February 23, 2017 • 50 mins
It’s common knowledge that famines are usually caused by major droughts: Rain doesn’t fall, crops don’t grow, and people go hungry. But recent research suggests that while weather may trigger famines, they may actually be more of a human-made catastrophe.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
So hey, let's talk about this cool new podcasting push
called tripod hashtag tripod. There's this really cool thing going
on right now the podcasting industry, which is one thing
I love about the podcasting industry is that we all
like try to support one another. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah,
Like what's good for us is good for other shows.
It's like, uh, all boats ride with the rides with
(00:23):
the tide or something. That's right. So there's this new
push going on. It's this cool program called tripod t
r y pod as in try a pod, right, get it? Yeah?
And the whole basis of this is that we podcasters
are asking you podcast listeners to go tell a friend
(00:43):
to go try podcast not necessarily ours. I mean, if
you want to recommend stuff, you should know, we're always
fine with that. But even if it's some other one
that um that you like or love even more, just
turned a friend onto podcasting is basically the whole point. Yeah,
I mean you're probably gonna hear this on a lot
of podcasts. And the the whole deal is, even though
podcasting has come a long way since we've started, it's
(01:05):
still sort of a baby of a medium. Yeah, half
of a half of a percent is what we always
say in the podcasting industry. But a lot of people
still don't even know what podcasts are. So, uh, get
out there, tell a family member, tell a friend what
podcasts are. Recommend when you like, tell them how to
get it. Uh, you know, just go out in your
backyard and put your ear to the sky until you
(01:27):
hear a podcast. Yeah, that's a big one too, because
a lot of people are like, Okay, sure I've heard
a podcast, I have no idea where to start. Yeah,
so recommend a good way to listen, maybe how you listen.
And we really appreciate it, Like the whole industry appreciates
you spreading the word. That's how we grow and that's
how we've grown on behalf of the entire podcasting industry.
Thank you. Welcome to Stuff you should Know from House
(01:52):
Stuff Works dot com. Hey, I'm welcome to the podcast
on Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry
did jeer stir that should we say what just happened here?
Or focus like, oh, what is this? Probably twenty something
(02:16):
thirty something episodes, Let's get up there and for the
first time ever, right before we went go, Jerry said, focus,
what does that mean? Usually she goes, huh what I
don't get It is just me so bothering you guys, right, exactly,
the smell that's so Jerry. Focus Alright. I feel pressure now,
(02:38):
yeah I do. I'm a little off now, Jerry. So yeah,
that worked. All right, let's concentrate. All right. So we're
talking Chuck about use your eye okay, yeah, I got
something large in it. We're talking about famine today, yes,
which goes with our super sad uh horrific geo political
(03:00):
catastrophe sweets. Yeah, this probably will not be chock full
of humor. No, I try to think of a way
to insert some jokes. There's not unless we go on
a tangent. Do you remember the eighties stand up comedians,
like they would make just the worst jokes that just
would not fly, Like they get chased off stage by
people with like like just the jokes they would make
(03:22):
aids jokes and and famine jokes. Yea, yeah, he's just
like the material they would make jokes about, and they
like they weren't even remotely funny, you know, it was
not not nuance or smarts or anything. Yeah, I think
as Sam Kennison made like starving Ethiopian kid jokes, give
him a sandwich, cameraman, wouldn't him? Was that him? I
(03:46):
think so, like just people can't do that today. It's
a different world. So yeah, there probably won't be any
jokes in this one. Uh, what there will be is
tons of information and hopefully everybody who will understand famines
after this can come together and prevent them for the
rest of eternity, unless climate change gets that says we'll
(04:08):
see at the end. Yes, I just spoiled it though,
didn't I. I'm glad you said that was relevant. Yeah,
so everybody has a pretty good idea of what famine is.
It's when you run out of food and a bunch
of people start dying. That's actually pretty close to the
real definition. But there's this guy who's a scholar of famine.
(04:30):
His name is Cormac o Grata and he um has
written several books on famines and studied famines and he's
a pretty sharp tack. So people kind of looked at
him to say, what's the actual definition of a famine
and he says in his best Irish accent, Uh, it's
a lot like malnutrition. But it's a lot worse. There's
(04:52):
a lot more crisis, there's a lot more death. YEA. Specifically,
he says, it's a shortage of food or purchasing power
that leads directly to excess mortality from starvation or hunger
induced diseases. And um, that's an important addition because it's
not just hunger starvation related, but all the disease that
(05:15):
comes along with that that can kill people very much
more easily because you're so under nourished. Right, And we'll
find out too, it's a It forms a bit of
a vicious cycle because people start to get hungry and
start to starve and start to suffer from disease. They
have an even harder time, say, working in field produce crops,
(05:35):
and so the whole thing just keeps getting worse and
worse and worse. Once it passes um breaking point, it
really starts to spiral out of control. Yeah, it's a
it's a three pronged terror of poverty, hunger, and disease,
all contributing to one another. Right. So, Cormeco grads definition
(05:57):
of a famine is a daily death rate um of
above one per ten thousand people. Is that ten thousand? Yeah, alright,
I had a period and not a comma. That's uh,
that's European and I didn't, is it. It's gotta be
because that didn't. That's like point zero zero zero one
(06:20):
percent of the population per day, is that right? Yeah?
I think that is ten thousand, because just off the
top of my head, like the normal American death rate
is like eight hundred and twenty three per one hundred
thousand people, So that is significantly more daily death rate.
That's the first characteristic. Yeah. Number two is the proportion
(06:40):
of wasted children is above and wasted means there there
muscle masses withering away due to starvation. Yeah. Technically it
means they weigh too standard deviations or more below average.
And just that term itself is like the most heartbreaking
thing you can wasted children. Yeah, in any sense, that's
(07:02):
not a good thing, because especially when it has to
do with famine. Uh. And then finally, the prevalence of
what's called quash or core, which is um it's basically
an extreme malnutrition due to protein deficiency. Yeah, and those
pictures everybody who grew up in the eighties and saw
the pictures of the starving children in Africa that were
(07:24):
just little skin and bone kids, but they had these
huge bloated pot bellies. That's a classic hallmark of quash core. Yeah,
very sad. Yeah uh. And then he went on to
qualify further with severe famine that means a daily death
rate above five out of ten thousand, uh, proportion of
wasted children above and then that same quash or core prevalence. Right,
(07:49):
So if quash your core is around, you got a
famine on your hands. That's not a normal thing that
happens in a normal food secure population. Yeah. And that's
that's the main distinguishing factor between famine and just what
you would consider malnutrition. And this is all tied into
what we call food security, right, and we we we
(08:11):
talked about food security before, I think maybe in desertification
or something like that. Yeah, I know we have at
some point, but we talked a lot about the food
the green Revolution to which factors in but um, food
security is that means you have you have food available,
you can get to that food or that food can
get to you readily, and you can use that food
(08:32):
to meet your health needs. You can leverage it to
make your population healthy. Yeah, Like if it's if your
entire countries food supply is twinkies. You do not have
food security. There's an abundance of it. People can get
to it very easily. It's probably affordable for everybody, but
it's not nutritious. Or if your country has nothing but
(08:52):
like the finest fruits and vegetables and proteins, but only
the very wealthy have access to it because it's too expensive, well,
you don't have food security. So, according to the u N,
if you have food security in a nation, all people
at all times have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe,
(09:13):
and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and get
this food preferences for an active and healthy life. Yeah,
which I mean we'll talk about Ethiopia some later, but
at one point the goal was, which they you know,
never met, was that not only would they have food
one day readily available, but be able to choose what
(09:33):
they wanted to eat. Like there's something you don't think about.
You really take that for granted here in the United
States and elsewhere. Um, it's not just having food, but like,
oh I might like to eat this or that. You know, uh,
all right, so a lot of things can affect this
food security. UM. And We're gonna talk about all these
as throughout the show as they relate to famine. But
(09:54):
obviously you think of natural disasters first, and probably drought first. Yeah,
that's a that's a big one. If you don't have
water and rain, you can't grow crops, usually uh, crop blight,
which we'll talk a little bit about the potato famine
in Ireland later on. Um, but any kind of disease pest,
(10:16):
even like over abundance of weeds, could conceivably ruin a
crop flooding, extraordinarily cold weather, extraordinarily hot weather, we'll just
say weather patterns in general, Yes, severe weather. And then
a big one which a lot of people, a lot
of people I think, mainly think of natural disasters or
natural factors, and political conflict is one of the big, big,
(10:40):
big contributors. So here's this is what we're coming to
though eventually, is there's a big debate on what causes famine.
And for many, many years everyone said, well, don't be dump,
droughts caused famine, right, But studies, much more recent studies
have found that actually, if you kind of peek behind
(11:01):
the curtain a little bit, yeah, there was a drought
and it started the famine, But what actually caused the
famine or caused it to be horrible is usually government,
either government that has bungled something or um just is
it moved to actually care to do anything to alleviate
the famine. As we'll see. Yeah, what I gathered from
reading this was most famine throughout all of history has
(11:27):
been caused by natural factors, but modern famine, like from
the nineteenth century on, has largely been that plus government factors.
Does that sound about right? I think the very presence
of famine in the globalized era is just because of
(11:50):
governments screwing things up. Yes, because there is enough food
defeat everyone at this point, right, and enough of a
trade supply lines and government aid agency NGOs who are
working to get that food to those people, and prices
that a lot of times there's people standing in their way. Yes.
Another big It can be sort of a domino effect too.
