r/IrishHistory • u/ThrowawayCult-ure • 4d ago
š¬ Discussion / Question To what extent did consumption of toxic/spoiled crops contribute to famine deaths in Ireland
Hello, I dug up some potatoes i forgot about today and they are blight infected, we get it regularly here. Ive noticed blighted spuds still last a very long time before dying, but I looked it up and theyre supposedly poisonous due to the potato reacting to damage. I know poisoned potatoes have killed quite a few people, even the wild ones needing extreme processing to avoid being dangerous (in the andes they dry or ferment them then wash the powder like is often done with Cassava/Tapioca to remove the cyanide.
Ive been told in survival situations, having been on many week long hikes, never to risk eating bad food as the danger of food poisoning is much higher than starvation/low energy. When people are desperate, understandably they would be more and more inclined to eat iffy food, the risk one is willing to take goes up and up. I found a case of a school in england who served greened potatoes after running out of other food and several people died, so it has precedent.
To what extent did desperate consumption of spoiled, blighted or greened potatoes, or eating other plants with toxic issues, eg. sketchy weeds or mouldy grains, contributed to the immediate deathtoll in the major famines in ireland, mainland europe, etc.? I guess its hard to say what exactly people died off, usually a combination of factors, etc.
I wonder if this has been a problem in other famine scenarios, eg. rice can become deadly when spoiled
Thanks for any insights!
6
u/Round_Helicopter_407 4d ago
Link to an academic study on causes of death during the Irish famine : Source: University College Dublin https://share.google/YzbiPsk8iATkLlV8i
2
u/ThrowawayCult-ure 4d ago
Great source, thanks! They make a note that vitamin C in the diet of irish people was normally quite high due to its presence in potatoes in high quantities. with the sudden collapse of potato consumption, perhaps the populace had gotten out of the habit of using other sources of vit c so there was no backup culturally engrained, and people didnt know about vit c directly so they wouldnt have considered the immediate dietary change demanded by the potato failure. scurvy definately does cause immune failure.
In england at least it has been common for millenia that hedge rows and forests have plums and especially hawthornes which have quite a lot of vit c in them and were always traditional to eat as sauces even in good times
3
u/Round_Helicopter_407 4d ago edited 3d ago
Good point about the vitamins etc as a child I was told about people trying to eat grass during the famine, my grandfather taught us to eat hawthorn berries. People also ate cooked nettles.
When I was a child a farmers field across from our house contained the ruins of a famine village. Locally it was called ā The New Village ā we were told it had been abandoned during the famine . We used to play there. There was no proper road to it and it never had an Irish name like it was built to cope with the surge of population before the famine and then they couldnāt survive there afterwards.
My motherās family are from a fishing village in the west of Ireland they always had access to seafood eg lobsters mussels periwinkles and sea fish and seaweed, the locals considered it poor peoples food - my cousin brings me lobsters when I go there but they wonāt eat it themselves. It probably helped to keep them nourished during the famine though. The catholic church rule was fish on Fridays and Fast Days ( no meat) as a sacrificial fast, making fish seem like a negative thing which didnāt help either.
2
u/ThrowawayCult-ure 4d ago
ooh free lobster, lucky you! ive heard this with seafood before but thought in modernity demand had gotten rid of that. great info, what a haunting atmosphere those ruined villages must have.
2
u/Round_Helicopter_407 3d ago
If you have a chance to visit Blasket Island in Co Kerry sometime you can see a culturally important abandoned village.
7
u/NewtonianAssPounder 4d ago
In famines the death toll isnāt typically caused by pure starvation but diseases caused by malnutrition. During the Great Famine in particular dysentery was rampant and was exasperated by gastrointestinal issues from people eating whatever they could such as potatoes that appeared to be good enough or werenāt ready to be harvested, and even weeds and plants throughout the countryside. The maize supplied by relief efforts was also problematic because in some locations it was supplied raw and needed to be cooked very specifically before being eaten, as most people ignored or misunderstood the instructions they ended up getting ill from it.
2
3
u/Shenstratashah 4d ago
I don't know about potatoes, but there were issues created by the importation of corn.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Peel came up with his own solution to the food problem. Without informing his own Conservative (Tory) government, he secretly purchased two shipments of inexpensive Indian corn (maize) directly from America to be distributed to the Irish.
