@trustmeimageographer reblogged your post and added:
Hi Iâm a fantasy writer and now I need to know what potatoes do to a society
They drastically increase peasant food security and social autonomy.
The main staple of medieval agriculture was grainâwheat, barley, oats, or rye. All that grain has to be harvested in a relatively short window, about a week or two. It has to be cut down (scythed), and stored in the field in a safe and effective way (stooked); then it has to be brought to a barn and vigorously beaten (threshed) to separate the grain from the stalks and the seed husks. It can be stored for a few weeks or months in this form before it spoils or loses nutritional value.Â
Then it has to be ground into flour. In the earlier middle ages, peasants could grind their own flour by hand using small querns, but landlords had realized that if they wanted to get more money out of their peasants, it was more effective for the entire village to have one large mill that everyone used. Peasants had to pay a fee to have their flour groundâand it might say something that there are practically no depictions of millers in medieval English literature in which the miller is not a corrupt thief.Â
Then the flour has to be processed to make most of its nutrients edible to humans, which ideally involves yeastâeither itâs made into bread which takes hours to make every time (and often involves paying to use the villageâs communal bread oven) and spoils within a few days, or itâs made into weak ale, which takes several weeks to make, but can keep for several months.Â
Potatoes, in comparisonâŚ
Potatoes have considerably more nutrients and calories than any similar crop available in medieval Europeâthey beat turnips, carrots, parsnips, beets, or anything else all to heck. I donât know if they beat wheat out for calories per acre, but practicallyâŚ
When you dig a potato out of the ground (which you can do at any time within a span of several months), you can bury it in the ashes of a fire for an hour, or you can boil it in water for 20 minutes.
Then you eat it. Boom. Done. (I mean, if youâre not fussy, you could even eat them raw.)
You store the ones you donât want right now in a root cellar and plant some of them in the spring to get between a fivefold and tenfold return on your crop.
Potatoes donât just feed youâthey free you. Grain-based agriculture relies on lots of people working together to get the work done in a very short length of time. It relies on common infrastructure that is outside the individual peasantâs control. The grain has to be brought to several different locations to be processed, and it can be seized or taxed at any of those points. Itâs very open to exploitation.
TW: Genocide The Irish Potato Famine happened because the English colonizers of Ireland demanded rents and taxes that were paid in grain, and it ended up that you didnât really get to keep much of the grain you grew. So the Irish farmed wheat in fields to pay the English, and then went home and ate potatoes from their gardens. And then, because they were eating only one specific breed of potatoes, a blight came through and wiped all their potatoes out, and then they starved. So English narratives about the potato famine tended to say âOh yes, potato blight, very tragic,â and ignore the whole âThe English were taking all the grainâ aspect, but the subtext here is: Potatoes are much harder to tax or steal than grain.
So⌠yeah. I realize itâs very counterproductive to explain to everybody why Iâm always like âOMG POTATO NOâ when I wish I could just chill out and not care about this. But the social implications of the humble potato are rather dramatic.
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