(12:12):
So when you have food security in one place start
to crumble or wayne, uh, then you have another country nearby,
maybe it may start stockpiling for themselves, uh, fewer exports
and protecting their own population, and then that drives up
process prices for people that were depending on importing that
(12:32):
food and it just starts this big vicious cycle, right exactly. Um,
back in two eight there were food riots in Bangladesh
and Haiti and Egypt. Do you remember that because of rice? Right?
It was because of rice. But the global food price
head like when they look at food prices, they look
at baskets of foods around the world, UM, put them
(12:54):
together and say this is how much food costs these days.
It rose between two thousand two and two thousand eight.
Food prices rose a hundred globally, and a lot of
people got priced out of the market. And when they
looked at what happened, apparently that price increase was due
to using food for biofuels, like using crops that normally
(13:18):
would have gone to food, we're being used to create
energy like biofuels, right, And so that drove grain prices
up through the roof because speculators got involved and food
was being diverted from the food supply into the energy supply,
and then crop land was being increasingly diverted to produce
(13:38):
the stuff for the energy supply as well. And it
had a huge effect that just drove food prices up
around the world. One of the big problems that can
contribute to famines. As we'll see in a lot of famines,
there are people still producing food for export because they
can't afford it. But their country starving to death. But
(14:00):
they can't afford it because they don't have the money.
So ts but the rest of us, you have the money,
so keep growing that food. Yeah, it's pretty devastating effect. Uh.
And it's obviously most devastating for um. And you always
hear about this, the two groups, the elderly and the young. UM.
I don't know about the total number of children, but
(14:22):
the stat that I have from the u N, the
most recent STATA have, is that twenty one thousand children
die of hunger every day day yep, every four seconds.
Oh it's awful. Yeah, it's sobering to say the least.
So uh, you know what happens is, especially if you're
(14:45):
young or you're old. Uh, that disease sets in and
little kids and old people can't fight it like um,
you know the parents can. And then you know the
parents are in bad shape too. Well, it's not like
anyone's doing great. When you're malnourished, your immune system starts
to dig cline and when your immune system starts to decline,
that's the disease comes in, especially if um, a group
(15:07):
starts to migrate in search of food, because then you
could be living in um unsanitary conditions and everybody has
lower immune systems and you're basically in a herd. Now
moving like moving to a different place to get food,
and so a disease can just rip through a population.
Well yeah, and and uh that's article points out that
(15:29):
refugees are not often resettled in, you know, the most
hospitable areas either, so uh, moving doesn't necessarily help the
cause in a lot of cases. Um, all right, let's
take a break and we're gonna come back and talk
a little bit about some of the more noteworthy famines
throughout history. All right, So I said, we're gonna talk
(16:20):
about historical famines. I lied, that's coming later. Is that
all right? Yeah? That's fine, all right, So we're gonna talk.
He sent this great article, Um, what was the name
of it? The History of Humanity is a history of hunger.
It was written by a guy named Mark Joseph Stern
on Slate. This is a good one. Yeah. Yeah, he's
(16:41):
basically ringing the bell. He's saying Hey guys, Uh, there
seems to be this movement towards looking at famines as
the result of dictatorships, which we'll get into super interesting. Um,
but let's not forget something else, and it's a little
something called global climate change, because I think from Stearns perspective,
(17:03):
and he doesn't put this explicitly, but he basically says, yes,
dictatorships can have this effect and have had this effect.
That's proven. But really, honestly, that's fairly localized from a
globalized perspective. Right, even if it just happens in China,
that's still technically local as far as the globe is concerned.
(17:25):
And that means that there's other people around the globe
that can help the people in China or Ethiopia or
Ireland or wherever a famine happens. Again, so we've got
stuff in place, but if the entire global food supply
starts to become threatened by climate change, then we're all toast.
I think is ultimately the message of what he's saying. Yeah,
and he he was kind of saying like he kind
(17:46):
of set up really well throughout history and then said,
but nowadays, you know, things have never been better there's
more food than ever. Supply chain is more robust, so
like we shouldn't have anything to worry about, right, like
on a global scale. And that's when he said, you know,
you might want to look at some of these studies
and uh, one of them, there was a report from
the U N inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change and
(18:09):
they said that rising temperatures around the globe are cutting
into global food supply. Um. I think to the point
now where if it continues at current levels, there could
be a two cut in crop harvests each decade moving forward.
And it might not sound like a lot two percent
a decade though, but when you couple that with a
(18:29):
rising population, that's a problem. Um. Especially like in the
short term, you might think, oh, well, you can grow
more food more places if if it's warmer, if things
are melting, Yeah, and certainly more CEO two will increase
yields in the short term, but um, in the long term,
warming trends will make crops wilt, especially near the tropics.
(18:50):
I saw one step that said a three percent I'm sorry,
a three degree celsius increase in temperature at the tropics
could uh cut on crops. So it's you know, it's
a real threat. Yeah. Well, even without a massive temperature
change like that, are an increase in CEO to One
of the trademarks of UM climate change is severe weather,
(19:14):
which we're seeing more and more. It seems too much rain.
Severe weather is not enough. Yeah yeah, or either one
over like a couple of year period you're not going
to be able to grow crops, or you're growing season
is going to be shortened, or the whole crop will
just be wiped out right there at the end, who
knows well. And then the other thing you need to
(19:35):
think about, which he points out, is what we can
invent our way out of this, like technology will take
care of it always. And the study from NASA there's
a more dire wind from NASA than even the U
n one UM that basically says we're screwed UM And
the NASA one says technological change tends to raise both
per capital resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction,
(19:58):
basically meaning it's just it's sort of a net net,
like we can't invent our way out of it, Like
it's net net up to the point where we run
out of resources and then we're toasts. So there is
a big threat from climate change. But what Stern's saying
is actually kind of retro to tell you the truth,
(20:19):
because up until the last couple of decades, everybody looked
at famine as strictly a a natural disaster, and it
it started to become increasingly apparent of what kind of
a man made disaster famine can be, especially when people
(20:40):
started to look at China's Great Famine back as part
of Mao's cultural revolution. So Chuck China I didn't really
realize this. I don't think I didn't know a lot
about it either. There is there's a something called when
Mao took over, when the Communists took over China UM.
One of the things that Mao set his sights on
(21:01):
Chairman Mao Mousley doing was that he wanted to show
the West just how great communism was, the same dream
of Stalin Um. But he also wanted to be the
top guy in the communist world too, so he was
very ambitious and one of the ways to do that
was one of the same path that Stalin had followed,
(21:22):
which was what We've got a lot of agriculture here,
Let's use our agriculture to fund and finance industrialization. We're
gonna shock the system. We're gonna take these old agrarian
backwards ways, we're gonna put him together in this great
communist way, and we're gonna squeeze as much productivity out
(21:43):
of them as we can. We're gonna funnel that money
into the workers in the cities. We're gonna make China
the glorious leader of the world, and we're gonna catch
up to productivity, uh, to the productivity of the UK
or the US within ten years, five years, which is insane.
It's called the Great Leap Forward. Uh. And it was
a five year plan, which you're right it was. It
(22:04):
was I mean to call it ambitious, it was. What
it was was a disaster in the making. Because what
happened was, especially when you live under someone like mouse Tongue,
you're gonna have people that are afraid to tell the
truth about what's going on. So what happened from the
very beginning is officials, either driven by fear or just
(22:24):
because they were so caught up in the movement, started
um exaggerating reports of crop success, like they were literally
reporting like three to five times what they were really
bringing in with their crops. Uh. And then the authorities
came along and basically took those crops to the urban centers,
killed off anyone who had any opposition to this. Well,
(22:47):
I think they will also kill off locally to like
if we were gonna say no, this guy's lying about
crop yields, but the local people would would take care
of you. Yeah, you just disappear. Uh. And so what
happened in this is an actual quote, um mouse tongue said,
to distribute resources evenly will only ruin the great leap forward.
When there's not enough to eat, people starved to death.
(23:08):
It is better to let half the people die so
that the others can eat their fill. So there you
have it, right. It was very clearly a man made famine,
like they were aware of it, um. And you you wonder,
like why were they coming to grab the grain? Well,
grain had turned from something that people produced locally for
basically local consumption, into a national commodity that was used
(23:31):
to feed these workers and then to sell on the
global market to finance the glorious revolution. Right, So when
grain was turned into a commodity and people were given
quotas to meet, if you wanted to get ahead, you
could just say, oh, we had this great great yield
this this year, so we've got all this green. And
there were cases where the Chinese government would come and
(23:54):
requisition more grain than the the than they had then
they'd even grown that based on these false reports. Right,
So people started to starve. Clearly, Mao had no problem
with it because it was the people out in the
and it was the farmers, not the workers, who were starving.
And in three years, the lowest number anyone's willing to
(24:15):
say of the total number of people who died in
three years from this famine is fifteen million people. Yeah,
that's the lowest. That's what the Chinese government itself officially says. Yeah,
I've seen numbers. I've seen a total population loss and
that means thirty five million deaths and forty million people
that weren't born because of all this, So total population
(24:38):
loss of seventy five million um. And it's still apparently,
like I looked into it today, it's very taboo to
even talk about it today in China, and they don't
they don't even call it a famine. They call it, uh,
three years of natural disaster or three years of difficulties.
That's what they call capitalized. Yeah, yeah, like that's the
(24:58):
titial name. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, and apparently the um Yeah,
they don't talk about it. It's it's not obviously not
taught in schools and certainly not taught as the result
of a calamitous um government policy because that same government,
the Communist Party, is still in charge there. But yeah,
(25:20):
that was a huge, enormous famine, and I guess scholarship
on that sorted to open people's eyes about how human
intervention could make a famine much much worse. Same thing
with Ethiopia as well. Um. Ethiopia is almost famous in
a weird way for for famines. Yeah, they were, especially
(25:43):
like you said, if you grew up in the eighties,
it was sort of the face of famine and drought.
