68. Antoine Parmentier & The History of the Potato

by Diana S. |

April showers bring May flowers – unless they bring floods, famine, and fear. This month, I’m looking at the moment in French history when farmers turned their nose up at the foods of the New World – until they realized what the potato had to offer. Antoine Parmentier, one of the great hype men of food history, features in this month’s episode all about the tastiest of tubers!

Episode 68: “Antoine Parmentier & The History of the Potato”

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Antoine Parmentier, “the apostle of the potato”

Portrait of Antoine Parmentier holding wheat and potato blossoms
Portrait of Antoine Parmentier holding wheat and potato blossoms

 

Illustration of Antoine Parmentier offering a potato blossom to King Louis XIV
that moment when u run into the king and it’s potato blossom season

Transcript

“Le légume de la cabane et du château.” – Le marquis de Cussy
 
Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and most of this script was written over the course of a gloomy, rainy weekend here in San Francisco. As always, the arrival of rain in the Bay Area has only one appropriate response: “Ah, but we need the rain” – and it’s true, California is always in a fluctuating state of drought, and this year is particularly bad. I say this to explain that I have climate shifts on the brain right now, and my recent reading all focuses on the relationships between humans, cities, and weather. This month, as we wait to see whether April showers really do turn into May flowers, I’d like to do a prequel episode, if you will. If you’ve been a listener from the start – or if you’ve taken a dig through the archives – you’ll remember that the debut episode of this podcast centers around the volcanic explosion which kicked off a series of bread riots in France, acting as kindling for the French Revolution. Today, let’s ask this question: why didn’t that volcano trigger riots in Britain, or other countries in Europe? Or to put it another way, we associate the French Revolution with an uprising of millions of French peasants. It was the 1780s, why on earth did France still have so many peasants? Today, we’re taking a closer look at a dreadful century when France was – horror of horrors – out of date, behind the times, and out of fashion. As the rest of the West underwent an agricultural revolution, the French kept her ancient farming practices – no matter what the cost. One of the greatest revolutions in French history didn’t take place in Paris, or even Versailles, but out in the sticks, where wheat – the so-called staff of life – gave way to new crops, and a whole new way of life. In this episode, let us appreciate one of the great changemakers of French history: the potato.
 

Subsistence farming/the old ways

“And six years thou shalt sow thy land, and shalt gather in the fruits thereof: but the seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie still; that the poor of thy people may eat: and what they leave the beasts of the field shall eat.” This passage from the book of Exodus perfectly captures the shmita, or the Sabbath year of the ancient world, in which farmers would spend an entire year letting their fields sit, fallow, as the soil rested and recovered. Though they wouldn’t have known why at the time, the chemistry checks out. Cereal grains, like wheat and rye, are “scavenger” plants – their roots dig down, down, down into the soil, gobbling up nutrients and incorporating them into the the stems and leaves, thus producing a nutritious crop with enough vitamins and minerals to sustain, oh, the human race. But scavenging the soil comes at a cost: planting cereal grains like wheat and barley in the same dirt year after year eventually leeches those nutrients, especially nitrogen, out of the soil. Things stop growing. Giving the farm a break – a sabbatical, if you will, eh eh – let those biblical farms recover and kept the soil from eroding. There was just one problem: what do you do during, you know, the year without a harvest? 
 
The impracticality of going a year without any harvest led to the development of the “two-field system” in which the farm was split in half – one field would be planted with crops while the other sat empty, and the next year they’d swap places. This system worked okay, which is why it persisted for thousands of years, but like a Gillette executive innovating razor blades, you’ve always got to ask yourself, what if we added another one? Around the year 800, French farmers gave it a shot – and it took feudal Europe by storm.
 
