68. Antoine Parmentier & The History of the Potato

“The vegetable of the shack and the château.” – Le marquis de Cussy

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”

Antoine Parmentier, “the apostle of the potato”

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 Today, we’re taking a closer look at a dreadful century when France was – horror of horrors – out of date, behind the times, and out of fashion.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, jus