#930 Rebecca Earle: The History and Politics of the Potato

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Decent. I'm your host, Ricardo Lobs. And today I'm joined by Doctor Rebecca Earl. She's a professor in the Department of History at the University of Warwick. She is a historian specializing in the history of food and colonial and 19th century Spanish America. And she's the author of books like Potato and Feeding The People, the Politics of the potato. And of course, today we're talking about the history and politics of the potato. So Doctor Earl, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to everyone.

00:34 Rebecca Earle: Thank you so much for inviting me.

00:37 Ricardo Lopes: So to introduce the topic. Tell us first a little bit about the, let's say the origins of the potato. So where does it come from and when and where exactly these people start farming

00:50 Rebecca Earle: it? Well, potatoes originate in the Andes in South America and they the precise point of origin where the very first potatoes were domesticated or cultivated or eaten as a topic of some dispute between ethno botanists and historical archaeologists. But for many, many thousands of years, people all along the slopes of the Andes have been subsisting off potatoes and actually the, there's evidence that has been found relatively recently for the consumption of wild potatoes as far north as the United States, which um are on the same long mountain chain as the Andes. So the Andes that run all the way up from the south of Chile through Peru through Colombia, continuing away up into the Rockies. And so there's evidence even in the rocky mountains that a type of wild potato was being eaten long before um writing began to keep track of these things. So they were very, very ancient food stuff for people in those parts of the world. But people outside those parts of the world, they were totally unknown and nobody else had ever encountered a potato.

02:01 Ricardo Lopes: So I would like to understand a little bit better here. What are some of the biggest advantages and disadvantages of potatoes as a crop? So, I mean, how they compare, for example to other major crops in terms of, for example, yields and providing people with nutrients and calories.

02:23 Rebecca Earle: There are superfood stuff. They are really excellent. If what you want to do is be get is get the most nutrients out of a set amount of land. You'd be hard pushed to find something better than a potato to cultivate. They're a really great way of converting sunlight and soil into nourishment for people. So they're a good, it's not, the potatoes are particularly high calorie, but they're high calorific yield that out. A small plot of ground. You can get many more calories than if you were growing wheat or rice or something like that. So they're a really efficient way of cultivating a smallish amount of ground. They're quite miserly in their use of water compared to lots of other crops. So you don't need to inundate them with as much water. They contain a large number of other nutrients which again, they produce quite densely. So they're in material, you know, from a material perspective, there are really, really excellent food stuff. So they have lots going for them from that point of view. And they're, they're quite nutritious, particularly if you can combine them with a bit of dairy, like a bit of yogurt or a bit of milk or buttermilk, they make if not, maybe a complete meal, but a really pretty well rounded nourishment

03:36 Ricardo Lopes: and how adaptable are potatoes to different kinds of environments. Because of course, people started farming them in South America. But then, and we're going to get a little bit more into that. They spread across Europe and other parts of the globe. But uh and I would imagine here, of course, we're not talking about one single type of potato, but basically how adaptable are they as a food source?

04:04 Rebecca Earle: Yeah, that's also a really good question. And so continuing, my enthusiastic promotion of potatoes is a really excellent food. Um I will say that potatoes are extremely adaptable and they're adaptable. I mean, not just because I guess they have a some botanical um malleability which allows them to be adapted, but also because people are very ingenious cultivators. And so we might talk later about who it was, who spread potatoes all about the world and how it was that potatoes traveled from the Andes to absolutely everywhere. But because of the ingenuity of mostly small peasant farmers whose names have not been preserved by, by the historical record, people learn to adapt potatoes to a wide range of different climates. So potatoes, as you were just saying, come originally from, from the Andes and from a particular type of climatic um environment, but they now grow in all kinds of different parts of the world. So India, for example, has become a leader in breeding potatoes that will grow in, in subtropical conditions. So we have potatoes that grow almost anywhere that you might wish to grow them with maybe, you know, maybe some exceptions, but they're really very adaptable. Mhm.

05:19 Ricardo Lopes: Uh So just before we get into how they started spreading across the globe. So uh going back to South America, what was the status of potatoes for South American people? I mean, they were they held in high regard because they were such a good source of food, I guess or