Under the new system, you needed – you guessed it – three fields. In the spring, you’d plant beans or oats in your first field. In the fall, you’d plant wheat in your second field. The third field would lay fallow, just chillin’ out. Beans are nitrogen-fixers, they speed up the process of introducing nutrients back into the soil, so the land doesn’t just recover, it’s positively bursting with fertility. Meanwhile, the third field sits around fallow, with cattle grazing on the weeds and contributing free manure into the process. The three-field system was a huge improvement: most obviously, you only had one third of your land sitting around doing nothing at a given moment instead of one half. You now had two harvests each year instead of one. Better yet, one of those harvests was a cash crop, which could help you buy food to live on during winter. Finally, the more successful farmers were able to raise livestock. It was definitely an improvement over the Sabbath year, but over the two thousand years that this system was in place, things started to get…complicated. The need for food often took second place after the need for power, and the three-field system in its most common form, the “open field system” was a byzantine arrangement which had less to do with keeping everyone fed than with keeping everyone compliant. The system was juuuust productive enough to keep Europeans from starving…until, of course, it wasn’t.
 
Feudalism is just a big daisy chain of power: at the top you’ve got God, and God bestows the crown on the king. The king bestows land onto his favorite lords. The lords then divided their vast tracts of land into tiny strips, which they rented out to local tenants. Here, this is your strip in the first field, this is your strip in the second field, this is your strip in the third field. It’s a bit like renting a parking space at your apartment building, and renting another parking space by your house – you probably won’t be using both of them at the same time, but you definitely want access to each of them when its turn comes up. Tenant farmers spent a loooot of time walking back and forth between their little strips. The tenants had the right to farm their little strips, and as long as they had rent money for the lord, the lord didn’t care about how you farmed it. The system prized stability over everything else: a lord couldn’t evict you or replace you, and you weren’t allowed to go somewhere else to work or try something besides farming. This was the system practiced by most of the European continent for centuries on end, from Charlemagne through the Renaissance. Whether you were farming in Normandy, East Anglia, or the banks of the Elbe, you were farming your little strips on somebody else’s land until you died. Unfortunately, that happened sooner rather than later for millions of Europeans.
 
Life in the three field system was, to put it simply, precarious. Crop yields weren’t very high, which meant you didn’t have much of a buffer. If you planted 10 wheat seeds, you’d get 40 wheat seeds at harvest, which was just enough for you to save half for next fall and eat the other half to stay alive through winter. If you had a bad wheat harvest, you could use the cash from your bean crop. But if you had a year of bad beans and bad wheat? God help you. No food for winter, and no cash to buy more – farmers frequently found themselves making an agonizing choice about whether to eat the wheat grains they were trying to save for next year’s crop. Yeah, you’d need those grains to plant – but what was the point of saving them if you weren’t going to be alive to plant them? Everybody lived on the subsistence line, and one run of bad luck was enough to doom entire villages. In 1315, everyone’s luck ran out. 
 
Seven weeks after Easter, the rains began. “It rained most marvellously and for so long,” one witness observed. But the shine wore off as the rains continued. Day after day, and then week after week, those precious spring cash crops drowned under the weight of all that water. Anxious, the tenant farmers of feudal Europe turned to their precious fall crops, which would have to be gangbusters if they were all going to make it through the year. But it was just more bad news: September 1315 was freezing cold and rainy, and that harvest got trampled into the mud like the one before. A whole year of farming wasted. Most people assumed they’d been cursed by God, and no wonder. Even the French king, Louis X, on the eve of battle outside Flanders, found himself turning around before all the horses got stuck in the mud. Usually, when a village suffered a bad harvest, well-connected families compensated by networking with friends and family in other villages. What happens when everyone’s harvests fail at the same time? Worse yet, what if it happens again the next year? 1316 was just as wet as the 1315, and two bad harvests in a row was enough to kill a continent. From Normandy to Norway, villages filled with starving peasants, who ate diseased cattle and died on the side of the road. Unable to find nutritious food, humans ate questionable substances and died of malnutrition and disease. As desperate workers migrated in search of food, entire villages sat abandoned. In 1316, the entire grape harvest of France failed, and wouldn’t recover for nearly a decade. Livestock, just as hungry as their humans, succumbed to pests and disease, taking with them the last source of nutrition. Across the nation, French churches led special services and parades praying for good weather and food, but to no avail. Europe’s bad weather continued for seven years, and even after the famine ended, those who were lucky enough to survive it were forever weakened by the experience. When a mysterious plague arrived from Asia a few decades later, it found a frail, malnourished population, especially susceptible to disease, and it wiped out nearly one third of Europe.
 

