopt children. Catholics even had to pay tithes to the Church of England. Making people pay off your imaginary friend takes some fucking audacity.
With an Irish population that was about 80% Catholic at the time, I’m just saying this feels a smidge anti-Irish.
There was a complex system of landlords and middlemen that, by comparison, made renting in NYC today seem downright sane. English landlords wanted income from their property in Ireland without having to smell those filthy peasants, so tenants often dealt entirely with middlemen. As long as landlords got paid, they didn’t care what fuckery middlemen got up to. Described as “the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country,” a legion of Jared Kushners descended on the Irish housing market. They divided and subdivided properties so that tenant farms were often reduced to little more than subsistence.
Furthermore, there were upwards of three million poor Irish ‘cottiers.’ They’d have a work contract with a larger farm in exchange for use of a pitifully maintained cottage and an acre of land deemed unprofitable.
When you’re a dirt poor Irish Catholic peasant with limited time, you don’t have much land, and the land you do have is shit, what do you plant to fuel all that backbreaking farm labor?
The goddamn Irish lumper potato.
Potatoes and other tubers were easy to grow virtually anywhere and produced far more calories per acre than grains for your efforts. You got a patch of worthless dirt, there’s a variety of potato that’ll grow in it. The lumper grew well in utterly crap conditions, and it was the main spud grown on the island. In the early 1800s it became a staple food for impoverished Irish to the point where millions were dependent on this one crop.
Clearly shit was not all running smoothly when suddenly, whoopsiedaisy, bad year for potatoes. This volatile socioeconomic backdrop was ready to erupt when late blight came to Europe in 1845.
There’s debate about specifics, but there’s general agreement that this never had to be such a fucking nightmare. Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel sent food for relief but he didn’t want to send too much, lest he “stifle private enterprise” by giving food to hungry people. Then Lord John Russell became PM, and he was sure that the market would provide food. So when asked for aid he was like “pfft, go ask the market.”
When they realized the market had no cure for late blight, they tried governing. The Irish Poor Laws offered direct relief through workhouse programs and soup kitchens. In attempt to hold landlords responsible for their role in the nation’s financial woes, they were partially on the hook to fund this. To which many landlords responded, “so if my tenants conveniently disappear I don’t have to pay?” It’s estimated that 250,000-500,000 people were evicted during this time.
The first fatalities hit in autumn of 1846. The Irish population in 1841 was about 8.2 million. It was 6.6 million in 1851.
A million died from disease or starvation. Another 1-2 million fled the country. The population in Ireland has never bounced back to what it was before the famine.
It’s been suggested that the Irish Potato Famine was a result of the English deliberately trying to murder the Irish. I’m not saying that’s the case. Nope. Definitely not. Nuh-uh.
There are ways to manage and prevent late blight now, including fungicides and potatoes that have been genetically modified to resist the pathogen. But there’s no scientific defense against imperialism.
This has been your daily moment of Science curious why England is referred to as Old Blighty.
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