05:42 Rebecca Earle: not. Well, sort of yes and no. So I guess one needs to say by whom. So from the point of view of local communities, they were really important. And so we have lots of good evidence from European sources which started to write um records using alphabetic writing of what was going on in the Andes. Um These sources of sources start to appear in the 15 hundreds when Europeans invaded the Inca Empire and spread all around South America um conquering and colonizing and also making notes and records of what they were observing. And so we have evidence from colonial sources, for example of rituals and ceremonies to help protect potato crops and to encourage potatoes to grow and to flourish that persisted after the arrival of, of Europeans, and which show how very very important potatoes were to local communities. So there were potato goddesses, there were potato deities who protected the crop and who you might try to um to encourage to look after your potato field. So there would there would be ceremonies that local villages would put on to mark the planting season to mark the harvest season, et cetera. So they were really important and they were, they were all kinds of ceremonial events to attempt to protect these super important foodstuffs. So on the one hand, locally, very, very important and with a whole pantheon of, of religious deities who might help protect them from the point of view of the Inca state, which was the the state that was governing much of, of Peru and parts of Bolivia and Ecuador at the time that Europeans invaded in the 15 hundreds. From the point of view of this very large uh empire, I guess we could call it of the Incas potatoes were not particularly um glamorous or important. The foodstuffs that were seen as really high status was, was maize really or you know, corn or sweet corn depending on what you want to call it. And that was, that was a crop that was closely linked to Inca state ritual. And the, the ruler himself, the Inca would engage in certain ceremonial events to mark the start of the the harvests and or the cultivation season for maize, for example. So maize was really important, maize. Why was it important? It was partly because it was made into a really important beverage, a type of beer that had a, a sort of, well, a a liturgical significance almost, I mean, a bit like wine within Christian thinking, you know, wine isn't just a beverage. It also has a religious significance in the the mass. You know, it's part of what becomes the body and blood of Jesus Christ. And these this maze beer didn't have good exactly that same status, but it had a similarly important religious and social status. And so maize was really what? Potatoes, not so much, you know, potatoes were kind of like an everyday crop. People eat them, you don't need this big ritual. So they weren't seen as so so fancy from the point of view of the, the Inca State but they sustained the people and that was what most people would have been consuming on a daily basis.

09:05 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm uh That's very interesting. And actually I've asked you that question because later on, I want to ask you another question about how during the enlightenment and mo in modern history, people particularly in Europe have been looking at the potato. I mean, philosophers and politicians uh politically how people have been thinking about. But just before that, so uh Europeans basically invade uh South America. How do we know when exactly did they first get in touch with this crop? The potato and how and when they brought it to Europe?

09:48 Rebecca Earle: Well, so food historians often like to play the game of, of finding, you know, when is the first written reference to a potato? When do we have the first evidence for this or that? And so the earliest evidence that we have from European sources for the existence of potatoes dates from the 15 thirties. So we have some examples. We have some a couple of early examples from the 15 thirties, from what's now Colombia, some from Peru and Ecuador. So we have some descriptions. Europeans say things like, oh the people in this part, this part of, of the world, they eat a, a sort of a root, they eat a kind of root a bit like a truffle or a bit like it tastes a bit like a chestnut and this is their bread this is what they eat. So we have these European descriptions from the early 15 hundreds who it was who first took the potato back to Europe is, is, um, that's lost to history. There is um, in Britain where, where I, where I live, there's um, a certain kind of mythology around the idea that either Sir Francis Drake or maybe Sir Walter Raleigh brought the potato back to Europe and there's stories about, um Raleigh cultivating the first potato, which I think is, I mean, almost certainly totally incorrect because he didn't go anywhere near really where uh potatoes originated before European, before Spaniards did. So Spaniards would have had the chance to bring them back much earlier and it would have been Spaniards who had the opportunity to both encounter potatoes and then take them back to Europe. I think it was sailors. I think it was um people, ordinary people bringing, who brought back all kinds of different foodstuffs with them and who spread all sorts of different things. So we know that there were sweet potatoes, for example, growing on the southern coast of Spain by the end of the, the 15 hundreds. And we have evidence of potatoes being sold in markets in Madrid in the um turn of the from the 15 hundreds to the 16 hundreds, for example, but who it was, who brought all these back. Those were usually things that were considered so unimportant that no historian at the time thought it worth recording.

12:06 Ricardo Lopes: And how long exactly did it take for Europeans to include potatoes in their diet? Because, you know, it was a new food and sometimes people are a little bit reticent when it comes to including new foods in their diet. So, but actually did it take longer or not?