Life in France

While farmers in the Low Countries were innovating their way out of famine, the vast peasantry of France was too busy surviving crisis after crisis. After the great famine years of the 14th century, followed by the Black Death which wiped out as much as 42% of the French population, the 15th century proved to be another endless series of disasters. Between 1420 and 1450, peasants faced massive food shortages at least 7 times in Paris alone. Roughly every ten years, the crops failed, and bad winters and worse wars kept people hungry until the middle of the century, when the French population finally recovered enough to repopulate the villages devastated by the Black Plague a hundred years earlier. The good times lasted for a few decades, before the return of cold winters spurred panic across the country, reaching its climax in a series of witchcraft trials. For most of the 16th century, England and France both followed the same patterns of traditional farming, which left the peasants existing at subsistence level at best, constantly vulnerable to the luck of the weather. Then, in the 1600s, something changed in Britain. Within one hundred years, Britain would undergo the first of a series of agricultural revolutions, and a stubborn, starving France found itself stuck in the past.
 
Ironically, this thousand year cycle of feast, famine and fallow fields came to an end in France itself, though the rest of the country didn’t know it. In the same fields of Flanders where Louis X had to turn his horses around to escape the deadly rains of 1315, farmers were determined to figure out how to break the endless grind of subsistence farming. Long before the Enlightenment, Flemish farmers began conducting experiments to see which crops fared better in their local soil, and their discoveries changed the way humans farm for the first time in two thousand years. 
 
How to improve on a three-field system? That’s right. Give the Gillette executive another raise because that’s right, we’re going to add another field. Say hello to the four-field system. It changed what Europeans grew, and when they grew it. 
 
First, the people of Flanders ate their vegetables. Unlike the British and French, who stuck to a diet of beer and bread with perhaps the occasional onion for centuries after the discovery of the New World, Flemish farmers were open minded about new varieties of vegetables and crops making their way across the Atlantic. Not only could the Flemish eat these crops, so could their livestock – how handy! Different countries had their fodder crop of choice, but the Flemish particularly loved the humble turnip, whose leafy greens fed the cattle, and whose starchy bases fed the farmers. 
 
Second, Flemish farmers soon realized that certain kinds of grazing crops did just as good a job at restoring the soil as a season of doing nothing. Clover was particularly miraculous: cows loved it, but so did soil. Clover is very nitrogen rich, and a field of wheat or rye planted where clover used to be will be gangbusters.
 
By the 1600s, the Flemish had perfected their system: four fields, each staggered but following the same sequence – wheat, then animal fodder, then barley, then a grazing crop. No more fallow fields, no more wasted land, and enough year round crops to keep livestock happy and well-fed around the clock. For two thousand years, autumn meant it was time to slaughter most of your livestock, because you couldn’t afford to feed them your precious wheat during the winter. Every harvest festival, every Christmas feast, is a legacy of this ancient tradition. For the first time, farmers could sustain all of their livestock over the course of the winter, feeding them clover and hay during the warm months and turnips during the winter. Farmers had diversified their portfolio, so to speak, and were no longer doomed by a single bad harvest or a year of cheap wheat prices. As anyone who’s ever played Stardew Valley knows, keeping livestock unlocks the real moneymakers – leather, cheese, milk, and more. Suddenly, Flemish farmers were squeezing incredible amounts of nutrition out of their land. Suddenly, Flemish farmers were living longer, healthier lives, and making enough money to lift themselves out of subsistence. Suddenly, starvation was no longer waiting just outside the gates. It was a milestone in human agriculture. The landowners of Britain caught on relatively quickly. The landowners of France did not – and they’d come to regret it.
 