It was Ethiopia. Um. And if you go back, you know,
back in time Prime Minister uh melists Zenawi. Um. This
was what more than twenty years ago at this point
that when I mentioned earlier what his vision for the country,
(26:03):
he said, you know, I hope in ten years that
Ethiopians will eat three times a day. And after twenty years,
not only were gonna have enough food, but they're gonna
have the luxury of choosing what they eat. Uh. He
was in office for twenty one years before he died
in power and Uh, things these days aren't a whole
lot better. No, So Um, Like I remember learning about
(26:26):
Ethiopia and their famines, and I just was thinking, like, Wow,
they must have just the worst weather. They've got the
worst luck with weather. Turns out no, they had the
worst luck with governments. Um. So they had a famine
in nineteen seventy three that the government basically just covered up. Yeah,
the Wallow Famine. Yeah. And in that three hundred thousand
(26:49):
people died. Uh. And even though there were there was
actually plenty of food. The reason the family had come
along was because food prices had increased just a little bit,
but the people in the Wallow region were so poor
they couldn't afford the food that was even available to them. Yeah.
And this is nineteen seventy three, the same year that
(27:12):
Emperor Highley Selassie spent thirty five million dollars on his
eightieth birthday celebration. So he's starting it's starting to kind
of become clear what's going on. And then the very
famous famine famous here in the West, the eighty five famine. Um,
everyone who was funding that. That was when band Aid
came out. They had that do they know It's Christmas song? Um?
(27:35):
They had the Live Aid concerts. Phil Collins flew in
the Concorde from London to the Philadelphia to play two
shows at the same night. Do you remember Live Aid?
How old are you? I was eight? Do you remember
it happening? Like? Did you watch it? I remember the
Phil Collins thing, of course you do, because he loved
(27:55):
Phil Collins. Now I totally remember. I was babysitting at
a summer gig, a regular summer gig where I would
baby sitting these kids like for half days, like you know,
money through Friday. And I was babysitting these kids and
we watched Live Aid and I remember seeing, of course
Phil Collins, and I remember seeing the amazing performance by
(28:18):
Queen Like it's still like one of their like hallmark
performances was their Live Aid. Um. But yeah, it was
like it was all over the place USA for Africa
that was one of the big causes because of this famine, right,
and it was great, like there was all these great
pictures of not great pictures, but they were pictures spread
far and wide. They were waking up the west, Like, guys,
(28:40):
there's a huge problem. You gotta give. And band Aid
and live Aid raised a hundred and fifty million dollars
in nine four for famine relief in in Ethiopia. They
had a significant impact. But what no one realized because
the reporters were too lazy to report and the government
was doing a good job covering up. This famine was
(29:03):
not the direct result of a drought or a crop failure.
The government was actually fighting a civil war secretly against
the Um what the group that now makes up Aera Trea,
the err trean Um ethnic group. Uh. And the government
was like napalming the crop lands there, blowing up cargo transports, um,
(29:28):
blowing up farmers markets to affect the food supply and
to create a famine. It was a man made famine. Yeah,
and not only that, you know, I talked about frivolous
spending by the government. They spent that year and uh,
I think three they spent between a hundred million and
two hundred million dollars to celebrate the tenth anniversary of
the revolution, almost up to two d million dollars. So
(29:55):
here's here's the thing. I'm reading this article from Spin
I think it was written in called The Terrible Truth
about band Aid. And so at the time, there are
a lot of aid groups working in Ethiopia, and if
you said anything about how the government was taking this
um like aid money and using it for themselves and
(30:16):
not distributing it correctly. They were trying to put tariffs
and taxes on age shipments into the country just to
make money off of it. If you said anything, your
your group would get kicked out. And apparently Medicine Songs,
Frontier Doctors Without Borders UM had raised the alarms and
they got kicked out of Ethiopia. And they went to
(30:38):
Bob Geldof and said, hey, um, we know you have
a hundred and fifty million dollars that you're about to
give to Ethiopia. Let us tell you what's really going
on there and then you just wait until there's a
stable government to give it to. And he was like, no,
it's fine, it'll be fine. I'd rather I'd rather work
with these devils and help these people out a little
bit then than just not right. And a lot of
(31:01):
people say that he um he was extremely reckless and
basically he gave a hundred and fifty million dollars to
an autocratic government that was creating a famine in its
own country. Is that a new article? It was from?
All right, I need to check that out. Yeah, it's
called the Terrible Truth about Live about band Aid, About
band Aid. Uh. Well, there's a great book in the
(31:22):
same article that's reference that you sent. UM. A Nobel
Prize winning economist name Marcia Sin wrote a book called
Development is Freedom and basically kind of backs up what
we're talking about. Uh. Sin says that, you know, authority,
authoritarian systems are the were the ones who have famines. Uh.
And they went back and did a historical investigation and
these are twenty century famines, thirty major famines that happened.
(31:46):
We're all in countries led by autocratic rule or that
we're under armed conflict at the time. Yeah, and the
the um this article from I don't I wish I
knew who wrote it. I feel terrible, but it was
in huff Po, So there you go. Um. The author said,
there's a country right next to Ethiopia that that has
(32:07):
a lot of the same weather, a lot of the
same soil conditions, growing conditions, crop plant Botswana. They said,
Botswana is a democracy and it has been. Yeah, it
has been since the sixties, and since it's been a democracy,
it's never had a famine. And it's right next door
to Ethiopia. Well yeah, and the whole idea there is
that if resources were not being allocated properly, the people
(32:31):
would have a voice and change the people in power.
But when you're under autocratic rule, you're either completely squashed
or so disregarded that they don't care if you are dying. Basically,
they are in power so and they can't do anything
to change it. They don't need your vote or your
support because they've got a barrel of a gun at you.
(32:52):
That's how they stay in power. Yeah. A group called
Human Rights Watch, which is great. I know we've talked
about them before. Uh. In two thousand ten, they did
a work called Development Without Freedom How AID underwrites repression Ethiopia,
and it just completely confirms all of this that it's
just it's suppression of a people and watching them die
and not caring and it's still going on. So let's
(33:14):
take another break and then we'll talk about Ireland and
then we'll talk about how to combat famines. So, chuck Um,
(33:53):
I think when most people think of famine they think,
if not of Ethiopia and of Ireland, because Ireland had
one heck of a famous famine back in the nineteenth
century that actually created Ireland and the Irish as we
know him today. Yeah, the Irish potato famine. Um are
cohorts are colleagues Tracy and Hollyott. Stuff you miss in
(34:16):
history class. They do one on it. Yeah, did a
great episode just on this. I recommend listening to that.
But um, here's our knuckle headed overview. Uh. This was
also called the Great Irish Famine and their famine of
eighteen forty five to forty nine because that's when it happened. Um.
This was one of the ones that initially was caused
(34:37):
by UH disease, it's called late blight, and it basically
destroyed kind of every part of the potato. Yeah, the leaves,
the roots, which I mean, if you're eating a potato,
the root is what you're after. Um. They had I
guess a cold, rainy spring. Yeah, it's kind of a
(34:59):
per picked storm of bad luck. Right, and this this
microbe showed up from North America accidentally from what we understand,
and so there were three successive years of dead crops.
And one of the reasons why this had such an
impact is that by this time, by the middle of
the nineteenth century in Ireland, there are a lot of
um Irish farmers who were basically subsistence farmers. A lot
(35:23):
of farmers in Ireland were small small land farmers who
are tenant farmers, which means they they work the land
and they had to give up a substantial amount of
their crop yield in this case to Great Britain, which
held Ireland under colonial rule at the time, and then
they could keep a little bit for themselves to keep
their family alive, so they could come out and work
(35:45):
the fields for another day. Right, most of those people
depended almost exclusively on potatoes. Yeah, not only for income,
but like what they ate on a daily basis exactly
so for their nutrition. And not only that, but they
they had whittled it down to just a couple of
varieties of potato. It's like, yeah, it's like that's bad
(36:07):
news if uh, disease strikes or or blight or something
like that. If you've got just a couple of varieties
and your dependent on that as a nation, and they're
both susceptible to that blight yeah, then you're you're screwed.
And that's exactly what happened. Um it said in the
early eighteen forties, almost half the Irish population depended almost
exclusively on the potato for diet, and especially the rural
(36:31):
poor farmers and um in five that uh, that's strain.
It was called fidoh uh phido thora. I think so,
I think there's got to be some silent letters in there.
There's a there's a lot of consonants strung together and
um like you said that came from North America and
(36:52):
everything just rotted and uh, this was the natural part
of it. So then you have England, the controlling body,
um like needs to step in and do something, and
they kind of did, but not a chin up. Keep
that grain coming our way. Yeah, that was a primister
(37:12):
named Sir Robert Peel, and he he provided a little
bit of relief. He authorized the import of corn from
the United States. Helped avoid a little bit of starvation.
But it was certainly not a problem solver. No, and
again they really did say, uh, we're sorry to having
these troubles. We'll see what we can do, but keep
those grain imports coming. Because just like in the wallow
(37:34):
Uh famine in Ethiopia. There were plenty of places in
Ireland where the there was grain in abundance, but the
people growing the green couldn't afford it. And so because
the people elsewhere we're having problems with the potato crop,
the price of food was going through the roof because
(37:56):
there was less food overall, and the people back in
great break and still typically had money to pay for
this food. So they were exporting the stuff out of
Ireland during a famine for their own consumption, including livestock
which must be fed that grain. So to add insul
to injury. They were saying, you guys are starving over there.
