QUARANTINE BLOG # 313

February 6, 2021

Return with me now to those thrilling days of yester year, the Lone Potato rides again.  Or something like that.

European Potato Famine

In the summer of 1842 farmers around Philadelphia noticed something the leaves their potato plants were curling, then the body of the plant wilted. The tubers turned into a slimy, blackened mass. The disease could wipe out a farmer’s potato crop in a matter of days, and the blight rapidly spread west throughout Pennsylvania and north to New York and Massachusetts.

In June 1844 the potato blight appeared in Belgium. The following month, it was discovered in the Netherlands, and then it spread to Scandinavian countries, France,  Germany, Prussia and Russia. Dutch and Belgian potato were devastated.

On August 1, 1845 the potato blight was recorded in the Channel Islands. Ten days later it was discovered in England, then Scotland and finally Ireland. In Ireland, the blight caused a massive human tragedy.

When continental European farmers first suffered from the potato blight, Ireland remained largely untouched. Tons of Irish potatoes were exported during the summer of 1845 to help avert famine in Europe. Not until the end of August 1845 was the blight discovered in Ireland, and it spread quickly. 

The blight reduced the Irish potato harvest by about 30% in 1845. Only about 80% of the former potato crop was planted the next year. Early signs indicated that the potato crop was not infected by the blight, but the growers had planted their potatoes in infected ground. The blight spread at an estimated speed of 50 miles per week. 

By July of 1846 the blight was virtually everywhere. 90% of the Irish potato crop failed.

In January 1847, soup kitchens were set up to feed the poor and destitute. French-born Chef Alexis Soyer opened a facility in Dublin in a temporary shelter. At serving time, a bell was rung, and the first 100 people were ushered in. Soup bowls were distributed and filled. As soon as everyone was seated, grace was said, and soup consumption commenced. Precisely six minutes later the bell rang again, and the first group filed out of the back door as another shift came in the front. Other soup kitchens opened, and by May of 1847 800,000 people were being fed in these facilities. Three months later, the total hit three million.

The 1847 harvest was better, but it didn’t provide enough food to sustain the Irish through the winter. The summer of 1848 was unseasonably cold, and once again the potato crop failed completely; hundreds of thousands of Irish perished, while those who could emigrated elsewhere.

By 1851 more than a million Irish had died due to hunger or disease. One million immigrants fled Ireland for North America. During the next 50 years another four million Irish left the country. By 1900 the population of Ireland was just four million, half the number that had lived there in 1841. 

The cause of the blight was little understood. Some thought it was the unusually wet weather; others blamed bad soil. Still others, particularly Protestants, proclaimed that God was punishing Catholics in Ireland. 

One English farmer, Rev. M. J. Berkeley, concluded that the blight was caused by a fungus, which was visible on the leaves of infected plants. The organism had been  transported on air currents from Mexico to the United States to Belgium and the other infected areas.

Potatoes Live Long and Prosper

As the potato crops recovered, it became less of a matter between bare sufficiency and starvation, and more a food that was eaten because it was liked, rather than because it was the only option.

Enter London’s Baked Potato Man, and his cry: “Baked Taturs! Baked Taturs! All ot, all ot!”

300 vendors of hot baked potatoes were plying their trade on the streets of London in 1851, jostling for space and customers with equally numerous bands of fruit and vegetable sellers, fish sellers, game, poultry and dairy produce sellers, match girls, flower girls, pie-men, coffee and cocoa stalls, oyster-men.

Potatoes were baked in the ovens of an amenable baker – for a charge – then sold from the potato can – essentially a large tin box on four legs, with a fire heating a water jacket that kept the potatoes hot and compartments for salt and butter at one end and charcoal at the other. 

Women bought the greatest number, sometimes to eat in the street, but more often to take home. The total sales of London’s baked potato vendors added up to about 10 tons per day; with vendor’s averaging 200 potatoes and making an average profit of around 30 shillings per week.