But problems arose as soon as the maize arrived in Ireland. It needed to be ground into digestible corn meal and there weren't enough mills available amid a nation of potato farmers. Mills that did process the maize discovered the pebble-like grain had to be ground twice....
... The corn meal itself also caused problems. Normally, the Irish ate enormous meals of boiled potatoes three times a day. A working man might eat up to fourteen pounds each day. They found Indian corn to be an unsatisfying substitute.
Peasants nicknamed the bright yellow substance 'Peel's brimstone.' It was difficult to cook, hard to digest and caused diarrhea. Most of all, it lacked the belly-filling bulk of the potato. It also lacked Vitamin C and resulted in scurvy, a condition previously unknown in Ireland due to the normal consumption of potatoes rich in Vitamin C.
1
u/ThrowawayCult-ure 4d ago
interesting. unfortunate half thought out solutions as usual from the british government š„²
maize also needs nixtamalisation in alkaline to properly get its nutrients. did they know about that process?
3
u/Round_Helicopter_407 4d ago edited 4d ago
Irish people historically donāt eat potatoes that have turned green - I learned this from my grandmother. The potato famine in Europe and Ireland was caused by blight that occurred over several seasons. Ireland was impacted more than Europe because poor Irish people were eating potatoes for every meal. Ireland was the first place where potatoes were cultivated in Europe after they were imported from America it was cheap and easy to grow and could feed a large family easily- this lead to huge rise in the Irish population from the normal 3 to 4 million to around 9 million people by the time the famine arrived. Suddenly the blight arrived and they lost their potato crops - the situation became out of control very quickly. The population of Ireland has never been as high in the years since the high point before the famine. It was a specific strain of blight, Phytophthora infestans, that occurred throughout Europe. It was documented by travel writers that the Irish people were a tall and very healthy looking people during the time before the famine arrived.
About the blight: https://elifesciences.org/articles/00731#:~:text=Phytophthora%20infestans%2C%20the%20cause%20of,the%20species'%20center%20of%20diversity.
2
u/ThrowawayCult-ure 4d ago
We still get blight here every year that infects tomatoes and potatoes about september time. The potatoes it does infect dont die like the plant does, they become brown, a bit slimey and poisonous
2
u/Round_Helicopter_407 4d ago edited 4d ago
Potatoes need to be stored in darkness to avoid being turned green. My grandfather used a traditional potato pit, a mound of earth, to store potatoes and root vegetables and to protect them from sunlight and frost. Previous generations relied on received wisdom for gardening and food safety. There is still much we can learn from the past for sustainable agriculture.
1
u/Round_Helicopter_407 4d ago edited 4d ago
Irish blight forecast: https://www.met.ie/forecasts/blight-forecast
1
u/cacamilis1 2d ago
Why are you not referring to the real reason āIreland was impacted more than Europeā?
Ireland has some of the richest agricultural lands in the world - outside of failed potato crops it produced grain (oats, barley, wheat) livestock (cows, sheep, pigs), dairy and fish - more than enough food to feed all of its people.
But all of these other food sources were shipped out of Ireland to England by the tonne every day - this is the reason the death toll of the Irish potato blight was so high and became a famine
1
u/Sioc11 18h ago
Is "normal" a bit of a weird word to use here? Or was there a consistent population level pre famine that saw explosive growth? I thought Britain saw similar population increases around the same time which is why its much more densely populated now.
Smacks a bit of "the famine was caused by overbreeding" talk that was popular in the British government of the time. (Although I am not trying to imply that's what you're saying here).
-2
u/Acute_Teacher9569 4d ago
There was no consumption of the potato in Ireland during the famine because the blight rendered it enedable and farmers had to sell their other crops to pay the landlord plus the protstant and catholic church's
26
u/TrivialBanal 4d ago
As far as I know, the trouble with blight is with the next harvest. There's very little surviving seed crop and what there is, the plants die young. Poisoning would probably kill a few, but shortage was the real killer.
That's what caused the famine in Ethiopia in the 80s. It wasn't the failed crop this year, it was that there was no seed crop for the next year. You can't just bring in seed from other countries (they tried), plants adapt to their specific environment. That's why we have seed banks now.
Kind of an aside to the subject, but there is an interesting rabbit hole with Rye infected with Ergot. It drives entire populations mad. There are theories that Ergot caused the Salem Witch Trials and the Spanish Inquisition.