(38:18):
Keep exploring that grain, but feed some of it to
your livestock, and then export the livestock to us to eat. Yeah,
and not only that, it was just so compounded. It's
just like so frustrating to look at, like through a
modern lens of like things that they could have done differently.
But um, these poor farmers like you said that they
were farming a lot of time on farms owned by
(38:39):
British absentee landowners. They couldn't farm all of a sudden,
so they weren't getting paid. So then they in turn
couldn't pay rent back to the landowners, and so they
were basically evicted. Hundreds of thousands of tenant farmers were
evicted under these years. And uh there was an eighteen
thirty four there was something called the British Poor Law
(38:59):
and acted in Ireland that said able bodied indigence were
sent to a workhouse rather than given relief. So now
you're sent to a workhouse. You're not even like farming
the land that you lived on to provide for your family, right,
which is a terrible, terrible move in any famine. Part
of the spiral that spiral out of control of famine
(39:20):
is something called livelihood shock, when farmers who can still
conceivably grow um food get priced out of their own
crop land and they can't afford to work any longer.
Your your food supply is taking a further hit, which
you should not allow to happen. But the British government
(39:43):
definitely did allow it to happen. Um the guy who
came after John Peel or Robert Peel, not John Peel.
Um the guy who came after Robert Peel, Lord John Russell.
He did even less than Um Peel did. Basically kicked
it back to Ireland to deal with. But still give
us your your export that grain to us and we'll
(40:05):
just leave it to the free markets. If you ever
leave dealing with the famine to the markets to hammer out,
you have abdicated all responsibility for dealing with that famine. Yeah,
that's not okay. The markets aren't equipped to deal with
the famine, right. The famine happens when the markets break down, right,
and you need assistance to correct that. It doesn't just
(40:28):
work itself out. Uh. So you know, Ireland already is
not so happy to be under the thumb of uh
the British. Um. This got even worse when there was
this sort of attitude among sort of the elite of
of England that, um, you know what this is. This
is really just a sort of a correction because you know,
(40:50):
those Irish all they do is have children, and there
are far too many of them anyway, These poor Irish
people have ten kids. So this is sort of a
necessary correction, um in the long run. Apparently at the
time that was a bit of the mentality of the
intellectuals of England. Yeah, so that's not going to do
yourself any favors as far as getting along and one
(41:12):
of the other things that happened was a consolidation of wealth.
Like all of those small farms that were that people
were getting kicked off of because they couldn't pay their rent.
The their landlords couldn't afford the farms any longer either
because they weren't able to collect rent, And so wealthier
landowners said, I'll buy your farm and your farm and
(41:32):
your farm and your farm, and you're farming here, go
buy some corn. You can get it from the soup
kitchen over here. And then they put it together. So
these small farms that farming these communities now we're single
large farms owned by single wealthy landowners. As a result,
it's kind of like that's saying, if there's blood in
the streets by real estate, that's what those guys were doing.
(41:52):
Not cool. So in the end, this had a huge
effect on the I mean, the way you put in
this article the Dimmock graphic history of Ireland um directly
caused from the famine. Their population of about eight point
four million in eighteen eight sorry eighteen forty four fell
to six point six million, uh just seven years later,
(42:15):
and about a million people died literally just died from starvation,
and by the time Ireland achieved independence in nineteen one.
In twenty one, the population was barely half of what
it was in the early eighteen forties. Yeah, because that's
not supposed to happen. Death and emigration, Yeah, how many
like people? Uh? Another two I think a million died
(42:38):
in another two million immigrated as a result. New York City, baby, Yeah,
that's how New York got to be in New York.
So we've got, um, we've got a pretty good idea
of what famines are, how they happen. There is still
that struggle between how much of it is man made
how much of it is natural. I think it's a
combination of the two at this time. Sure, but how
(43:00):
do you prevent something like a famine? Chuck Well, Um,
there's a lot of controversy and um, there's a lot
of controversy surrounding it. A lot of people rightfully are
saying that even AID groups like what we're doing is
putting a band aid on something, and they're not like
(43:21):
getting to the root of some of these problems. And
aid is great, you know, it's keeping people alive. They're
not saying don't do that, but it's not addressing the
real problems, right, and apparently the real problems are autocratic rule.
Well want one of them for sure. Yeah. Another one
is you know, just food education. Um, there are food
for work programs which apparently are working out pretty good.
(43:43):
So they'll have you know, I think they will deliver
some food aid to get people able bodied enough to work,
and then um, try and get people working on infrastructure
jobs in the country. UM, and exchange for food. Yeah,
in exchange for food, and I would imagine money. I
don't know for sure, but I don't think it's straight
up food. I wonder if like, yeah, I wonder maybe
(44:06):
it seems like could be a combination the two or
maybe not. I don't know. Another one is hashing out
early warning signs. Probably they have different UM scales now
of food security to kind of gauge where a country
is as far as it's spiral towards famine, like don't
(44:27):
wait till you're seeing the unit SEF commercial before you act.
But not only that, you government of this, this the
people that are about to enter into a famine. You
need to do certain things like there's a famine that
UM is. I believe Ethiopia is on the verge of
another one again right now. And part of the problem
is the government denied that this was that this was happening,
(44:51):
that there was going to be a famine. They said,
we have food security and they said the author of
that huff Po article pointed out, no, there's plenty of food,
but it's too expensive in a lot of places, so
that's not food security. And they didn't do enough, Like
they didn't tell um cattle herders to move their their
um herds closer to like reliable water sources. They didn't.
(45:13):
There's steps and actions that governments that care about their people,
or care at least about the food supply um can take.
And there are early warning signs and apparently they are
born out of famine codes from nineteenth century India. India
had a string of famines in the nineteenth century that
killed like seventeen million people, so they really started to
(45:34):
pay attention to what made up the warning signs or
fam of famine. Well, there's something it was created in
nineteen eighty five and it may have been based on
what you're talking about, called the Famine Early Warning Systems Network,
and they monitor these trends and food prices, UH, food
security and basically you can compare it to other years,
other areas and right now because I want to see
(45:56):
like kind of what the current state of the world was,
there is a global alert UM emergency food assistant needs
ON needs are unprecedented. And these four areas right now, Nigeria, Yemen,
South Sudan and Somalia are the most of the areas
of the highest concern and has the reasons of concern
(46:19):
right here Nigeria the Boco Harem conflict. So there you
have it right, Yeah, it doesn't have to be a
dictatorship being lazy. You can be in the middle of
a war torn country and people aren't growing crops like
they normally do when a wars not on. So there's one.
In Yemen, extensive conflict has reduced incomes and food prices
(46:40):
remain elevated. Uh South Sudan conflict severely disrupted trade, humanitarian
access in livelihoods. And finally Somalia. Somalia was the only
one of the four that seemed like it was weather
related and it said that UM the December on aus
pronounced the y r season. There two rainy seasons, the
(47:03):
goose season and the day are or dear der season,
and apparently they've both been below average. So it looks
like in Somalia it's due to rainfall, but elsewhere it's
you know, conflict, conflict, conflict. So if you care, if
you want to help, if you want to make a difference,
look around, do your research, find an aid group that
(47:23):
you feel good about, and uh, give money, give time,
do something. Don't just sit back and eat your big
mac and forget about the whole thing. I agreed. If
you want to know more about famine, you can type
that word into the search part how stuff works dot com.
Since I said search parts time for a listener mail.
I think this one Trump's homelessness. Surely we won't get
(47:45):
an email saying that people deserve children, does deserve to
die every four seconds? I don't know if we do,
we'll get they'll all start with I believe in a
vengeful God. Alright, I'm gonna call this one. Uh. Whatever
happened to super fan Sarah? Remember that? Remember Sarah Sparrow,
the amazing twelve year old fan? Right? Yeah, so I
(48:06):
listened to several podcasts per day, guys, Uh, to learn
something and to drown out the buzz of the office.
I work in I was going through so many that
I had caught up to the President forcing me to
dig way back to the archive instead of waiting for
the newest one. So he's sandwiching, right, That's fine, it's
the way to do it. At the end of the
podcast in two thousand and ten about grandfather's diets shortening
(48:28):
our lives, um fascinating. By the way, this is June
two ten. You've got the email from Sarah who had
been listening to the show, uh since she was eleven.
At the time she was thirteen. You mentioned you should
go to a high school graduation and be the keynote speaker.
You were still doing this. Well, my math is right then. Uh,
(48:48):
Sarah is twenty years old and halfway through college. So
I hope you guys don't feel too old. But I
think is an exceptional accomplishment. You're still doing the show.
You're more popular than ever. Keep up the good work,
Josh Taylor and Josh you know he asked about Sarah.
Sadly we haven't heard from Sarah in years. Were like
the giving tree, we got ditched, she ditched us and
(49:11):
um or she just you know, still listens and doesn't
right in it's playing it cool. Maybe so well she is.
You know, it's twenty years old. It's not super cool
to still be the Sarah the amazing seven year old
for eleven year old band. You're smelly old pseudo uncles.
But Sarah, if you were out there, hit us up, yeah,
(49:31):
say hi, send us an email. We would love, love,
love to hear from you. Yeah, well even guaranteed read
it on the on the air, and you know what
that goes for you too, Sam who is in college
Summer of Sam Sam. So all of our younger listeners, like,
they girl up and they forget about us. It's so sad,
but then they turned like and they'll come back. They'll
(49:54):
be back. Well, if you want to get in touch
of this for a while, make us feel pretty good
and then forget about us, you can start by tweeting
to us at s Y s K podcast. You can
join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know.