12:27 Rebecca Earle: Well, that, so the fact that as in the early 16 hundreds, as I was just saying, there were um market sellers in Madrid who were selling potatoes for people to buy starts to hint at the fact that actually people weren't so suspicious of these foods. There's an old story about how potatoes spread around Europe, which um I, I think it's completely wrong. One of the things I wanted to show when I started researching into the history of potatoes was how this story couldn't be right because it really got up my nose. This story, it seemed to me it was just completely wrong. So the old story goes something like this. Um The old story says when potatoes first reached Europe in the 15 hundreds and the 16 hundreds Europeans in general turned up their noses at the this food stuff because it was unfamiliar. It was different. It grew in the ground from tubers, not from seeds, it wasn't mentioned in the Bible. So probably it was, you know, not a food approved of by God. It was sort of knobbly and lumpy and looked peculiar and people were afraid of it. And it was only in the 17 hundreds during the enlightenment that Europeans began to eat potatoes. Why? Because far sighted intelligent enlightened aristocrats and public spirited philosophers began to realize that the potato was a really great food and that it might end hunger. And they started encouraging ordinary people to eat potatoes. And at that point, the ordinary people who had been refusing to eat potatoes because they weren't mentioned in the Bible said, oh, if Frederick the great tells us to eat them, then we'll definitely eat this. And the rest is history, right? That's the kind of standard story of how the potatoes, but it's just nuts. I mean, this is not how anybody behaves. And anyway, most of the foods that were mentioned that, you know, that are, that were eaten in early modern Europe aren't mentioned in the Bible. You know, the Bible doesn't have long lists of foods and that wasn't stopping people from eating a lot of these other foods. So this idea of, you know, people being hopelessly conservative and only eating foods that their great, great ancestors had had eaten. That just didn't make sense to me. And I was also thinking, well, who was going to be doing the horticultural adaptation to allow potatoes to grow in these slightly different European climates? The very question you were asking a moment ago, I was thinking, who would be doing that? It's actually peasant farmers, they're the ones who know how to adapt plants and how to cultivate them in slightly different soils. So I started looking for evidence who was cultivating potatoes in early modern Europe. And the earliest examples that I found tended to be referring to the fact that they were being grown by small farmers. So scientists would write about this, you know, botanists and people who studied plants. They were the ones who were writing down the information about potatoes because they were the ones who were writing down anything, right. But what they often were writing down was to say, oh, plants seem to be being widely cultivated in certain parts of Germany now, or these plants are being grown in Northern Italy by small farmers. So I would say that they spread much more quickly than people have giving them credit for doing. And there are reasons that we could talk about for why that might have been the case. And that ordinary people far from being, you know, conservative troglodytes were actually very happy to eat new foods we have and we'll set up in a minute, but we have lots of evidence from, from other foods from the Americas maize, for example, another, you know, peculiar food unknown to Europeans. It was being grown in the area around Venice by the mid 15 hundreds. And people used it to make a new kind of polenta, a food that we often associate with Venice. Now we think of polenta being a kind of corn meal mush. Right before, before maize arrived, in Europe, people were making polenta, they were making them out of millet and other grains. They were making sort of stodgy, starchy porridge is out of other grains. When maize arrived, people started making their polenta out of maize. And now it's the most typical dish from, from the Veneto. But again, it was peasant farmers who were doing this, they were the ones who were eating these starchy mushes. So people were generally quite interested in new foods if they grew well, if they um were calorific or if they were nourishing, if they would have put it at the time and their other, they had other advantages as well.

17:08 Ricardo Lopes: So in your book, Feeding The People at a certain point, you talk about how particularly in the early modern era and around the time of the enlightenment uh instead of the state just caring about people having enough twe and the political consequences of famine. For example, there was sort of a transformation in the political significance of everyday eating habits. Uh So could you tell us a little bit about that and how that relates uh at a certain point to the potato?

17:46 Rebecca Earle: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Uh The, so there was a big change in the 17 hundreds in Europe about how political thinkers conceptualized what it meant to govern. Well, so this was a topic, how you governed well, was a topic that had been of interest to people who wrote about political theory for some time. So listeners might be familiar with people like Machiavelli who wrote advice about how to govern. There were people like Hobbs who wrote books with, we wrote a book called Leviathan, that was a sort of analysis of the state. So there were people who were beginning to write accounts of what it meant to govern properly and how you should do that. So this was a sort of new genre that was emerging. But over the course of the, the 17 hundreds ideas about what it in fact did mean to govern properly began to devote more and more attention to the importance of having a hearty, healthy robust population. This was something that became increasingly of interest to political theorists and there was increasing attention to what it was you needed to do to make sure that your population was not only large but also robust. So, I mean, this was in the, you know, I mean, nowadays, we might think, oh, too big a population could be a problem. Maybe your population will be bigger than the food supply. That that was an idea that emerged really only at the end of the 17 hundreds. And it was a totally new idea really at the time for much of the, the 18th century, the absolute consensus was the more the bigger your population, the more powerful your state, you if you had more people than in the neighboring country, you had more people to be in the army. You had more people to be in the navy. You had more people to work in agriculture. You had more people to work in the emergent industries. You know, you would be more powerful provided those people were healthy, right? You needed, you didn't want a population of sickly layabouts. You wanted a population of hard working um laborers. So how did you accomplish this? This became a topic that became more and more interesting to state builders over the course of the 17 hundreds. It hadn't really been that interesting a question to people some hundreds of years earlier. So if you look at ideas about how to govern properly, I mean, even in Machiavelli, he wasn't really interested in how you make the population hearty and robust. He was concerned about how you made sure the population wasn't so annoyed and disaffected and pissed off from the state that it might rebel. And he was conscious that you needed to have enough food to feed your army. If you had an army, you wanted to make sure there wasn't a famine because again, people might be really unhappy about that. But, you know, having like a hearty population, that wasn't his focus, but that became more and more of a focus over the 17 hundreds. And so statesmen and political theorists began to think, what sort of foods could we be encouraging the population to eat. It's got to be cheap because we're not thinking about restructuring the entire social order so that poor people have more money. No, no. You want to make sure that poor people on their limited pennies could be as healthy as possible. And potatoes were increasingly identified as an ideal food stuff that were cheap. People could grow them themselves. They didn't even need to buy them whatsoever. And they would in fact allow people those hearty peasants nourished on potatoes could then work for somebody, a landlord growing wheat which could then be exported to some other lesson, you know, enlightened country that hadn't figured out how to get its population eating potatoes. So the balance of trade would be positive. It was, you know, part of a virtuous circle of becoming more powerful than your neighbor. So potatoes were the subject of an enormous promotional campaign across Europe during the 17 hundreds for those very reasons.

