The Great Hunger, as it's referred to in Irish-American culture, was a famine brought on by the potato blight in several subsequent years in the mid-19th century. There was nothing uniquely Irish about the potato blight itself; the fungus spread worldwide in a most egalitarian manner, without concern for national boundaries or the race, religion or politics of the people whose hands tended the potato plants. The reason that the event is usually thought of as the Irish potato famine is that unlike most of the rest of the world, the people of Ireland had nothing else to eat.
(My band O'hAnleigh, with Patrick and DonnCherie McKenzie, performing An Gorta Mor, a song I wrote to honor the Irish famine dead, at the Town Hall Theater in Middlebury. See all our performance videos at www.youtube.com/ohanleigh1)
Potatoes had been introduced to Ireland and the rest of Europe by Sir Walter Raleigh, the Englishman of Virginia exploration and tobacco fame. As the native Irish population was increasingly disenfranchised by a series of laws declaring that Catholics could not own land or engage in a variety of trades (or speak their native language, or wear their native clothes and hairstyles), they moved onto every smaller tenant farms. The land enclosures as the British increased their dairy and beef herds drove the tenant farmers onto smaller plots, on rockier soil at higher elevations. Potatoes remained the only crop that could produce enough bulk and calories to keep a peasant laborer alive and also be grown on top of rocky soil by the straw or mound method. Families fortunate enough to score a piglet to raise in the house also fed it potatoes.
When the potatoes failed, millions wandered the roads of Ireland slowly starving to death, while others begged borrowed or stole the money for passage to Canada, the US and elsewhere--or were stuffed onto coffin ships by landlords anxious to clear their lands of the Irish problem. Meanwhile, the English landlords who had been awarded Irish land shipped millions of pounds of beef, butter and cheese back to England from the very lands the Irish had been evicted from.
The potato blight has been in the news again the last few years, as the same fungus has been doing economic harm to market and commercial tomato and potato farmers in the Eastern United States the last few summers. Yet bad as the impact has been on some of our Vermont market farmer friends, no one is starving or emigrating--we all have plenty else to eat, and our neighboring market farmers own their own land and houses and plows and pickup trucks, so they have the resources to be flexible and plant other crops--or sell their land for other purposes--as soon as the potato blight appears.
Lesson learned: Owning the means of food production--and making sure that the ownership remains in the hands of people with substantial involvement with and dedication to the local community--is critical to food security. It's unlikely we'll starve, but if wheat or corn fails one year due to disease, weather, or some political snafu, our food prices will skyrocket and a lot of us will be in a world of hurt. As petroleum prices rise, the cost of food from commercial farms concentrated in California and Florida--and even China, where a significant portion of America's garlic now comes from--will go up exponentially.
Planting even a small portion of your own food helps to distribute that means of food production, which means a stronger web of food security for all of us--not to mention healthy, tasty, nutritious and inexpensive food for you no matter what happens to supermarket prices.
Plant, because you can.
(My band O'hAnleigh, with Patrick and DonnCherie McKenzie, performing An Gorta Mor, a song I wrote to honor the Irish famine dead, at the Town Hall Theater in Middlebury. See all our performance videos at www.youtube.com/ohanleigh1)
Potatoes had been introduced to Ireland and the rest of Europe by Sir Walter Raleigh, the Englishman of Virginia exploration and tobacco fame. As the native Irish population was increasingly disenfranchised by a series of laws declaring that Catholics could not own land or engage in a variety of trades (or speak their native language, or wear their native clothes and hairstyles), they moved onto every smaller tenant farms. The land enclosures as the British increased their dairy and beef herds drove the tenant farmers onto smaller plots, on rockier soil at higher elevations. Potatoes remained the only crop that could produce enough bulk and calories to keep a peasant laborer alive and also be grown on top of rocky soil by the straw or mound method. Families fortunate enough to score a piglet to raise in the house also fed it potatoes.
When the potatoes failed, millions wandered the roads of Ireland slowly starving to death, while others begged borrowed or stole the money for passage to Canada, the US and elsewhere--or were stuffed onto coffin ships by landlords anxious to clear their lands of the Irish problem. Meanwhile, the English landlords who had been awarded Irish land shipped millions of pounds of beef, butter and cheese back to England from the very lands the Irish had been evicted from.
The potato blight has been in the news again the last few years, as the same fungus has been doing economic harm to market and commercial tomato and potato farmers in the Eastern United States the last few summers. Yet bad as the impact has been on some of our Vermont market farmer friends, no one is starving or emigrating--we all have plenty else to eat, and our neighboring market farmers own their own land and houses and plows and pickup trucks, so they have the resources to be flexible and plant other crops--or sell their land for other purposes--as soon as the potato blight appears.
Lesson learned: Owning the means of food production--and making sure that the ownership remains in the hands of people with substantial involvement with and dedication to the local community--is critical to food security. It's unlikely we'll starve, but if wheat or corn fails one year due to disease, weather, or some political snafu, our food prices will skyrocket and a lot of us will be in a world of hurt. As petroleum prices rise, the cost of food from commercial farms concentrated in California and Florida--and even China, where a significant portion of America's garlic now comes from--will go up exponentially.
Planting even a small portion of your own food helps to distribute that means of food production, which means a stronger web of food security for all of us--not to mention healthy, tasty, nutritious and inexpensive food for you no matter what happens to supermarket prices.
Plant, because you can.
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