Change comes to Britain

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Londoners started seeing a new sight at the marketplace: vegetables. A wave of Dutch and Flemish immigrants brought with them the techniques – and the turnips – they’d perfected over the past century. As one witness recorded, they were the “first gardiners that came into these parts to plant cabbages and cauliflower and to sow Turnips, and Carrots, and Parsnips, to sow Raith, Pease, all of which at that time were great rarities, we having few or none in England but what came from Holland and Flanders…so ignorant were we of Gardening in those days.” Queen Elizabeth herself was a big fan of the newfangled treat called carrots. Nevertheless, it took many years for the farming techniques these newcomers used to get adopted by their neighbors.
 
Here’s the thing about British lords of the 18th century: they really, genuinely loved farming. Read through any literature of the era and the lords are always having long discussions in front of the fireplace about how to drain such and such marsh, and how to improve the harvest, and would you like to see the new chicken I’ve been breeding? British aristocrats loved stomping around on their lands finding improvements, and there was a booming trade in pamplets and treatises about how to produce a more profitable farm. One of the first gentlemen to take note? The diplomat Charles Townshend, a viscount who retired in 1730 to spend the rest of his life focused on his real pleasure: farming. He’d served as an ambassador to the Hague at various points in his career, where he’d come into contact with those savvy farmers and their innovative techniques. Back on his farm with too much time on his land, Townshend spent so much time promoting the new rotation strategy that the neighbors called him Turnip Townshend. After experimenting to see which of the Flemish crops would work best in British soil, he eventually settled on the perfect four-crop rotation for the area: wheat, barley, turnips, clover. He was eccentric, but he got results: Townshend’s farm had the output of lands far bigger than his. Slowly but surely, word spread, and between 1700 and 1900, as each enthusiastic landlord applied these techniques to his own property, the amount of good British farmland sitting around doing nothing went from 20% down to 4%. Turnips kept weeds at bay and the cows ate their leaves. Clover healed the soil and fed the animals. Together, turnips and clover kept animals alive over winter, and the resulting milk, cheese, meat, leather and manure meant British farmers were some of the most productive in the world.
 
But all this change came at a great cost. Transitioning from a three-field system to a four-field system was a big bet, an experiment, a risk. Individual tenant farmers struggling to survive on the margins couldn’t afford to take any risks. So the British landowners did the unthinkable: they broke the social contract of feudalism. Some landowners bought the rights to the tiny strips of land off of their tenant farmers. Others simply appropriated it from them and dared the tenants to do something about it. Slowly, and then all at once, the communal fields in which everyone farmed their strip of land or let their cattle graze were snatched back by the landowners and consolidated, a process called enclosure. I’m not going to get into it because I promise I have not spent as much time thinking about the process of enclosure as Karl Marx did, but I can’t just skip over it and focus on the carrots. Enclosure was incredibly controversial, and resulted in the creation of an enormous class of landless, rootless peasants completely unmoored from the social ties which had organized their lives. Millions of them went on to labor in – spoiler alert – the factories of the Industrial Revolution around the corner. Nevertheless, as destructive and disruptive as enclosure was, there’s no doubting the results: with the landowner able to coordinate the transition to a four-field system, British agriculture produced more food than ever before, and within a century or two, Britain’s food system was almost entirely self-sufficient and finally free of the endless cycle of subsistence farming.
 
Across the channel, however, it was a blast from the past. 
 