22:00 Ricardo Lopes: Uh So please correct me if I'm wrong. But I guess that it was very tied to the rise of nations as we understand them today or not. I mean, the the idea of nation uh and, and the nations that developed throughout particularly the late 18th, 19th and 20th century or not. Because I was trying to understand here if this sort of uh transformation in terms of uh uh this sort of ideological transformation in terms of how politically we think about nutrition was tied to certain specific uh political developments or if it was mostly intellectual developments coming from thinkers and other philosophers that eventually started paying attention into that. Uh What what, what happened here exactly that led to this transformation.

22:56 Rebecca Earle: So I think the big changes that took place during the 17 hundreds were about how you govern properly and what you, what's what was necessary to have a powerful state. Absolutely, I really agree with you. Those are strongly linked to the emergence of of modern nation states. So I mean, the very idea of public health in a sense, assume some kind of concept of a public and of a and that's in the modern period has been connected to the idea of of a national population. So this is the same period when states started getting interested, I mean, in doing censuses, I just, you know, just for the most basic level, knowing how many people there were in France or in Britain or in England as it would, you know, I those those questions are all interconnected. So it's absolutely right. It became part of what you needed to do to be a modern state is you needed to understand the population, you needed to, to know who these people were and that the population was considered to be part of the the raw material in a way of what made a powerful state. And so, I mean, these aren't my insights, these are ideas that that many scholars I have commented on. So, I mean, people like Michelle Foucault were writing about this 50 years ago. So the view increasingly was developing in the enlightenment that just as a nation had natural resources that might consist of mineral reserves or abundant water supplies or certain crops that grew. Well, the population too was a sort of natural resource and you needed to understand it. And so that you needed a census because you needed to know how large this resource was just as you needed to know how many trees there were in your forest. So you could think about how you were going to be using the the timber resources. So they're absolutely interconnected and the emergence of of nutritional science as a branch of chemistry, it partly came out of people being curious about understanding foodstuffs, but often those curiosities were very explicitly connected to a nationalist impulse to ensure that your nation was more powerful. So explorations and like how much food did people actually need? How much is enough? What's, what's the kind of minimum standard that people can survive on? Those ideas were often very strongly linked to nationalist impulses or moments of military expansion and involves often, you know, lots of we could say pure science but coming out of a of a larger nation building impulse. Yeah.

25:36 Ricardo Lopes: And since we're talking here about the emergence of modernity and another aspect that came along with it was the upward increase in in the world's population. Were potatoes also tied to that.

25:51 Rebecca Earle: Well, there certainly are scholars who argued that there have been scholars who tried to correlate the growth of population, whether in Europe or worldwide with increasing cultivation of potatoes. So there's certainly scholars who've made that claim, but there, there are a couple of economists who did a kind of meta analysis um of world population in which they claim that potatoes were responsible for something like 20 5% of global population growth since the 15 hundreds. I mean, I I don't know if I can um endorse that position or not, but you know, there are people who claim that and have been claiming it for some time. But these claims the idea that the population is fueled by, by potatoes or the potatoes, fuel population growth. That idea itself emerged in the 17 hundreds, which was why potatoes were being promoted so much. So there were lots of comments of people saying potatoes are really great crop for population growth. If you have any doubt, look at Ireland. So Ireland was often held up in the 18th century as exhibit a to demonstrate how fabulous potatoes are. And they would say, look at Ireland, people have huge numbers of Children. They either have, you know, 89, 10 Children, all eating potatoes, which they're growing themselves. What is superfood stuff? You know what, what could possibly be better? So the ability of the potato to fuel population growth was something that was widely claimed at the time, which was why it was so popular with Statesmen.