You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at
how stuff Works dot com and has always joined uswitter
home on the web Stuff you Should Know dot com
(50:19):
For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff Works dot com
So hey, let's talk about this cool new podcasting push
called tripod hashtag tripod. There's this really cool thing going
on right now the podcasting industry, which is one thing
I love about the podcasting industry is that we all
like try to support one another. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah,
Like what's good for us is good for other shows.
It's like, uh, all boats ride with the rides with
(00:23):
the tide or something. That's right. So there's this new
push going on. It's this cool program called tripod t
r y pod as in try a pod, right, get it? Yeah?
And the whole basis of this is that we podcasters
are asking you podcast listeners to go tell a friend
(00:43):
to go try podcast not necessarily ours. I mean, if
you want to recommend stuff, you should know, we're always
fine with that. But even if it's some other one
that um that you like or love even more, just
turned a friend onto podcasting is basically the whole point. Yeah,
I mean you're probably gonna hear this on a lot
of podcasts. And the the whole deal is, even though
podcasting has come a long way since we've started, it's
(01:05):
still sort of a baby of a medium. Yeah, half
of a half of a percent is what we always
say in the podcasting industry. But a lot of people
still don't even know what podcasts are. So, uh, get
out there, tell a family member, tell a friend what
podcasts are. Recommend when you like, tell them how to
get it. Uh, you know, just go out in your
backyard and put your ear to the sky until you
(01:27):
hear a podcast. Yeah, that's a big one too, because
a lot of people are like, Okay, sure I've heard
a podcast, I have no idea where to start. Yeah,
so recommend a good way to listen, maybe how you listen.
And we really appreciate it, Like the whole industry appreciates
you spreading the word. That's how we grow and that's
how we've grown on behalf of the entire podcasting industry.
Thank you. Welcome to Stuff you should Know from House
(01:52):
Stuff Works dot com. Hey, I'm welcome to the podcast
on Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry
did jeer stir that should we say what just happened here?
Or focus like, oh, what is this? Probably twenty something
(02:16):
thirty something episodes, Let's get up there and for the
first time ever, right before we went go, Jerry said, focus,
what does that mean? Usually she goes, huh what I
don't get It is just me so bothering you guys, right, exactly,
the smell that's so Jerry. Focus Alright. I feel pressure now,
(02:38):
yeah I do. I'm a little off now, Jerry. So yeah,
that worked. All right, let's concentrate. All right. So we're
talking Chuck about use your eye okay, yeah, I got
something large in it. We're talking about famine today, yes,
which goes with our super sad uh horrific geo political
(03:00):
catastrophe sweets. Yeah, this probably will not be chock full
of humor. No, I try to think of a way
to insert some jokes. There's not unless we go on
a tangent. Do you remember the eighties stand up comedians,
like they would make just the worst jokes that just
would not fly, Like they get chased off stage by
people with like like just the jokes they would make
(03:22):
aids jokes and and famine jokes. Yea, yeah, he's just
like the material they would make jokes about, and they
like they weren't even remotely funny, you know, it was
not not nuance or smarts or anything. Yeah, I think
as Sam Kennison made like starving Ethiopian kid jokes, give
him a sandwich, cameraman, wouldn't him? Was that him? I
(03:46):
think so, like just people can't do that today. It's
a different world. So yeah, there probably won't be any
jokes in this one. Uh, what there will be is
tons of information and hopefully everybody who will understand famines
after this can come together and prevent them for the
rest of eternity, unless climate change gets that says we'll
(04:08):
see at the end. Yes, I just spoiled it though,
didn't I. I'm glad you said that was relevant. Yeah,
so everybody has a pretty good idea of what famine is.
It's when you run out of food and a bunch
of people start dying. That's actually pretty close to the
real definition. But there's this guy who's a scholar of famine.
(04:30):
His name is Cormac o Grata and he um has
written several books on famines and studied famines and he's
a pretty sharp tack. So people kind of looked at
him to say, what's the actual definition of a famine
and he says in his best Irish accent, Uh, it's
a lot like malnutrition. But it's a lot worse. There's
(04:52):
a lot more crisis, there's a lot more death. YEA. Specifically,
he says, it's a shortage of food or purchasing power
that leads directly to excess mortality from starvation or hunger
induced diseases. And um, that's an important addition because it's
not just hunger starvation related, but all the disease that
(05:15):
comes along with that that can kill people very much
more easily because you're so under nourished. Right, And we'll
find out too, it's a It forms a bit of
a vicious cycle because people start to get hungry and
start to starve and start to suffer from disease. They
have an even harder time, say, working in field produce crops,
(05:35):
and so the whole thing just keeps getting worse and
worse and worse. Once it passes um breaking point, it
really starts to spiral out of control. Yeah, it's a
it's a three pronged terror of poverty, hunger, and disease,
all contributing to one another. Right. So, Cormeco grads definition
(05:57):
of a famine is a daily death rate um of
above one per ten thousand people. Is that ten thousand? Yeah, alright,
I had a period and not a comma. That's uh,
that's European and I didn't, is it. It's gotta be
because that didn't. That's like point zero zero zero one
(06:20):
percent of the population per day, is that right? Yeah?
I think that is ten thousand, because just off the
top of my head, like the normal American death rate
is like eight hundred and twenty three per one hundred
thousand people, So that is significantly more daily death rate.
That's the first characteristic. Yeah. Number two is the proportion
(06:40):
of wasted children is above and wasted means there there
muscle masses withering away due to starvation. Yeah. Technically it
means they weigh too standard deviations or more below average.
And just that term itself is like the most heartbreaking
thing you can wasted children. Yeah, in any sense, that's
(07:02):
not a good thing, because especially when it has to
do with famine. Uh. And then finally, the prevalence of
what's called quash or core, which is um it's basically
an extreme malnutrition due to protein deficiency. Yeah, and those
pictures everybody who grew up in the eighties and saw
the pictures of the starving children in Africa that were
(07:24):
just little skin and bone kids, but they had these
huge bloated pot bellies. That's a classic hallmark of quash core. Yeah,
very sad. Yeah uh. And then he went on to
qualify further with severe famine that means a daily death
rate above five out of ten thousand, uh, proportion of
wasted children above and then that same quash or core prevalence. Right,
(07:49):
So if quash your core is around, you got a
famine on your hands. That's not a normal thing that
happens in a normal food secure population. Yeah. And that's
that's the main distinguishing factor between famine and just what
you would consider malnutrition. And this is all tied into
what we call food security, right, and we we we
(08:11):
talked about food security before, I think maybe in desertification
or something like that. Yeah, I know we have at
some point, but we talked a lot about the food
the green Revolution to which factors in but um, food
security is that means you have you have food available,
you can get to that food or that food can
get to you readily, and you can use that food
(08:32):
to meet your health needs. You can leverage it to
make your population healthy. Yeah, Like if it's if your
entire countries food supply is twinkies. You do not have
food security. There's an abundance of it. People can get
to it very easily. It's probably affordable for everybody, but
it's not nutritious. Or if your country has nothing but
(08:52):
like the finest fruits and vegetables and proteins, but only
the very wealthy have access to it because it's too expensive, well,
you don't have food security. So, according to the u N,
if you have food security in a nation, all people
at all times have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe,
(09:13):
and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and get
this food preferences for an active and healthy life. Yeah,
which I mean we'll talk about Ethiopia some later, but
at one point the goal was, which they you know,
never met, was that not only would they have food
one day readily available, but be able to choose what
(09:33):
they wanted to eat. Like there's something you don't think about.
You really take that for granted here in the United
States and elsewhere. Um, it's not just having food, but like,
oh I might like to eat this or that. You know, uh,
all right, so a lot of things can affect this
food security. UM. And We're gonna talk about all these
as throughout the show as they relate to famine. But
(09:54):
obviously you think of natural disasters first, and probably drought first. Yeah,
that's a that's a big one. If you don't have
water and rain, you can't grow crops, usually uh, crop blight,
which we'll talk a little bit about the potato famine
in Ireland later on. Um, but any kind of disease pest,
(10:16):
even like over abundance of weeds, could conceivably ruin a
crop flooding, extraordinarily cold weather, extraordinarily hot weather, we'll just
say weather patterns in general, Yes, severe weather. And then
a big one which a lot of people, a lot
of people I think, mainly think of natural disasters or
natural factors, and political conflict is one of the big, big,
(10:40):
big contributors. So here's this is what we're coming to
though eventually, is there's a big debate on what causes famine.
And for many, many years everyone said, well, don't be dump,
droughts caused famine, right, But studies, much more recent studies
have found that actually, if you kind of peek behind
(11:01):
the curtain a little bit, yeah, there was a drought
and it started the famine, But what actually caused the
famine or caused it to be horrible is usually government,
either government that has bungled something or um just is
it moved to actually care to do anything to alleviate
the famine. As we'll see. Yeah, what I gathered from
reading this was most famine throughout all of history has
(11:27):
been caused by natural factors, but modern famine, like from
the nineteenth century on, has largely been that plus government factors.
Does that sound about right? I think the very presence
of famine in the globalized era is just because of
(11:50):
governments screwing things up. Yes, because there is enough food
defeat everyone at this point, right, and enough of a
trade supply lines and government aid agency NGOs who are
working to get that food to those people, and prices
that a lot of times there's people standing in their way. Yes.
Another big It can be sort of a domino effect too.
(12:12):
So when you have food security in one place start
to crumble or wayne, uh, then you have another country nearby,
maybe it may start stockpiling for themselves, uh, fewer exports
and protecting their own population, and then that drives up
process prices for people that were depending on importing that
(12:32):
food and it just starts this big vicious cycle, right exactly. Um,
back in two eight there were food riots in Bangladesh
and Haiti and Egypt. Do you remember that because of rice? Right?