 
In 1857, Jean François Millet debuted a startling new painting entitled The Gleaners, depicting three peasant women bent over in a wheat field. Familiar to any Art History student and now on display at the Musée d’Orsay, the painting is most famous for its provocative ideas about class warfare and the rights of the poor. But take a moment and think about what this painting literally depicts. Gleaning is an ancient feudal custom, in which the poor have the right to cross onto a farmer’s harvested field and dig for leftover scraps and roots. It’s the ancient equivalent of dumpster diving. What on earth is it doing in a painting from 1857? This is not a historical painting, and none of the voluminous criticism The Gleaners received accused it of being an exaggeration. 40 years after the last great famine of England, the French peasantry still hovered on the brink of starvation, caught in the old cycle of subsistence farming. What happened? How did France fall so far behind?
 
While the landed gentry of the British countryside spent the 17th century gleefully planting turnips and breeding new types of chicken, French aristocrats were busy elbowing their way into the king’s favor at Versailles. Louis XIV kept the rich on their toes at all times, because aristocrats busy gossiping about one another, eating 20 course meals and shopping, shopping, shopping are too distracted to bother fomenting rebellion. The landowning classes in France spent more of their time away at court than they did back home, tending the crops. They didn’t care what you grew, or whether you grew anything at all, so long as you had the money for rent. Enclosure? Sounds like a lot of paperwork, and we have 57 social events and a trip to Chambord coming up.
 
With absentee landlords, unpredictable harvests and zero margins, French farmers had no money to invest in upgraded equipment. They continued to farm the exact same way their great-great-great-grandfathers did, and often using the exact same tools to do it. The scythes and handplows weren’t the only thing their ancestors would have recognized. Long after the Dutch introduced 50 shades of carrots and the British discovered the joys of mashed potatoes, the French continued to reject New World crops. Nobody wanted to grow them, and nobody wanted to eat them. Potatoes were the first food Europeans had ever encountered which grew from an ugly little tuber instead of seeds. Highly suspicious. In 1751, no less than Diderot himself proclaimed, “No matter how you prepare it, the potato root is tasteless and starchy.” He went on to declare, “It cannot be regarded as an enjoyable food, but it provides abundant, reasonably healthy food for men who want nothing by sustenance.” Even this was sort of a PR coup – the rest of the nation thought the potato caused leprosy.
 
But sustenance was exactly what the French nation desperately needed. Even as Britain, the Netherlands, and the rest of Western Europe adopted new practices which enabled them to diversify their farms, improve their yields, and broke the wheel of subsistence farming, France suffered from famine after famine. France suffered major famines in 1650, and then again in 1660. Instead of recognizing the nation’s urgent need for agricultural reform, Louis XIV got distracted by his favorite pastime: fighting with the neighbors. He spent thirty straight years at war, draining the country’s bank accounts and leaving the nation unable to buy reserves when crops failed. And did they ever fail. In 1693, a stormy summer withered crops on the vine. Ten years later, a freezing winter forced everyone to eat what little reserves they had for next year’s planting. In both cases, malnutrition left everyone but the aristocracy completely vulnerable to disease, and millions of French farmers and peasants died from typhoid and dysentery. The famine of 1693 alone may have killed more French citizens than World War One. While courtiers at Versailles dined for hours on end, one tenth of the nation perished. With their populations literally decimated by war and disease, French farming villages sat abandoned, fallow as far as the eye could see. 
 
A regime change wasn’t enough to fix the situation – the French nobility did not wake up the day after the Sun King’s funeral and begin caring about their tenant farmers and wheat yields. In the late 18th century, Arthur Young, a British agriculturist, toured the French countryside and couldn’t believe what he found. “Go to the districts where the properties are minutely divided, and you will see great distress, even misery, and probably very bad agriculture.” Surrounded by peasants so poor they went without shoes, he wrote, “This is a poverty that strikes at the root of national prosperity.” As long as the rent came in, the nobility didn’t care what happened, and as luck would have it, for a while the rent did indeed come in. Under Louis XV, the weather was nice and everything was great until suddenly it wasn’t, and everything was horrible. In 1740, Paris had seventy five straight days of frost. Everyone was sick, miserable, or frozen to death in their own homes. As melting frost flooded the fields, harvest dates got pushed back further and further. Famines were turning into a once-in-a-decade affair in France at the exact moment the rest of Europe was leaving them behind. France needed a wake-up call, and that call would come from an unknown pharmacist named Antoine-Augustin Parmentier.
 