27:26 Ricardo Lopes: And you mentioned Ireland there. And of course, we have to talk here a little bit about one major historical event, potato related. That was the great famine that lasted from 1845 to 1848. So could you tell us a little bit about that? What happened exactly how back then the British government responded to the famine. And I guess that also another thing that you mentioned in one of your books is how the government tried to discipline people into wage labor back then. So, could you tell us a little bit about those aspects?

28:05 Rebecca Earle: Yeah. So there was a terrible blight that spread across many parts of Europe in the 18 forties. Um It was called the Late Blight. It's a, it's a potato disease which is actually um on the rise today. And as a, you know, a source of concern to potato cultivators today, it was absolutely devastating. It causes the potatoes to rot and to develop a, a kind of to just collapse into a kind of smelly rotten mush. And this, this blight spread across Ireland in the 18 forties, but actually a number of other European countries as well. It was present in the low countries in Belgium, et cetera where it caused tens of thousands of deaths in places like Belgium. So it was quite devastating in other parts of, of western Europe. But in Ireland, the bla the late blight caused maybe a million deaths of some hunger and hunger induced diseases when the crop failed year after year. And the reason why in Ireland, the mortality was so horrendous. It was so much greater than mortality in other parts of western Europe, which were also hit by this, this crop failure was because in Ireland, the diet of working people in the countryside had been reduced almost entirely to potatoes. And that was not the case in places like Belgium where people were a, were able to eat a more diverse diet. Why was this? Well, it was a combination of the fact that the potato is such a nutritious foods stuff as you were asking about a little while ago. And the fact that the Irish rural population had been squeezed onto tinier and tinier plots of land as Europe, as British colonialism advanced and more and more land was brought into commercial crop cultivation and the size of land holdings that peasant farmers um we're trying to live off got smaller and smaller. But because the potato was such a nourishing food stuff, it was, you know, just about possible to keep body and soul together if you had a potato patch even better if you had maybe enough land to have a, a cow and you could get some of that dairy that helps complement the potato and make it a more nourishing food stuff. So the situation was kind of just about sustainable at a, at a level of, you know, sort of just above total immiserate because the potato was, was so nourishing. And because the situation in Ireland was so fragile, but because it was so fragile when the crop failed and utter devastation was the consequence. So I I it resulted in, in um the deaths of, you know, something like one out of eight people and the migration uh to um the breast of the British Isles or to um across the ocean to the United States, for example, that may be another million people out of a population of 8 million. So it was absolutely devastating. And it tells you something about how important the potato had become in Ireland, that it had this, this terrible effect. But you were also asking about the response of the, the the British government, which has been a topic of much research and much um debate among Irish historians for, for a very long time. And there's a, a vast body of really excellent work. What seems really clear is that the response of the government in London to the famine was not one of wholehearted horror and dismay. There was of course concern and the government wasn't in, in London wasn't simply delighted to see a terrible famine leaving leading to such poverty. And there were efforts at famine relief of varying sorts. But there was also a sense that this was as 11 of um one official put it, you know, a bit of a godsend because terrible though it was, it was going to like it or not. And from the point of view of the British government, it was more like it rather than not like it, it was going to sweep away the old system of peasant farming that was seen increasingly by the sort of free marketeers in London as being an obstacle to modernity. So the very potato that in the 17 hundreds had been held up by Statesmen as being a super example of a wonderful population building food was now seen as a big impediment to modernity. So in the, in the 17 hundreds, when potatoes were being promoted as a source of population growth and nat you know, national strength, people were saying potatoes encourage population growth. They're so nourishing, they're great and because people can cultivate them for themselves in their own little, you know, allotment ground, they don't have to depend on the market, they don't have to buy them, they don't have to enter into the capitalist world effectively and they can be self sufficient and isn't that great. It protects people from vicissitudes in the market. That was kind of the view in the 17 hundreds. By the 18 hundreds, the situation was perceived as being very different. The last thing that you wanted, if you were somebody trying to build a modern capitalist economic system, the last thing you wanted was peasants who could opt out of wage labor, which was exactly what the potato was seen as facilitating in Ireland. So there were various comments by treasury officials, for example, in London during the famine saying, well, terrible thing what's happening in Ireland, but at least it's gonna sweep away this archaic old system of peasant farmers. And in the future, all of these people are gonna have to become wage laborers. They're gonna have to work for somebody else. They're gonna have to earn a salary and a wage and they're going to use that wage to buy food on the market and it's gonna bring them unwillingly into the modern world. So this is in the long run. Really a good thing.

