Let Them Eat Potatoes

“What’s an Irish seven course meal?  A six pack of beer and a potato.”

If you’re Irish, I hope you will excuse the crude joke, but I’m including it for a reason.  It is almost impossible to talk about potatoes and not mention the Irish.  When the potato blight hit Ireland in the middle of the 19^th century, over a million Irish immigrants came to America, enriching our country in ways too numerous to count.

There is still a lively debate going on about exactly when and where potatoes were first domesticated.  It was somewhere between 4500 and 10,000 years ago, and in either present day Peru or Bolivia, when Native Americans began gathering and planting the tuberous relative of the nightshade family.  Carefully selection of the best specimens to replant, year after year, century after century, with occasional cross-pollination of some plants, eventually gave us the 5,000 varieties of potatoes we have today.

The Spanish brought the potato back to Europe from the New World in the middle of the 16^th century, where it quickly became popular in Spain, England, and Ireland—but not in the rest of Europe.  Today, potatoes are an essential part of the diet in the entire world, with only wheat, corn, and rice being planted more often, but for well over a century after its first being imported, most of Europe had no use for the potato. 

Nowhere was the opposition to spuds more vehement than in France.  The church, using logic that only the French could understand, banned eating potatoes because they weren’t mentioned in the Bible, prompting the French King to outlaw their consumption.   Few French people disagreed with the law because of the popular belief that eating potatoes gave you leprosy. 

Note.  Obviously, French Fries are wildly misnamed.  The name comes from American soldiers stationed near the front during World War I.  The local peasants normally subsisted on a diet based on fish, but when the river froze over in winter, they fried potatoes.  Since the local language was French, the Americans (somewhat ignorant of the local geography) misnamed the dish.  They should have called it “Belgian Fries”.

In Prussia, Frederick the Great encouraged farmers to grow potatoes, even distributing cuttings for the farmers to use, but only to provide feed for livestock, since potatoes were still considered to be dangerous for humans to eat.  It was the Seven Years War that eventually led to the root vegetable being more widely accepted.

The Seven Years War (which lasted nine years—1754-1763–in the New World just to confuse future history students) raged across most of Europe and her colonies and was truly a “world war” before we had the good sense to start numbering them.  So many peasants were conscripted into the competing armies that there was not enough agricultural labor to produce food or raise livestock.  The predictable result was widespread starvation.

In 1755, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier was an apothecary in Paris who joined the French Army under King Louis XV to serve as a pharmacist.  While serving in present day Germany, he was wounded and captured by the Prussian Army.  With little food to spare for prisoners, the French prisoners were fed hog feed—potatoes.  As you have probably guessed, Parmentier did not catch leprosy and grew to love the potatoes.

In 1763, upon his return to Paris, Parmentier, while continuing to work as a military pharmacist, began to advocate the planting of potatoes as a cheap and nutritious source of food for the French people.  Though his work was not popular at first, Parmentier continued his experiments, laying the foundation to what eventually would be known as nutrition science.  It was through his efforts that the law banning the consumption of potatoes was finally repealed in 1771.  And though Parmentier developed easy recipes for using the inexpensive vegetable, potatoes were still not popular with French people.

Now an inspector general in the French Army, Parmentier plotted a publicity campaign that would have done a modern public relations firm proud.  Parmentier invited well-known celebrities, such as Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier, to lavish dinner parties where most of the dishes contained potatoes and the bread was made of potato flour.  The pharmacist also presented bouquets of potato blossoms to both King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette; the latter wore the blossoms in her hair on several occasions.

To show his gratitude and to encourage more work on a sustainable food source, the King gifted Parmentier fifty-four arpents of land.  If you are not familiar with pre-metric French measurements, the arpent is a measurement of both length and area based on the even older Roman actus.  In total, the king’s gift was slightly more than sixty-eight acres of farmland fairly close to Versailles on which Parmentier could plant potatoes.

Effectively, the monarch was saying, “Let them eat potatoes.”  The king encouraged the idea, but it was not like he was losing his head over it.

Parmentier not only grew large quantities of potatoes, he made sure that others prized his crop, too.  During the day, his farm was conspicuously guarded by Imperial soldiers, deliberately giving the local peasants and farmers the idea that the farm’s crop was valuable.  Since the guards left as the sun set, the locals used the cover of darkness to steal the now valuable potatoes.  The news of these thefts so delighted Parmentier, that he would reward the messengers with handfuls of coins.

In 1785, the north of France had a disastrous harvest, threatening mass starvation.  The deaths were largely averted by a bumper crop of potatoes.  Four years later, the king subsidized the printing and distribution of a book Parmentier wrote, A Treatise on the Culture and Use of the Potato, Sweet Potato, and Jerusalem Artichoke.  Almost immediately after its publication, the French Revolution began.

In a long and distinguished career, Parmentier helped develop wine and cheese-making, experimented with refrigeration, promoted the use of cornmeal, improved the process of bread making, and promoted the drinking of mineral water.  When he died in 1813, he was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.  Appropriately, his tomb is surrounded with potato plants.

Merci beaucoup, Monsieur Parmentier!