Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to The History Guy Podcast Counterfactuals. What is a
counterfactual in the context of studying history. It is a
kind of analysis where we examined what might have happened
had historical events gone differently as a thought experiment. The
goal is to learn and understand history as it is
by talking about what it could have been as a
(00:27):
twist on the historical stories that we tell on the
History Guy YouTube channel. This is a series of podcasts
that dwell on that eternal question what if. I'm Josh,
a writer for the YouTube channel and son of the
History Guy. If you're a fan of the channel, you
already know Lance the History Guy himself. To liven up
our discussions on what might have happened, we have invited
(00:48):
Brad wagnan history officionado and a longtime friend of The
History Guy, to join us. Remember that if you'd like
to support us, you can find us on Patreon, YouTube
and locals dot com. Join us as we discuss what
deserves to be remembered and what might have been. On
today's episode of the History Guide podcast, we talked about
(01:10):
one of the most important parts of the Colombian Exchange
and possibly the reason that Europe was able to colonize
and dominate much of the world in the early modern period.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
The potato.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Without further ado, let me introduce the history guy.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Of all the goods that crossed the ocean in the
Colombian Exchange, perhaps none has become more ubiquitous than the
humble potato. It's become the centerpiece of hundreds of dishes,
It's parts of all sorts of cuisines. But that didn't
really happen overnight. Originally cultivated by the Incas, potatoes were
brought back to the Old World by some of the
earliest European explorers, but people in Europe didn't initially find
(01:52):
them to be.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Well particularly eatible.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
It was circumstances and a few diehard potato fans that
made the potato popular across the continent. In his history
that deserves to be remembered, potatoes seemed to have been
domesticated between seven and ten thousand years ago by the
indigenous peoples of the Andes. Modern Peruvians still raised hundreds
of varieties of potato in those same fields. The Inca
(02:17):
created countless dishes with potatoes, including a very light freeze
dried version that could be carried by the Incan armies
and lasted ten years, providing a supply against famine. Potatoes
didn't leave the New World until Francisco Pizarro led his
conquistadors to conquer the Incan Empire in fifteen thirty two.
It took some time to reach Europe, with some of
the earliest examples reaching Antwerp from the Canary Islands in
(02:39):
fifteen sixty seven. By sixteen hundred, the potato had reached
most of Western Europe as food. The potato was not
immediately popular. While the Spanish and other Europeans likely used
potatoes as food on their voyages from South America, potatoes
were more often fed to livestock or eaten only as
a last resort. The first scientific description of the potato
(02:59):
came Infield eighteen ninety six from a Swiss naturalist, who
gave it the name solanum to boroso. The potato was
unpopular for a lot of reasons. It is a night
shade which Europeans knew to be poisonoused, and in fact
the flowers and growths of potatoes contained the toxic chemical
compound solanin. Another issue was that some such as the
Russian Orthodox Church thought the potato suspect because it isn't
(03:22):
mentioned in the Bible. It was sometimes called the devil's apple,
and some said it was used by witches to make
flying ointment. Most important to understand, perhaps, is the perspective
of the European peasantry. Accustomed to grains and bread, potatoes
were an unfamiliar, misshapen and dirty vegetable. People didn't know
what to do with them, but after budding into a
(03:43):
raw one, they were pretty sure it wasn't food. In
the first years after its introduction, potatoes were in a
few places like England and Spain, considered a delicacy and
an aphrodisiac. Shakespeare mentions potatoes in this context in several plays,
and English doctor William Salmon said potatoes nourished the whole body,
restore its consumptions, and provoke lust. The director of the
(04:06):
Royal Botanical Gardens said potatoes were purchased when scarce at
no inconsiderable cost for those that believed in their powers. Eventually,
the aristocracy of Europe began to realize that potatoes had
some hidden benefits. One of the early supporters of the
potato was Frederick the Great of Prussia, When Frederick ascended
the Prussian throne in seventeen forty, Frederick sought to consolidate
(04:27):
his kingdom's holdings and strengthened his position on the continent.
Shortly after taking the throne, it became involved in the
War of Austrian Secession, which lasted until seventeen forty eight.
Endemic warfare in Europe put frequent strain on food supplies.
Large armies needed to requisition more and more food, causing
widespread devastation and starvation. Famins caused by the Thirty Years
(04:49):
War from sixteen eighteen to sixteen forty eight were some
of the worst in European history, with population declines its
highest fifty percent in some regions. The introduction of the
potato began to change that. The first people to figure
out the virtues of the potato were peasants, who found
that armies would ignore them completely when they came to
requisition food. Peasants likely the first ate the potato out
(05:10):
of desperation, but the food proved to have much greater
chloric density than wheat and better nutrition. Frederick noted that
despite military requisitioning, the peasants were staying fed, and even
if the army did target potatoes, they were harder to
destroy or take than stores of wheat. In seventeen forty four,
he added potatoes to his army stores and ordered seed
(05:30):
potatoes tubers that would grow when planted, to be distributed
across Prussia. Frederick's patronage didn't convince his people at first.
