Eating up Exploitatives

In “Ireland and the Potato,” K.H. Connell affirms that staple diet is driven by population fluxes, the economy and land condition in which it is grown. He takes the reader step by step thoroughly retelling Ireland’s past leading up to the famines and extending beyond to the lasting effects and relationship the Irish have with the potato crop. However, the potato is remains an Irish staple today even though seemingly illogical in terms of these three driving factors. Connell raises this issue conundrum as a question, but I would like to affirm that the potato has persisted as a staple in Ireland for habitual constraints rather than need and that the Irish don’t stand alone in our exploitative global system.

The end of the 16^th century brought on industrial and technological change. He points out specific benefits of the potato to the reader to understand what blessing the crop was to Irish people in availability. He gives background to Ireland’s poor farmer’s desperate situation as result of exploitative English rule. Connell backs the claim clearly arguing the English System in the 18th and 19th century “geared the Irish economy to the elastic rent which ensured the diffusion of the potato (66)” This mechanism involving, taxation, English landlords and export quotas determined by the English were so abrasive, that the Irish peasants were seen as an English resource for food not as a nation of families struggling to survive. Thus, the potato quickly replaced the 16^th century traditional food staples due to its ability to be harvested, processed and cooked easily without having to purchase complex machinery (58). Also, these specific conditions gave poor farmers luxury, because they were now able to grow enough so that they too could be fed. The Irish loved their potatoes “for all their wretchedness, they were admirably nourished - better, maybe, than the mass of the people of any other country during any recent century (60).” Their calorie intake averaged 4,000 a day, eating potatoes at every meal, and breeding strong and healthy Irishmen (60). It is no wonder the potato was seen as some type of miracle crop sent from God to save the Irish race; at least for a little while.

These positive implications were too much of a good thing for the Irish population. As Connell describes, potatoes are “a capricious staple, liable to fail and hard to replace.” A little frost could wipe out a whole yield but the gravity of reliance magnitude was not realized until the Famines of 1820’s and 30’s (63). The Irish faced an extreme case of the resource curse, sometimes referred to as ‘dutch disease”; an unfortunate commonality of many developing countries. We can look at a number of cases such Columbia’s dive in banana reliance or Haiti’s timber industry deforestation. All remain helpless in the face of the crisis or threat to resource. Man can only grow on what land can provide. It is common sense to have a backup plan or to create variation for on term benefit. However, all cases persisted in reliance without any apparent logical reason. Connell simply justifies potato dependency after the famines claiming, “it is eaten because it is liked, not because it is necessary (68)." However, I am not so convinced the Irish particularly “liked” eating potatoes. Especially after having seen the detrimental effects of single reliance and for years having consumed potatoes morning, noon, and night, washed down with sour milk. Really, the Irish had no power to change anything in their country because they were a poor and had to do as instructed by England. The only safeguard to extinction available was biological regulation through emigration and death of population. Indeed this is precisely what occurred to total over a million who fled and half of that who died (64). It is such a bleak outcome in contrast to the supposed benefit of variation. Even though the solution to Dutch disease may look simple to solve in these isolated areas, the fact of the matter is that humankind is under the very same curse.

What!?

Exactly, you didn’t see that coming because we live in routine of our lives consuming and relying upon the same resources equally as blindly as these developing nations. Since the age of modernization we have been better able to survive and benefit. However, it is clearly becoming too much of a good thing. We consume simply because we “like” to. The only reason we have not taken a significant dive thus far is that we have extended our regulation time by manipulating circumstance with technology. We live on a finite earth that cannot sustain an increasing population indefinitely.

Works Cited

Connell, K. H. "Ireland and the Potato." Oxford University Press. 1962.