In terms of average earnings, 30 shillings in 1851 is equivalent to a weekly income of  £ 1,000 today – $1,400 – an indication of how the potato had moved on from the cooking pots of the poor to become a universal commodity. 

The Success of a Soviet Botanist

In the 20th century, a famine of proportions that surpassed even the tragedy of Ireland struck the Soviet Union. But it was not the failure of a potato crop that was responsible. It was a sequence of events – the First World War, the turmoil of the 1918 revolution and its ensuing civil war – compounded by drought and the wilful determination of the Soviet leadership to put the survival of their new political order before that of the people.

Transport networks broke down and the government ordered that all available food supplies be sent to the cities, leaving rural communities with little or nothing. At least 5 million people died of starvation as a result, many of whom would have survived if the Soviet leadership had been willing to accept foreign aid.

The Soviet elite were forced to admit that their state could not survive on ideology alone. The economy was ruined and its reconstruction required the expertise and knowledge of experienced engineers, scientists, industrialists and managers. But most of the country’s specialists had either emigrated or perished in the aftermath of the revolution. One of the few who survived was an agricultural botanist, Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov.

Before the First World War, Vavilov had worked on disease resistance in plants. New avenues of investigation led to valuable advances in the field of plant breeding – especially in respect of the potato.

Vavilov called for a living collection of the world’s cultivated plants and their wild relatives to be assembled at specially prepared gardens in Moscow. When asked by a British scientist  how he managed to secure the funds from the hard-pressed Soviet treasury, Vavilov replied, “Guile.” He had seen Leon Trotsky standing in a breadline during a food shortage. The Party elite often queued for bread in order to show solidarity with the proletariat. 

Vavilov moved into the queue at Trotsky’s shoulder, struck up a conversation and explained how his program of plant breeding could eliminate food shortages and bread queues for ever. Trotsky was impressed enough to tell Lenin. Lenin was similarly impressed. Vavilov got his funding.

Expeditions gathered more than 300,000 specimens – including some previously unknown species of potato. No one ever had such a mass of material and data on cultivated plants at their disposal. Applying it to the challenge of increasing the productivity of Russia’s food crops was a relatively simple matter. Satisfying the demands of his political masters was far more difficult.

As the country’s food production plummeted with the collectivization of agriculture, Vavilov was instructed to reduce the time needed to develop higher yielding varieties from 12 to 5 years. A rival, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, said he could do it in 3 years.

With the support of Joseph Stalin, Lysenko appropriated all that Vavilov had achieved. Nikolai Vavilov was arrested in August 1940 and found guilty of sabotaging Soviet agriculture and of spying for England. After a few minutes deliberation the court sentenced him to death. The sentence was later commuted to ten years imprisonment, but Vavilov served little more than a year before dying in January 1943 at the age of 65 – slandered, disgraced, tortured and starved in prison.

An article in The Atlantic, December 2017, suggests that Lysenko played active role in the famines that killed millions of Soviet people, and that Lysenko’s practices prolonged and exacerbated the food shortages. 

Lysenko promoted the Marxist idea that the environment alone shapes plants and animals. Put them in the proper setting and expose them to the right stimuli, he declared, and you can remake them to an almost infinite degree.

But because Lysenko concentrated his attention on cereal crops, the work that Vavilov had initiated on potatoes went on unabated. This work laid the foundations for all future work on the potato.

Next week: French fries and potato chips, the potato becomes cultured, and potatoes in space.

👉  Today’s close is from Praying with the Psalms by Eugene H. Peterson.

“My soul makes its boast in the Lord; let the humble hear and be glad” (Psalm 34:2).

All the great words of praise come, not from those who have never known suffering, but from those who have known God’s help in it.  Praising God is not the naive optimism of the sheltered, but the hearty realism of the delivered.

Prayer: “The Lord I will at all times bless, my mouth His praises shall express; in Him shall my boasting be, while all the meek rejoice with me.  O magnify the Lord with me, let us to praise His name agree; I sought the Lord, He answered me, and from my fears He set me free” (“The Lord I Will at All Times Bless,” The Psalter, 1912). Amen.

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