It was because of rice. But the global food price
head like when they look at food prices, they look
at baskets of foods around the world, UM, put them
(12:54):
together and say this is how much food costs these days.
It rose between two thousand two and two thousand eight.
Food prices rose a hundred globally, and a lot of
people got priced out of the market. And when they
looked at what happened, apparently that price increase was due
to using food for biofuels, like using crops that normally
(13:18):
would have gone to food, we're being used to create
energy like biofuels, right, And so that drove grain prices
up through the roof because speculators got involved and food
was being diverted from the food supply into the energy supply,
and then crop land was being increasingly diverted to produce
(13:38):
the stuff for the energy supply as well. And it
had a huge effect that just drove food prices up
around the world. One of the big problems that can
contribute to famines. As we'll see in a lot of famines,
there are people still producing food for export because they
can't afford it. But their country starving to death. But
(14:00):
they can't afford it because they don't have the money.
So ts but the rest of us, you have the money,
so keep growing that food. Yeah, it's pretty devastating effect. Uh.
And it's obviously most devastating for um. And you always
hear about this, the two groups, the elderly and the young. UM.
I don't know about the total number of children, but
(14:22):
the stat that I have from the u N, the
most recent STATA have, is that twenty one thousand children
die of hunger every day day yep, every four seconds.
Oh it's awful. Yeah, it's sobering to say the least.
So uh, you know what happens is, especially if you're
(14:45):
young or you're old. Uh, that disease sets in and
little kids and old people can't fight it like um,
you know the parents can. And then you know the
parents are in bad shape too. Well, it's not like
anyone's doing great. When you're malnourished, your immune system starts
to dig cline and when your immune system starts to decline,
that's the disease comes in, especially if um, a group
(15:07):
starts to migrate in search of food, because then you
could be living in um unsanitary conditions and everybody has
lower immune systems and you're basically in a herd. Now
moving like moving to a different place to get food,
and so a disease can just rip through a population.
Well yeah, and and uh that's article points out that
(15:29):
refugees are not often resettled in, you know, the most
hospitable areas either, so uh, moving doesn't necessarily help the
cause in a lot of cases. Um, all right, let's
take a break and we're gonna come back and talk
a little bit about some of the more noteworthy famines
throughout history. All right, So I said, we're gonna talk
(16:20):
about historical famines. I lied, that's coming later. Is that
all right? Yeah? That's fine, all right, So we're gonna talk.
He sent this great article, Um, what was the name
of it? The History of Humanity is a history of hunger.
It was written by a guy named Mark Joseph Stern
on Slate. This is a good one. Yeah. Yeah, he's
(16:41):
basically ringing the bell. He's saying Hey guys, Uh, there
seems to be this movement towards looking at famines as
the result of dictatorships, which we'll get into super interesting. Um,
but let's not forget something else, and it's a little
something called global climate change, because I think from Stearns perspective,
(17:03):
and he doesn't put this explicitly, but he basically says, yes,
dictatorships can have this effect and have had this effect.
That's proven. But really, honestly, that's fairly localized from a
globalized perspective. Right, even if it just happens in China,
that's still technically local as far as the globe is concerned.
(17:25):
And that means that there's other people around the globe
that can help the people in China or Ethiopia or
Ireland or wherever a famine happens. Again, so we've got
stuff in place, but if the entire global food supply
starts to become threatened by climate change, then we're all toast.
I think is ultimately the message of what he's saying. Yeah,
and he he was kind of saying like he kind
(17:46):
of set up really well throughout history and then said,
but nowadays, you know, things have never been better there's
more food than ever. Supply chain is more robust, so
like we shouldn't have anything to worry about, right, like
on a global scale. And that's when he said, you know,
you might want to look at some of these studies
and uh, one of them, there was a report from
the U N inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change and
(18:09):
they said that rising temperatures around the globe are cutting
into global food supply. Um. I think to the point
now where if it continues at current levels, there could
be a two cut in crop harvests each decade moving forward.
And it might not sound like a lot two percent
a decade though, but when you couple that with a
(18:29):
rising population, that's a problem. Um. Especially like in the
short term, you might think, oh, well, you can grow
more food more places if if it's warmer, if things
are melting, Yeah, and certainly more CEO two will increase
yields in the short term, but um, in the long term,
warming trends will make crops wilt, especially near the tropics.
(18:50):
I saw one step that said a three percent I'm sorry,
a three degree celsius increase in temperature at the tropics
could uh cut on crops. So it's you know, it's
a real threat. Yeah. Well, even without a massive temperature
change like that, are an increase in CEO to One
of the trademarks of UM climate change is severe weather,
(19:14):
which we're seeing more and more. It seems too much rain.
Severe weather is not enough. Yeah yeah, or either one
over like a couple of year period you're not going
to be able to grow crops, or you're growing season
is going to be shortened, or the whole crop will
just be wiped out right there at the end, who
knows well. And then the other thing you need to
(19:35):
think about, which he points out, is what we can
invent our way out of this, like technology will take
care of it always. And the study from NASA there's
a more dire wind from NASA than even the U
n one UM that basically says we're screwed UM And
the NASA one says technological change tends to raise both
per capital resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction,
(19:58):
basically meaning it's just it's sort of a net net,
like we can't invent our way out of it, Like
it's net net up to the point where we run
out of resources and then we're toasts. So there is
a big threat from climate change. But what Stern's saying
is actually kind of retro to tell you the truth,
(20:19):
because up until the last couple of decades, everybody looked
at famine as strictly a a natural disaster, and it
it started to become increasingly apparent of what kind of
a man made disaster famine can be, especially when people
(20:40):
started to look at China's Great Famine back as part
of Mao's cultural revolution. So Chuck China I didn't really
realize this. I don't think I didn't know a lot
about it either. There is there's a something called when
Mao took over, when the Communists took over China UM.
One of the things that Mao set his sights on
(21:01):
Chairman Mao Mousley doing was that he wanted to show
the West just how great communism was, the same dream
of Stalin Um. But he also wanted to be the
top guy in the communist world too, so he was
very ambitious and one of the ways to do that
was one of the same path that Stalin had followed,
(21:22):
which was what We've got a lot of agriculture here,
Let's use our agriculture to fund and finance industrialization. We're
gonna shock the system. We're gonna take these old agrarian
backwards ways, we're gonna put him together in this great
communist way, and we're gonna squeeze as much productivity out
(21:43):
of them as we can. We're gonna funnel that money
into the workers in the cities. We're gonna make China
the glorious leader of the world, and we're gonna catch
up to productivity, uh, to the productivity of the UK
or the US within ten years, five years, which is insane.
It's called the Great Leap Forward. Uh. And it was
a five year plan, which you're right it was. It
(22:04):
was I mean to call it ambitious, it was. What
it was was a disaster in the making. Because what
happened was, especially when you live under someone like mouse Tongue,
you're gonna have people that are afraid to tell the
truth about what's going on. So what happened from the
very beginning is officials, either driven by fear or just
(22:24):
because they were so caught up in the movement, started
um exaggerating reports of crop success, like they were literally
reporting like three to five times what they were really
bringing in with their crops. Uh. And then the authorities
came along and basically took those crops to the urban centers,
killed off anyone who had any opposition to this. Well,
(22:47):
I think they will also kill off locally to like
if we were gonna say no, this guy's lying about
crop yields, but the local people would would take care
of you. Yeah, you just disappear. Uh. And so what
happened in this is an actual quote, um mouse tongue said,
to distribute resources evenly will only ruin the great leap forward.
When there's not enough to eat, people starved to death.
(23:08):
It is better to let half the people die so
that the others can eat their fill. So there you
have it, right. It was very clearly a man made famine,
like they were aware of it, um. And you you wonder,
like why were they coming to grab the grain? Well,
grain had turned from something that people produced locally for
basically local consumption, into a national commodity that was used
(23:31):
to feed these workers and then to sell on the
global market to finance the glorious revolution. Right, So when
grain was turned into a commodity and people were given
quotas to meet, if you wanted to get ahead, you
could just say, oh, we had this great great yield
this this year, so we've got all this green. And
there were cases where the Chinese government would come and
(23:54):
requisition more grain than the the than they had then
they'd even grown that based on these false reports. Right,
So people started to starve. Clearly, Mao had no problem
with it because it was the people out in the
and it was the farmers, not the workers, who were starving.
And in three years, the lowest number anyone's willing to
(24:15):
say of the total number of people who died in
three years from this famine is fifteen million people. Yeah,
that's the lowest. That's what the Chinese government itself officially says. Yeah,
I've seen numbers. I've seen a total population loss and
that means thirty five million deaths and forty million people
that weren't born because of all this, So total population
(24:38):
loss of seventy five million um. And it's still apparently,
like I looked into it today, it's very taboo to
even talk about it today in China, and they don't
they don't even call it a famine. They call it, uh,
three years of natural disaster or three years of difficulties.
That's what they call capitalized. Yeah, yeah, like that's the
(24:58):
titial name. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, and apparently the um Yeah,
they don't talk about it. It's it's not obviously not
taught in schools and certainly not taught as the result
of a calamitous um government policy because that same government,
the Communist Party, is still in charge there. But yeah,
(25:20):
that was a huge, enormous famine, and I guess scholarship
on that sorted to open people's eyes about how human
intervention could make a famine much much worse. Same thing
with Ethiopia as well. Um. Ethiopia is almost famous in
a weird way for for famines. Yeah, they were, especially
(25:43):
like you said, if you grew up in the eighties,
it was sort of the face of famine and drought.