At the moment Diderot published his observation that potatoes were only fit for men who were desperate for sustenance, Parmentier was that man. A prisonder of the Seven Years War, locked up five times by the Prussian army, he spent most of the 1750s eating nothing but potatoes. Instead of finding himself riddled with leprosy, Parmentier was a picture of health. The humble, nutritious potato left him better nourished than most French people of the era, and he devoted the rest of his life to spreading the good news. As a sort of French Johnny Potatoseed, Parmentier toured the country, urging French people to give taters a try. As luck would have it, his services were needed by one man in particular: the hopeless, hapless King of France, Louis XIV. 
 
Guess who’s baaaaack? That’s right, it’s your old friend, Crop Failure. Just like clockwork, bad harvests led to wheat shortages in 1773. Grain merchants began hoarding wheat, prices skyrocketed, and the new king adopted a laissez-faire approach. This time, however, the French people weren’t accepting hunger as an act of God. Hundreds of riots broke out in 80 towns across the nation, and the so-called Flour War spurred conspiracy theories that the king was starving the people. 
 
Here came Parmentier. A few years earlier, he’d had a major breakthrough: thanks to his hard work, the Paris Faculty of Medicine made it official: Potatoes were edible. It was a start! Parmentier published books and pamphlets pleading with the French to give taters a try: “The vegetable kingdom affords no food more wholesome, more easily procured, or less expensive, than the potato.”Parmentier launched a series of PR stunts to rescue the good name of potatoes everywhere. He fed French nobility an all-potato dinner. He adorned the royals with delicate potato blossoms, tucked into Marie Antoinette’s hair and threaded through the king’s lapel. According to one legend, Parmentier planted 40 acres of potatoes and surrounded the plot with armed guards, to convince French society of their value. At one point, Parmentier served the American ambassador a meal so delightful, the ambassador saved the recipe and brought it back home. In 1802, Thomas Jefferson introduced Americans to their new best friend: the french fry.
 
Unfortunately for King Louis, Parmentier was a man ahead of his time. Despite their best efforts, French society took another twenty years to fully embrace the potato. In the meantime, as I covered in this show’s first episode, a volcanic explosion triggered yet another failed harvest. “The general temper of the population is so highly charged,” wrote one observer, “it may well feel itself authorized to ease its poverty as soon as the harvest starts.” By the 1780s, the flour supply wasn’t the only thing in France that got cut off.
 
Sure, the French revolution toppled God and King, but that didn’t mean it was enough to topple the most enduring institution of France: the three-field system. In one of its final acts, the National Assembly issued a ruling on the traditional three-field farms of France: essentially, “do whatever you want”. The creation of new common pastures was abolished, and landowners now had the right to enclose their lands like the British aristocracy, but communities who practiced traditional farming were free to continue their ancient practices and boy, did they. Ten years after the Revolution, the threat of famine was still so strong in the French imagination that French villages could force all able-bodied residents to drop what they were doing and collectively bring in the harvest.
 
The reign of Napoleon overlaps almost perfectly with the coldest cold spell modern Europe ever did see. Each year was colder than the last, leading up to April 11, 1815 when – you guessed it – another massive volcanic eruption wreaked havoc around the world. The ash and smoke which filled the Earth’s atmosphere was so thick that 1816 is still known to this day as “The Year Without A Summer.” Half of the French wheat crop died, and all of the wine grapes were lost. By the summer, the French began rioting. Police escorts guarded wagons of grain from hungry villagers. While Napoleon shivered in his prison cell, rumors flew around the nation that he was staging a comeback, triggering more and more violence. Unlike previous crop failures, the French government couldn’t even turn to other countries for help: everyone was suffering the same fate at the same time. For one summer, the European continent found itself hurled back to into the Middle Ages, facing down the same threat as their ancestors had exactly 300 years earlier. As the historian John D. Post wrote in 1977, 1816 was “The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World”. 
 