34:23 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Uh Thi this is actually very interesting because actually, as we've been talking about here since I asked you that question about how enlightenment thinkers and uh politicians in the modern era fought about potatoes. I mean, there have been in across time, uh contradictory views about the potatoes. Sometimes it's, it's been seen as a source of nourishment other times it's been associated with poverty. And also, I guess you mentioned capitalism there in the, in the early days of capitalism, um perhaps the first few socialists out there, I guess also associated the potato to a certain extent with uh exploitation. Uh CORRECT. So there are some contradictory views in Europe and elsewhere about what the potato really politically represents.

35:26 Rebecca Earle: Yeah, that's absolutely right. So, for these um free market capitalists in, in the London Treasury office, the potato was seen as being an obstacle to a capitalist modernity. It was a way of allowing people to opt out of the market and to remain self sufficient. And it was bad for, for that reason. And there was a whole school of thought that saw the potato as being part of a sort of archaic peasant world that didn't really fit with modernity or that involved people being isolated and separated out from the modern world, not just disconnected from waged labor, but disconnected from a kind of political organization. It's not a coincidence that um Karl Marx, you know, one of the great critics of of capitalism or the great analysts as well described peasants in France as being like potatoes in a sack. Because for him, the peasant lifestyle prevented people from developing associational links and developing it prevented them from developing a sense of class identity. And so for him, the potatoes summed that all up, right? You know, this was a um a antimo crop that kept people isolated. So there was that that sort of view of the potato as well. And you get critiques then in other words, both from the left and from the right of the potato is being a bad thing, other people, other leftist critiques, if we can put it that way of of the potato stressed that the potato actually enabled exploitation. So there were people who looked at Ireland before the the famine in the 18 forties and said, how is it possible that this exploitative situation exists? How is it possible that people are living on these tiny crops of land? You know, just about surviving? Um YOU know, barely able to keep their, their, their families fed, but you know, just about able to do that. Why is that possible because of the potato, which is an evil food stuff? Because it's enabling exploitation. If there weren't potatoes, the situation wouldn't be tenable and people wouldn't put up with this level of terrible exploitation. So there were people who criticized potatoes for enabling um terrible exploitation as well. So that, you know, sort of, from every angle, people were writing about potatoes and connecting them to this new form of economic organization that was emerging in the 19th century. And so potatoes were kind of surprisingly at the heart of this debate about what, what capitalism meant to the worker.

38:14 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I guess that potatoes were both the savior and the scapegoat for everyone. Yes. So uh so I have a few more questions relating to still the history of the potato, but some broader questions about how it relates to the politics of food more generally and the regulation of the food market. So does the history of the potato connect in any way to attempts by governments to regulate the food market? Like for example, we're seeing now with bans on sh sugary and salty foods and to the way certain political ideologies react to this kind of market regulations by labeling them, for example, illiberal or affronts to basic freedoms.

39:08 Rebecca Earle: Yeah. So, I mean, right now there's, uh there's always a backlash whenever any state tries to intervene in public eating habits by banning sugar, that sort of thing. There's tends to be a backlash of people saying this is taking away our basic right to eat terrible food. And that we should, you know, we have a kind of, um, philosophical right to make our own dietary choices. It's up to us, the state should get out of it. I mean, this, that view often coexists with the view that other people ought to be eating better and that, you know, I can make my own dietary mistakes, but that other people ought to be eating more appropriately. There tends to be support in Britain, for example, for the view that people who are, um, very overweight, for example, should be, you know, obliged to lose weight before they have operations that are paid for out of by the National Health Service. And that, you know, they, the National Health Service shouldn't be investing money in people who are unhealthy through their own fault. Right? I mean, there, so there's a certain contradictory aspect to, um, to this public debate. But I think you're right that we can situate these discussions about whether people should or shouldn't eat potatoes into a longer history of that kind of um those kinds of debates. So the emergence in the enlightenment, that's to say during the the 18th century of the view that people ought to eat more potatoes because they were healthful and nutritious and would encourage population growth. With those those sorts of ideas which were leading these political thinkers to encourage potatoes and make propaganda for why potatoes were so great. Those ideas emerged kind of simultaneously with the emergence of, of the theorization of the free market as a good thing. So exactly at the time that people were saying potatoes really good food, everybody should eat more potatoes. You should choose to eat more potatoes, it would be better for you. You personally, you'd be a lot stronger and healthier and happier if you just ate potatoes and they're tasty and your kids will like them. It would be good for the population as a whole and our state would be stronger and we would be more powerful. Everybody would win, right? If everybody just chose to eat potatoes, you don't have to be doing it out of any kind of self sacrifice because they're so yummy. But if you just did, everybody would win. These ideas were emerging at exactly the same time that people like Adam Smith were arguing that actually the state should get out of regulating trading and markets and that people should just be allowed to make their own financial decisions out of the pursuing their own interests. And they should be allowed as much as possible to barter and truck and to exchange goods and to engage in, in commercial activities unrestricted by the state and looking after only their own personal interests. But that, that would then kind of magically result in a smoother flowing more efficient economic system overall. So people like Adam Smith, I mean, he wasn't alone, but people like Adam Smith argued that the more the state tried to oblige people to trade or not trade in particular ways, the more it was likely to store up trouble for the future and that people should just be allowed to organize themselves and that would create a smoothly flowing economic system. And I hope you can see the similarities between that kind of economic position and the idea that people should just choose to eat those foods, not because they're forced to, but because it's in their own personal interests and they're freely choosing to do so. So potato promotion usually was in the form of strong encouragement rather than a dick to that you had to eat it. And I think we can sort of trace back to that in the 17 hundreds, our sort of contradictory relationship between state advice and our own eating habits that, you know, we sort of feel it's our business and it's part of our freedom the same way that we might think, um, you know, the free market is somehow a good thing. One might think that, you know, the state shouldn't be managing economies too much. It's, it might be argued by, by people who, who support that view and that we should be allowed to make our own decisions. But that if everybody made their own decisions sensibly, then everything would work out for the best. Right? And then somehow dietary choices will naturally self organize into a good system, just as individual, economic choices will self organize into a good system. I mean, I think the evidence that individual dietary choices naturally form an effective and smooth system, I think the evidence for that is slight. I don't think that there's a lot of evidence that we make good dietary choices. But those ideas emerged at the same time,