It was Ethiopia. Um. And if you go back, you know,
back in time Prime Minister uh melists Zenawi. Um. This
was what more than twenty years ago at this point
that when I mentioned earlier what his vision for the country,
(26:03):
he said, you know, I hope in ten years that
Ethiopians will eat three times a day. And after twenty years,
not only were gonna have enough food, but they're gonna
have the luxury of choosing what they eat. Uh. He
was in office for twenty one years before he died
in power and Uh, things these days aren't a whole
lot better. No, So Um, Like I remember learning about
(26:26):
Ethiopia and their famines, and I just was thinking, like, Wow,
they must have just the worst weather. They've got the
worst luck with weather. Turns out no, they had the
worst luck with governments. Um. So they had a famine
in nineteen seventy three that the government basically just covered up. Yeah,
the Wallow Famine. Yeah. And in that three hundred thousand
(26:49):
people died. Uh. And even though there were there was
actually plenty of food. The reason the family had come
along was because food prices had increased just a little bit,
but the people in the Wallow region were so poor
they couldn't afford the food that was even available to them. Yeah.
And this is nineteen seventy three, the same year that
(27:12):
Emperor Highley Selassie spent thirty five million dollars on his
eightieth birthday celebration. So he's starting it's starting to kind
of become clear what's going on. And then the very
famous famine famous here in the West, the eighty five famine. Um,
everyone who was funding that. That was when band Aid
came out. They had that do they know It's Christmas song? Um?
(27:35):
They had the Live Aid concerts. Phil Collins flew in
the Concorde from London to the Philadelphia to play two
shows at the same night. Do you remember Live Aid?
How old are you? I was eight? Do you remember
it happening? Like? Did you watch it? I remember the
Phil Collins thing, of course you do, because he loved
(27:55):
Phil Collins. Now I totally remember. I was babysitting at
a summer gig, a regular summer gig where I would
baby sitting these kids like for half days, like you know,
money through Friday. And I was babysitting these kids and
we watched Live Aid and I remember seeing, of course
Phil Collins, and I remember seeing the amazing performance by
(28:18):
Queen Like it's still like one of their like hallmark
performances was their Live Aid. Um. But yeah, it was
like it was all over the place USA for Africa
that was one of the big causes because of this famine, right,
and it was great, like there was all these great
pictures of not great pictures, but they were pictures spread
far and wide. They were waking up the west, Like, guys,
(28:40):
there's a huge problem. You gotta give. And band Aid
and live Aid raised a hundred and fifty million dollars
in nine four for famine relief in in Ethiopia. They
had a significant impact. But what no one realized because
the reporters were too lazy to report and the government
was doing a good job covering up. This famine was
(29:03):
not the direct result of a drought or a crop failure.
The government was actually fighting a civil war secretly against
the Um what the group that now makes up Aera Trea,
the err trean Um ethnic group. Uh. And the government
was like napalming the crop lands there, blowing up cargo transports, um,
(29:28):
blowing up farmers markets to affect the food supply and
to create a famine. It was a man made famine. Yeah,
and not only that, you know, I talked about frivolous
spending by the government. They spent that year and uh,
I think three they spent between a hundred million and
two hundred million dollars to celebrate the tenth anniversary of
the revolution, almost up to two d million dollars. So
(29:55):
here's here's the thing. I'm reading this article from Spin
I think it was written in called The Terrible Truth
about band Aid. And so at the time, there are
a lot of aid groups working in Ethiopia, and if
you said anything about how the government was taking this
um like aid money and using it for themselves and
(30:16):
not distributing it correctly. They were trying to put tariffs
and taxes on age shipments into the country just to
make money off of it. If you said anything, your
your group would get kicked out. And apparently Medicine Songs,
Frontier Doctors Without Borders UM had raised the alarms and
they got kicked out of Ethiopia. And they went to
(30:38):
Bob Geldof and said, hey, um, we know you have
a hundred and fifty million dollars that you're about to
give to Ethiopia. Let us tell you what's really going
on there and then you just wait until there's a
stable government to give it to. And he was like, no,
it's fine, it'll be fine. I'd rather I'd rather work
with these devils and help these people out a little
bit then than just not right. And a lot of
(31:01):
people say that he um he was extremely reckless and
basically he gave a hundred and fifty million dollars to
an autocratic government that was creating a famine in its
own country. Is that a new article? It was from?
All right, I need to check that out. Yeah, it's
called the Terrible Truth about Live about band Aid, About
band Aid. Uh. Well, there's a great book in the
(31:22):
same article that's reference that you sent. UM. A Nobel
Prize winning economist name Marcia Sin wrote a book called
Development is Freedom and basically kind of backs up what
we're talking about. Uh. Sin says that, you know, authority,
authoritarian systems are the were the ones who have famines. Uh.
And they went back and did a historical investigation and
these are twenty century famines, thirty major famines that happened.
(31:46):
We're all in countries led by autocratic rule or that
we're under armed conflict at the time. Yeah, and the
the um this article from I don't I wish I
knew who wrote it. I feel terrible, but it was
in huff Po, So there you go. Um. The author said,
there's a country right next to Ethiopia that that has
(32:07):
a lot of the same weather, a lot of the
same soil conditions, growing conditions, crop plant Botswana. They said,
Botswana is a democracy and it has been. Yeah, it
has been since the sixties, and since it's been a democracy,
it's never had a famine. And it's right next door
to Ethiopia. Well yeah, and the whole idea there is
that if resources were not being allocated properly, the people
(32:31):
would have a voice and change the people in power.
But when you're under autocratic rule, you're either completely squashed
or so disregarded that they don't care if you are dying. Basically,
they are in power so and they can't do anything
to change it. They don't need your vote or your
support because they've got a barrel of a gun at you.
(32:52):
That's how they stay in power. Yeah. A group called
Human Rights Watch, which is great. I know we've talked
about them before. Uh. In two thousand ten, they did
a work called Development Without Freedom How AID underwrites repression Ethiopia,
and it just completely confirms all of this that it's
just it's suppression of a people and watching them die
and not caring and it's still going on. So let's
(33:14):
take another break and then we'll talk about Ireland and
then we'll talk about how to combat famines. So, chuck Um,
(33:53):
I think when most people think of famine they think,
if not of Ethiopia and of Ireland, because Ireland had
one heck of a famous famine back in the nineteenth
century that actually created Ireland and the Irish as we
know him today. Yeah, the Irish potato famine. Um are
cohorts are colleagues Tracy and Hollyott. Stuff you miss in
(34:16):
history class. They do one on it. Yeah, did a
great episode just on this. I recommend listening to that.
But um, here's our knuckle headed overview. Uh. This was
also called the Great Irish Famine and their famine of
eighteen forty five to forty nine because that's when it happened. Um.
This was one of the ones that initially was caused
(34:37):
by UH disease, it's called late blight, and it basically
destroyed kind of every part of the potato. Yeah, the leaves,
the roots, which I mean, if you're eating a potato,
the root is what you're after. Um. They had I
guess a cold, rainy spring. Yeah, it's kind of a
(34:59):
per picked storm of bad luck. Right, and this this
microbe showed up from North America accidentally from what we understand,
and so there were three successive years of dead crops.
And one of the reasons why this had such an
impact is that by this time, by the middle of
the nineteenth century in Ireland, there are a lot of
um Irish farmers who were basically subsistence farmers. A lot
(35:23):
of farmers in Ireland were small small land farmers who
are tenant farmers, which means they they work the land
and they had to give up a substantial amount of
their crop yield in this case to Great Britain, which
held Ireland under colonial rule at the time, and then
they could keep a little bit for themselves to keep
their family alive, so they could come out and work
(35:45):
the fields for another day. Right, most of those people
depended almost exclusively on potatoes. Yeah, not only for income,
but like what they ate on a daily basis exactly
so for their nutrition. And not only that, but they
they had whittled it down to just a couple of
varieties of potato. It's like, yeah, it's like that's bad
(36:07):
news if uh, disease strikes or or blight or something
like that. If you've got just a couple of varieties
and your dependent on that as a nation, and they're
both susceptible to that blight yeah, then you're you're screwed.
And that's exactly what happened. Um it said in the
early eighteen forties, almost half the Irish population depended almost
exclusively on the potato for diet, and especially the rural
(36:31):
poor farmers and um in five that uh, that's strain.
It was called fidoh uh phido thora. I think so,
I think there's got to be some silent letters in there.
There's a there's a lot of consonants strung together and
um like you said that came from North America and
(36:52):
everything just rotted and uh, this was the natural part
of it. So then you have England, the controlling body,
um like needs to step in and do something, and
they kind of did, but not a chin up. Keep
that grain coming our way. Yeah, that was a primister
(37:12):
named Sir Robert Peel, and he he provided a little
bit of relief. He authorized the import of corn from
the United States. Helped avoid a little bit of starvation.
But it was certainly not a problem solver. No, and
again they really did say, uh, we're sorry to having
these troubles. We'll see what we can do, but keep
those grain imports coming. Because just like in the wallow
(37:34):
Uh famine in Ethiopia. There were plenty of places in
Ireland where the there was grain in abundance, but the
people growing the green couldn't afford it. And so because
the people elsewhere we're having problems with the potato crop,
the price of food was going through the roof because
(37:56):
there was less food overall, and the people back in
great break and still typically had money to pay for
this food. So they were exporting the stuff out of
Ireland during a famine for their own consumption, including livestock
which must be fed that grain. So to add insul
to injury. They were saying, you guys are starving over there.
(38:18):
Keep exploring that grain, but feed some of it to
your livestock, and then export the livestock to us to eat. Yeah,
and not only that, it was just so compounded. It's
just like so frustrating to look at, like through a
modern lens of like things that they could have done differently.