Slowly, very slowly, French farms began to change. Instead of the laissez faire approach which left farmers vulnerable and villagers hungry during the late eighteenth century, French policies actively incentivized smarter, more productive farming. Unlike the British, French governments didn’t kick everyone off the land and force them to change their ways – but they made it easier for farmers to justify taking risks. Common pastures and fallow fields continued all the way into the twentieth centuries. But new policies encouraged the farmers to begin coordinating and synchronizing their little strips of land, devoting large territories of a field to one crop, even if that field belonged to twenty different farmers. Nobody would force you to plant the same thing as your neighbors in a big synchronized rotation – but the neighbors would make it a lot harder for you if you didn’t. If you planted your strips of land using the same rotation as your neighbors, you were allowed to walk around wherever you liked, and step on your neighbors’ strips of land to get to yours. If you went rogue and planted whatever you wanted, you had to go the long way to reach your different strips of land, as though your neighbor’s tiny strips were made of hot lava. Plus, it was a hell of a lot easier to turn a plow around if you didn’t have to keep it inside an itty bitty plot of land. Over time, the combination of this social incentive and this natural incentive resulted in more and more common fields transitioning to a modern crop rotation. Central to that rotation? The humble potato. In 1825, the celebrated food critic, Brillat Savarin, published The Physiology of Taste, in which he declared, “I appreciate the potato only as a protection against famine, except for that, I know of nothing more eminently tasteless.” Ouch. Luckily for the spud, the rest of the French nation was coming around. 
 
In the 25 years following the Year Without A Summer, the French national potato crop quintupled in size. By 1850, the French were growing 10 million tons of potatoes on their tiny little strips. France now grew more potatoes than any other nation in continental Europe. And those potato fields fueled a population boom: an acre of potatoes yields nearly four times the calories as a field of wheat, with more vitamins and minerals to boot. Childhood mortality plummeted, birth rates went up, life expectancy increased. Nobody got scurvy anymore. A diet of milk and potatoes provided every single vitamin essential to the human diet. Introducing potatoes raised the average height of an adult French villager by half an inch. Plus, while France suffered invasion, siege, and social unrest in the late 19th century, the potato’s underground harvest offered a huge advantage: soldiers, thieves, and tax collectors couldn’t see them growing. Whether it was a group of Prussians, Communards, or Germans sweeping through your village, they might make off with your wheat crops, but nobody was going to take the time to dig up your potato fields. When potato blight arrived, the French nation suffered tremendously, but they had it a lot easier than Ireland, in part because the four field rotation ensured a diverse series of backup crops. After the potato crops recovered, the French never suffered a full-scale famine again.
 
By 1920, French agriculture modernized at last. It took nothing less than a world war to do it. Gone were the open fields, the tiny strips of land, and the threat of hunger. In its place were productive, stable fields, healthy livestock, and lots and lots of potatoes. Exactly 100 years after the year without a summer, in 1916, potatoes gave France a strategic wartime advantage. In Germany, then the largest potato grower in the world, potato crops were hit by blight, and the copper which would normally save the nation’s harvest had all been confiscated for the war effort. That year, hundreds of thousands of Germans starved and turned to another innovative root vegetable for survival – today, Germans still refer to 1916 as the Turnip Winter. Meanwhile, French rations mostly consisted of macaroni, rice, and yes, you guessed it, potatoes. By the end of World War One, France produced 500 million bushels of potatoes each year. At some point during that war, American soldiers stationed in Francophone Belgium ate some potatoes fried in oil, and in a blunder which refuses to die, named the treat “French fries”. The French fry may not be French at all, but a deep affection for potatoes sure is.
 