44:06 Ricardo Lopes: a a and actually related to that, do we really choose what we eat? As perhaps some people that come more from the side of this ideology of personal responsibility and some more uh neo liberal takes on social programs and so on would uh claim,

44:29 Rebecca Earle: well, I mean, I, so I would say that if, um, if we were not being persuaded to eat different things, if persuasion, if persuasion was ineffective, no money would be spent on advertising. So, I mean, I, I think that we're, I think we're not the free agents of our own diets to the extent that we might imagine they are. I mean, I often ask my students, I teach the history of food and I often ask them, well, why do you choose the things that you eat? And students will often say, oh, because I like them, you know, these are things that are tasty and sometimes they'll talk about cost as well. But they, their answers usually start with because that's what I like and then couple that to a question about and this is, you know, and I this these things I can afford but the extent to which what we like is shaped by the larger circumstances, I I think is an important topic. And behavioral economists pay attention to that and they look at the way in which we're incredibly persuadable. And also I think how we, we make poor dietary decisions, not simply because we're persuaded, but also because we just don't have a very good mechanism for evaluating what actually is good for us. You know, we don't have a very good set of bio, we're not very attuned often to what our body is telling us anyway. But yeah, I think the idea of choices is deeply flawed in general.

45:55 Ricardo Lopes: And actually, and this is something that uh many sociologists criticize, I guess. Uh THE idea of food choice also ties uh a lot to socio-economic status, right? Because poor people, particularly in more developed countries uh represent in terms of percentage. Uh uh I mean, there are more of these people among lower, uh, the people that are of the lower socio-economic status than higher socio-economic status because of the foods they can afford and basically have access to, for example.

46:39 Rebecca Earle: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's absolutely right. And so there are all kinds of factors that push people with less money into eating less healthy diets. So, I mean, the cost of the food is, is absolutely one of them. There's a question of time. So, you know, it's all very well to say that you can um cook a nutritious meal um for a much, you know, for a smaller amount, a smaller cost than it is to buy. Um, YOU know, fast food, for example, but if you don't have hours and hours to cook pots of chickpeas, for example, then you, you know, you're not going to be able to make a nutritious Chickpea based dish. So there's a question about not just money, poverty, but time poverty, their access to cooking facilities at all. So people might be living in a small flat, which actually doesn't really have proper cooking facilities at all. You might just have a microwave or something like that. So the technologies of cooking are also unequally distributed. And I mean, there's a old historical argument going, going back to the eighties um that was first developed by, by Sydney Mintz who wrote a wonderful classic book on the History of Sugar in which he argued that part of the reason that people in Britain became a nation of sweet tea drinkers was because during the industrial revolution, people working in textile mills or in other industries had very little access to cooking equipment. They had very little time and they had very little money and boiling some water might be about as sophisticated AAA cooking activity as you were able to engage in. And that a cup of very, very sweet tea, maybe with some bread that you'd purchased in a shop spread with some very, very sugary jam that you'd also purchased might be the cheapest source of calories that, that you could have. And the only thing you really were able to prepare, you know, you didn't have an oven to cook, nourishing, you know, stews or anything like that. And that, that's where this taste for super sweet tea originated. He argued. So all of those things, you know, time money, um cooking facilities come together to push people to eat particular foods, which they might ultimately then come to enjoy, you know, sweet tea might be something that people then really enjoy. But the forces that pushed them into that dietary choice where by, you know, by no means a choice.

