Potato: an anarchist vegetable
“Potato” is a book in the Object Lessons series which “take ordinary — even banal — objects and animate them with a rich history of invention, political struggle, science, and popular mythology”. This book is about, well, potatoes, tracing its journey from the beliefs of the Incas to Enlightened Europe and modern communist China. This journey moves seamlessly around the globe because almost every culture on Earth places some cultural and historical value on potatoes. Their qualities are relevant to the most basic human experiences: potatoes resemble primordial motherhood in their shape, they are the most rational dietary choice due to their nutritional qualities, and they do not stand out much, making them a perfect comfort meal that reminds people of home. Regardless of whether their home is Ireland, Belarus, or Peru.
The book is divided into several narratives about potatoes. Each of them has compelling arguments that support that particular view of the potato. The book is dangerously funny because of the obvious contrast between the mundanity of potatoes we all see, and the highly politicised perceptions, that are ready to fight each other for the truth of their deep meaning hidden in the potato.
Potatoes are immigrants
Potatoes are not from Europe, or many other places they are mostly consumed in today. They got dispersed around the world with the Spanish robberies of the Americas. In the 16th century, potatoes were a crazy innovation and a groundbreaking novelty. Yet, in a few centuries, they became perfectly familiar to the European landscape.
In modern times, British artists Mia Frostner and Rosalie Schweiker even launched a small campaign against British xenophobia and the fear of migration. They used an image of the typical English dish to show the hypocrisy of the anti-immigrant movements. This campaign was meant to highlight that there’s no such thing as a purely English culture, that even the most English thing ever — fish and chips— was a “dirty” migrant once. Therefore, protecting European culture against barbarian immigrants is rendered meaningless while we all relish the delectable combination of fish and chips, innit?
There is another example that strengthens Frostner’s and Schweiker’s case. During the conquest of Ireland, British officials were looking for ways to utilise this land and assimilate the people. The potato-eating way of life of the native population was an obstacle to the government expansion into the territories. Potatoes became the enemies of progress and a bad habit of the uncivilised Irish:
He [an English official William Petty] viewed the potato as a major obstacle to his plans to convert the recently-colonized Irish into a productive source of revenue for England. Because it was so easy to live on potatoes, the Irish did not work as hard as Petty would have liked, with the result that England was able to collect about half the taxes that Petty calculated a potato-free population would have yielded.
This story shows that while it is very easy to love potatoes, their symbolism can overpower the delicious taste. One of the future chapters of the book refutes the theory claiming that medieval peasants weren’t too quick to adopt the potato into their diet because it was not mentioned in the Bible, and thus it was somehow sinful. That’s clearly not the case, but our past willingness to accept this as a viable explanation shows how significant narratives are in human decisions about something as unintellectual as our diet.
Potatoes are the common good
As the government’s leviathan grew its tentacles long enough to interfere with people’s diets, Enlightenment intellectuals concluded that potatoes were the best crop to plant according to rational calculus. Potatoes were more nutritious and yielded more in volume than alternatives. The scientists had to communicate this discovery to the farmers and the undernourished peasant population. If they just planted potatoes instead of wheat, their diet would be more balanced and their health stronger. And strong peasants make a better army. To reach the people, these intellectuals developed new channels of communication with the public. One can say, that potatoes are responsible for the invention of public service announcements.
Evidently, as one French writer remarked with surprise, the ordinary potato had become the darling of the Enlightenment.
Also, the devastating Irish potato famine happened. Roughly a million people died because of British regulations based on ideas that were cool at the time and the lack of any diversification of Irish agriculture.
For the same reasons, the Communist Party of China is running a promotion campaign for peasants to choose potatoes over crops. It’s not going well but the heart is there. Potatoes are better than rice across all metrics: they don’t require nearly as much water, they yield more calories per area, and potato agriculture can be mechanised to a much larger degree. If only the wise and educated could explain the benefits of this exciting new solution to all their problems to the plebs. It would only require abandoning the thousand-year-long tradition… While the potato remains a symbol of one of the darkest famines in modern history, fortunately, it avoided carrying the burden of a government-induced famine, the way similar initiatives do.
Enlightenment and the thought of rational calculus applied to personal diets and state policy made potatoes the means and the ends of a sort of state intervention into the second most private of areas in our lives.
Potatoes are anarchists
Nevertheless, the most pleasant quality of potatoes is their anarchism. When collecting crop taxes from peasants, estimating the amount of wheat they should contribute is easy: the fields have concrete measurements, and the crops are planted and harvested during pre-established times of the year. There are very few ways to conceal a large golden square of a wheat field. Some researchers even attribute the creation of centralized states to cereal agriculture:
Cultivating, harvesting and processing cereals such as wheat demands a good deal of labour, but the payoff is that they store well. Cereal-based cultures usually construct granaries to hold the crop once it has been harvested. The problem is that granaries are easy to spot: Passing groups of brigands, local strongmen and the state itself soon notice the presence of such stocks of grain; from spotting to stealing is a short step. The temptation to confiscate is all the more appealing since most of the work necessary to turn the plants into food — the cultivating, harvesting, threshing and drying — has already been done.
Potatoes, on the other hand, are difficult to quantify. It is impossible to know how much a potato plant will yield before taking it out of the ground. This makes it impossible for tax collectors to enforce a tax on an amount that would not be too high to afford, provoking tension while making a profit. Furthermore, potatoes can be gathered at any time of the year. This meant that the peasants could very easily lie to the tax collectors about the growth status of their potatoes. How would they know, they are underground. As a result, potatoes were not taxed in Europe at all for quite some time.
When the rector in the Cornish parish of St. Buryan demanded that his tenants begin paying a tithe on their potatoes, they refused, insisting that they had been cultivating potatoes for their own use for ‘for time out of mind’, and that no one had ever tried to demand a tithe before.
Potatoes do not require complex social structures for their processing and can be grown individually, only depending on the equipment of a single household. As opposed to the large silos and mills that processing grain into wheat requires. Thus, potato-based societies are freer and less bound by social organisation and strict division of labour. James C. Scott claims (according to the book) that potatoes are “state evading” and even anarchist, as they do not promote hierarchy or structural inequality. In fact, the prevalence of potatoes in Ireland during the 19th century was seen as a threat by British officials, who sought to eradicate it in hopes of transforming the Irish population into a rural proletariat.
Planting potatoes was one of the most egalitarian forms of tax evasion that is usually inaccessible to the people who would benefit the most. For many peasants, they were likely to be that little part of their lives that was just theirs.
Conclusions
To me, this book is about how easy it is to get political allegiances to stick, even if you are a non-verbal vegetable. Some people will always claim that potatoes support them, or that potatoes are a necessary enemy of what they stand for.
The darker part of the story of the mighty potato is that love can turn into a deadly obsession. The Irish famine was not perpetuated by anything but loyalty to the delicious and healthy vegetable.
Finally, the humble potato’s story is one of bottom-up innovation to evade outrageous practices of serfdom and state-sanctioned theft.
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