As the French finally came around on the potato, Antoine Parmentier’s efforts did not go unnoticed. The French love their culinary heroes. Commuters taking Line 3 of the Paris Metro can wait for their train at the Parmentier station, and pass the time reading extensive murals about the history of the potato. And finally, as anyone who has ever dined in a French bistro knows well, Parmentier’s name is now a byword of its own. Potage parmentier, salade Parmentier – if you see Parmentier on a menu, you know it’s coming with spuds. Most famously, French shepherd’s pie is known as hachis parmentier. What better honor could a nation bestow than naming one of its greatest comfort foods after you? You can even eat your potatoes on Parmentier avenue. And boy do they ever: the average French adult eats 110 pounds of potatoes each year. Three hundred years ago, Antoine Parmentier shook his head at the injustice done to his favorite root: “They have not escaped the shafts of calumny. How many imaginary evils have been imputed to them!” Today, he rests in Pere Lachaise cemetery, and the French pay tribute by covering his grave with potatoes. 
 
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire! If you’re thinking one French history podcast isn’t enough, may I recommend The Siécle? That show has a particularly great episode about The Year Without A Summer, it’s definitely worth a listen. Say hello on Instagram or Twitter, and if you’d like to sign up for my monthly newsletter, you can do so at thelandofdesire dot substack dot com. Until next time, au revoir!

Sources:

  • The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 – Brian Fagan
  • De Moor, T. (2015). The Dilemma of the Commoners: Understanding the Use of Common-Pool Resources in Long-Term Perspective (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139135450
  • JONES, P.M. “Arthur Young (1741—1820): For and Against.” The English Historical Review, vol. 127, no. 528, 2012, pp. 1100–1120., www.jstor.org/stable/23272740. Accessed 29 Apr. 2021.
  • Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. I: The Structure of Everyday Life – Fernand Braudel
  • “How the Potato Changed The World” Charles C. Mann, Smithsonian Magazine, November 2011.
  • Nunn, Nathan, and Nancy Qian. “THE POTATO’S CONTRIBUTION TO POPULATION AND URBANIZATION: EVIDENCE FROM A HISTORICAL EXPERIMENT.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 126, no. 2, 2011, pp. 593–650. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23015685. Accessed 29 Apr. 2021.
  • A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment – Stephane Hénaut & Jeni Mitchell
  • Earle, Rebecca. “Promoting Potatoes in Eighteenth-Century Europe.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 51 no. 2, 2017, p. 147-162. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ecs.2017.0057.
  • Observations on such nutritive vegetables as may be substituted in the place of ordinary food, in times of scarcity – YA BOY, Antoine Parmentier
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  • The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World – Larry Zuckerman
  • The History and Social Influence of the Potato – Redcliffe N. Salaman
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  • Meuvret, Jean. “SUBSISTENCE CRISES AND THE DEMOGRAPHY OF FRANCE UNDER THE ANCIEN RÉGIME.” Population (English Edition, 2002-), vol. 71, no. 3, 2016, pp. 547–554., www.jstor.org/stable/44135484. Accessed 29 Apr. 2021.
  • Nunn, Nathan, and Nancy Qian. “THE POTATO’S CONTRIBUTION TO POPULATION AND URBANIZATION: EVIDENCE FROM A HISTORICAL EXPERIMENT.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 126, no. 2, 2011, pp. 593–650. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23015685. Accessed 29 Apr. 2021.
  • MCNEILL, WILLIAM H. “How the Potato Changed the World’s History.” Social Research, vol. 66, no. 1, 1999, pp. 67–83. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40971302. Accessed 29 Apr. 2021.
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  • Exceptionalism and Industrialisation: Britain and its European Rivals, 1688–1815 – Leandro Prados de la Escosura

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