49:06 Ricardo Lopes: So, and this will probably be my last question and still related to food regulations. Uh So I, I guess that at the same time, we have this sort of ambivalent idea or ambivalent attitude toward food regulation because even if uh many times like when it comes to banning sugary drinks or regulating, get directed at Children specifically. For example, uh, many times we might not like that kind of thing because we associate it with paternal, with paternalism and so on. Other times we actually like food regulation. Like, for example, a few years ago, with the horse meat scandal. Right.

49:53 Rebecca Earle: Yeah. Like, people want the state to ensure that the food that they're buying is, is wholesome. And so if it turns out that there's contaminated horse meat, this was about, yeah, 10 years ago, there was this big scandal all through Europe, right about where it turned out that horse meat had made its way into all kinds of dishes that you could buy in the chilled food section and that the beef lasagna was actually, you know, a very aged horse that had been shredded up. Um, SO people feel really betrayed when the state doesn't ensure that their food is safe. So there's an expectation on the one hand that the state should be regulating the food supply. And that goes way back to ancient times when it was considered a basic obligation of the state to regulate the safety of the food supply. But that safety then, you know, where that safety control of whether the food is basically wholesome where that then edges into saying actually, basically sugar is basically really bad for you. You just shouldn't eat that much. That, that is seen as being, um, you know, um, unacceptable. So, we're quite contradictory, I think in our attitudes towards what we want the state to be doing.

51:04 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Uh, GREAT. So, I guess this is a good point to wrap up the interview and then Doctor Earl just before we go, uh, I'm leaving some links to your books in the description box of the interview. But apart from that, would you also like to tell people where they can find you when your work on the internet?

51:25 Rebecca Earle: Oh, my goodness. Thank you. I should anybody want to do this? Um Where could you find me? Yeah, I guess. Well, I can send you the link. So I've got, I mean, you can look at my website um or what else could you, you can send me an email. I would be delighted to chat with people about anything related to potatoes or anything else to do with food if that was of interest to you. I'm always really happy to talk about any of this stuff to anybody whose ear I can bend. But yeah, thanks for giving me the opportunity to do so.

51:53 Ricardo Lopes: No, thank you so much for accepting the invitation. It's been a big pleasure to talk with you. Hi guys. Thank you for watching this interview. Until the end. If you liked it, please share it. Leave a like and hit the subscription button. The show is brought to you by the N Lights learning and development. Then differently check the website. At N lights.com and also please consider supporting the show on Patreon or paypal. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and paypal supporters, Perera Larson, Jerry Muller and Frederick Suno Bernard Seche O of Alex Adam, Castle Matthew Whitten Bear. No wolf, Tim Ho Erica LJ Connors, Philip Forrest Connolly. Then the Met Robert Wine in NAI Z Mark Nevs calling Hol Brookfield, Governor Mikel Stormer Samuel Andre Francis for Agns Ferus and H her meal and Lain Jung Y and the Samuel K Hes Mark Smith J. Tom Hummel s friends. David Sloan Wilson. Ya dear, Ro Ro Diego, Jan Punter Romani Charlotte Bli Nico Barba, Adam Hunt Pavlo Stassi na Me, Gary G Alman Sam of Zed YPJ Barboza Julian Price Edward Hall, Eden Broner Douglas Fry Franca, Beto Lati Cortez or Solis Scott Zachary Fish, TD and W Daniel. Friedman, William Buckner, Paul Giorgio, Luke Loki, Georgio Theophano, Chris Williams and Peter W as in David Williams, the Ausa Anton Erickson Charles Murray, Alex Shaw, Marie Martinez, Coralie Chevalier, Bangalore Larry Dey Junior, Old Ebon, Starry Michael Bailey. Then spur by Robert Grassy Zorn, Jeff mcmahon, Jake Zul Barnabas Radick, Mark Kempel, Thomas Dvor Luke Neeson, Chris Tory Kimberley Johnson, Benjamin Gilbert Jessica. No week in the Brendan Nicholas Carlson Ismael Bensley Man George Katis, Valentine Steinman Perras, Kate Van Goler, Alexander Abert Liam Dan Biar Masoud Ali Mohammadi Perpendicular Jer Urla. Good enough Gregory Hastings David Pins of Sean Nelson, Mike Levin and Jos Net. A special thanks to my producers is our web, Jim Frank Luca Stein, Tom Veg and Bernard N Corti Dixon, Bendik Muller Thomas Trumble, Catherine and Patrick Tobin, John Carl, Negro, Nick Ortiz and Nick Golden. And to my executive producers, Matthew Lavender, Si Adrian Bogdan Knits and Rosie. Thank you for all.