But um, these poor farmers like you said that they
were farming a lot of time on farms owned by
(38:39):
British absentee landowners. They couldn't farm all of a sudden,
so they weren't getting paid. So then they in turn
couldn't pay rent back to the landowners, and so they
were basically evicted. Hundreds of thousands of tenant farmers were
evicted under these years. And uh there was an eighteen
thirty four there was something called the British Poor Law
(38:59):
and acted in Ireland that said able bodied indigence were
sent to a workhouse rather than given relief. So now
you're sent to a workhouse. You're not even like farming
the land that you lived on to provide for your family, right,
which is a terrible, terrible move in any famine. Part
of the spiral that spiral out of control of famine
(39:20):
is something called livelihood shock, when farmers who can still
conceivably grow um food get priced out of their own
crop land and they can't afford to work any longer.
Your your food supply is taking a further hit, which
you should not allow to happen. But the British government
(39:43):
definitely did allow it to happen. Um the guy who
came after John Peel or Robert Peel, not John Peel.
Um the guy who came after Robert Peel, Lord John Russell.
He did even less than Um Peel did. Basically kicked
it back to Ireland to deal with. But still give
us your your export that grain to us and we'll
(40:05):
just leave it to the free markets. If you ever
leave dealing with the famine to the markets to hammer out,
you have abdicated all responsibility for dealing with that famine. Yeah,
that's not okay. The markets aren't equipped to deal with
the famine, right. The famine happens when the markets break down, right,
and you need assistance to correct that. It doesn't just
(40:28):
work itself out. Uh. So you know, Ireland already is
not so happy to be under the thumb of uh
the British. Um. This got even worse when there was
this sort of attitude among sort of the elite of
of England that, um, you know what this is. This
is really just a sort of a correction because you know,
(40:50):
those Irish all they do is have children, and there
are far too many of them anyway, These poor Irish
people have ten kids. So this is sort of a
necessary correction, um in the long run. Apparently at the
time that was a bit of the mentality of the
intellectuals of England. Yeah, so that's not going to do
yourself any favors as far as getting along and one
(41:12):
of the other things that happened was a consolidation of wealth.
Like all of those small farms that were that people
were getting kicked off of because they couldn't pay their rent.
The their landlords couldn't afford the farms any longer either
because they weren't able to collect rent, And so wealthier
landowners said, I'll buy your farm and your farm and
(41:32):
your farm and your farm, and you're farming here, go
buy some corn. You can get it from the soup
kitchen over here. And then they put it together. So
these small farms that farming these communities now we're single
large farms owned by single wealthy landowners. As a result,
it's kind of like that's saying, if there's blood in
the streets by real estate, that's what those guys were doing.
(41:52):
Not cool. So in the end, this had a huge
effect on the I mean, the way you put in
this article the Dimmock graphic history of Ireland um directly
caused from the famine. Their population of about eight point
four million in eighteen eight sorry eighteen forty four fell
to six point six million, uh just seven years later,
(42:15):
and about a million people died literally just died from starvation,
and by the time Ireland achieved independence in nineteen one.
In twenty one, the population was barely half of what
it was in the early eighteen forties. Yeah, because that's
not supposed to happen. Death and emigration, Yeah, how many
like people? Uh? Another two I think a million died
(42:38):
in another two million immigrated as a result. New York City, baby, Yeah,
that's how New York got to be in New York.
So we've got, um, we've got a pretty good idea
of what famines are, how they happen. There is still
that struggle between how much of it is man made
how much of it is natural. I think it's a
combination of the two at this time. Sure, but how
(43:00):
do you prevent something like a famine? Chuck Well, Um,
there's a lot of controversy and um, there's a lot
of controversy surrounding it. A lot of people rightfully are
saying that even AID groups like what we're doing is
putting a band aid on something, and they're not like
(43:21):
getting to the root of some of these problems. And
aid is great, you know, it's keeping people alive. They're
not saying don't do that, but it's not addressing the
real problems, right, and apparently the real problems are autocratic rule.
Well want one of them for sure. Yeah. Another one
is you know, just food education. Um, there are food
for work programs which apparently are working out pretty good.
(43:43):
So they'll have you know, I think they will deliver
some food aid to get people able bodied enough to work,
and then um, try and get people working on infrastructure
jobs in the country. UM, and exchange for food. Yeah,
in exchange for food, and I would imagine money. I
don't know for sure, but I don't think it's straight
up food. I wonder if like, yeah, I wonder maybe
(44:06):
it seems like could be a combination the two or
maybe not. I don't know. Another one is hashing out
early warning signs. Probably they have different UM scales now
of food security to kind of gauge where a country
is as far as it's spiral towards famine, like don't
(44:27):
wait till you're seeing the unit SEF commercial before you act.
But not only that, you government of this, this the
people that are about to enter into a famine. You
need to do certain things like there's a famine that
UM is. I believe Ethiopia is on the verge of
another one again right now. And part of the problem
is the government denied that this was that this was happening,
(44:51):
that there was going to be a famine. They said,
we have food security and they said the author of
that huff Po article pointed out, no, there's plenty of food,
but it's too expensive in a lot of places, so
that's not food security. And they didn't do enough, Like
they didn't tell um cattle herders to move their their
um herds closer to like reliable water sources. They didn't.
(45:13):
There's steps and actions that governments that care about their people,
or care at least about the food supply um can take.
And there are early warning signs and apparently they are
born out of famine codes from nineteenth century India. India
had a string of famines in the nineteenth century that
killed like seventeen million people, so they really started to
(45:34):
pay attention to what made up the warning signs or
fam of famine. Well, there's something it was created in
nineteen eighty five and it may have been based on
what you're talking about, called the Famine Early Warning Systems Network,
and they monitor these trends and food prices, UH, food
security and basically you can compare it to other years,
other areas and right now because I want to see
(45:56):
like kind of what the current state of the world was,
there is a global alert UM emergency food assistant needs
ON needs are unprecedented. And these four areas right now, Nigeria, Yemen,
South Sudan and Somalia are the most of the areas
of the highest concern and has the reasons of concern
(46:19):
right here Nigeria the Boco Harem conflict. So there you
have it right, Yeah, it doesn't have to be a
dictatorship being lazy. You can be in the middle of
a war torn country and people aren't growing crops like
they normally do when a wars not on. So there's one.
In Yemen, extensive conflict has reduced incomes and food prices
(46:40):
remain elevated. Uh South Sudan conflict severely disrupted trade, humanitarian
access in livelihoods. And finally Somalia. Somalia was the only
one of the four that seemed like it was weather
related and it said that UM the December on aus
pronounced the y r season. There two rainy seasons, the
(47:03):
goose season and the day are or dear der season,
and apparently they've both been below average. So it looks
like in Somalia it's due to rainfall, but elsewhere it's
you know, conflict, conflict, conflict. So if you care, if
you want to help, if you want to make a difference,
look around, do your research, find an aid group that
(47:23):
you feel good about, and uh, give money, give time,
do something. Don't just sit back and eat your big
mac and forget about the whole thing. I agreed. If
you want to know more about famine, you can type
that word into the search part how stuff works dot com.
Since I said search parts time for a listener mail.
I think this one Trump's homelessness. Surely we won't get
(47:45):
an email saying that people deserve children, does deserve to
die every four seconds? I don't know if we do,
we'll get they'll all start with I believe in a
vengeful God. Alright, I'm gonna call this one. Uh. Whatever
happened to super fan Sarah? Remember that? Remember Sarah Sparrow,
the amazing twelve year old fan? Right? Yeah, so I
(48:06):
listened to several podcasts per day, guys, Uh, to learn
something and to drown out the buzz of the office.
I work in I was going through so many that
I had caught up to the President forcing me to
dig way back to the archive instead of waiting for
the newest one. So he's sandwiching, right, That's fine, it's
the way to do it. At the end of the
podcast in two thousand and ten about grandfather's diets shortening
(48:28):
our lives, um fascinating. By the way, this is June
two ten. You've got the email from Sarah who had
been listening to the show, uh since she was eleven.
At the time she was thirteen. You mentioned you should
go to a high school graduation and be the keynote speaker.
You were still doing this. Well, my math is right then. Uh,
(48:48):
Sarah is twenty years old and halfway through college. So
I hope you guys don't feel too old. But I
think is an exceptional accomplishment. You're still doing the show.
You're more popular than ever. Keep up the good work,
Josh Taylor and Josh you know he asked about Sarah.
Sadly we haven't heard from Sarah in years. Were like
the giving tree, we got ditched, she ditched us and
(49:11):
um or she just you know, still listens and doesn't
right in it's playing it cool. Maybe so well she is.
You know, it's twenty years old. It's not super cool
to still be the Sarah the amazing seven year old
for eleven year old band. You're smelly old pseudo uncles.
But Sarah, if you were out there, hit us up, yeah,
(49:31):
say hi, send us an email. We would love, love,
love to hear from you. Yeah, well even guaranteed read
it on the on the air, and you know what
that goes for you too, Sam who is in college
Summer of Sam Sam. So all of our younger listeners, like,
they girl up and they forget about us. It's so sad,
but then they turned like and they'll come back. They'll
(49:54):
be back. Well, if you want to get in touch
of this for a while, make us feel pretty good
and then forget about us, you can start by tweeting
to us at s Y s K podcast. You can
join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know.
You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at
how stuff Works dot com and has always joined uswitter
home on the web Stuff you Should Know dot com
(50:19):
For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff Works dot com
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Josh Clark
Chuck Bryant
Show Links
Order Our BookRSSStoreSYSK ArmyAboutPopular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Death, Sex & Money
Anna Sale explores the big questions and hard choices that are often left out of polite conversation.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.