When the town of Kolberg received their first cart load,
they were disgusted and told the King, these things have
no taste, Not even dogs will eat them. What use
are they to us? Frederick threatened that any peasants that
refused would have their noses cut off, but the next
(05:52):
year sent a guard who had seen the benefits of
potatoes to encourage their planting in Colburg. In seventeen fifty six,
he went even further with the Potato Eatict, which ordered
everyone in Prussia to plant potatoes wherever they could find
room for them. This caused an important shift in agriculture,
as prior to the potato fields would be left fallow
to restore the soil. Now they were filled with potatoes.
(06:15):
Potatoes began to massively change European food production and supply.
Cheat hardy and less likely to spoil, potatoes offered a
cushion against famine and effectively doubled or more the European
food supply. Frederick actively advertised potatoes, and his effort paid
off handsomely. When the Seven Years War began in seventeen
fifty six, Prussia was faced with wave after wave of invasion,
(06:36):
but the kingdom proved remarkably resilient. Prussian fortunes were a
near thing. It was a godsend when the Russian Queen
died and Russia's wich sides to ally with Prussia. Potatoes
kept the situation at home managible long enough for the
kingdom's fortunes to shift. Frederick supported potatoes so enthusiastically that
he was called the Potato King, and people still leave
(06:57):
potatoes at his grave. Prussia's potatoes caught the attention of
other European powers. In Austria, Russia, and France all pushed
for their peasants to grow potatoes after the war. The
war also produced one of the most important promoters of
the potato, Antoine Augustine Parmentier. Parmnzier was a pharmacist and
the French army and was captured several times was imprisoned
(07:18):
for years by the Prussians, where he was said nothing
but potatoes. When he returned to France after the war,
he was amazed that his health had not suffered. It
convinced them that the potatoes would make a good food source.
The French had actually banned the planting of potatoes in
seventeen forty eight out of the suspicion that it caused illness.
Parmentier began doing pioneering work in nutritional chemistry, trying to
(07:39):
understand what in food was nourishing to humans. In seventeen
seventy two, he won a contest seeking to find the
best food capable of reducing the calamities of famine the potato.
Parmentier also convinced the Paris Faculty of Medicine to declare
the potato edible. He also published a paper explaining how
to make potato bread that was similar to wheat bread.
(08:00):
He hosted a feast made up of only potato dishes,
which Benjamin Franklin attended in seventeen sixty seven. In seventeen
eighty five, he finally received royal backing for his efforts,
possibly after presenting King Louis the sixteenth and his wife
Marie Antoinette with a bouquet of potato flowers. Marie wore
one in her hair, while Louis started a fashion of
wearing them in the buttonhole. Potatoes started to become popular
(08:22):
at the court, though that wasn't necessarily good in the
lead up to the French Revolution. It helped, too, that
potato saved a bad grain harvest in seventeen eighty five
from becoming a disastrous famine. His most audacious attempt to
popularize the potato came after seventeen eighty seven, when the
king allowed Parmentier to plant forty acres of potatoes near Paris.
At harvest, Parmentier posted guards to chase away onlookers during
(08:45):
the day, but withdrew them at night. The peasants, assuming
that only something valuable would be guarded, stole from the fields.
This story, or a very similar version of it, has
been told across Europe and attributed the various kings or leaders,
especially to Frederick the Great of Prussia, though no contemporary
records seemed to prove that Frederick did it before Parmentier.
The potato's popularity exploded, and the king told Parmentier that
(09:08):
France will thank you someday for having found bread for
the poor, though Louis was destined to lose his head.
Only a few years later, Parmentier became a hero. Potatoes
were declared to be the food of the Revolution, and
royal ornamental gardens were torn up to be replanted with potatoes.
Permantier's influence spread not only to France, but across the
continent and apparently across the pond. Thomas Jefferson had Parmentin's
(09:32):
work in his library and became a supporter of the
potato in America, serving at meals in the White House
during his presidency. Jefferson, a famous Francophile, is also credited
with being the first to serve fried potatoes that he
had seen in France, the now ubiquitous French fries. It's
hard to overestimate the importance of the potato to history.
Europe was plagued with famines, with at least fifty major
(09:54):
nationwide famines hitting France between fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred.
Most nations in Europe managed to grow just enough food
to satisfy their need, so looting, armies, bad harvests, and
crop failures left countries without anything to eat. Potato solved
all kinds of problems for Europe or time. It essentially
ended famines in Europe, massively increased food supply and provided
much better nutrition, which improved health and birth rates. Potatoes
(10:17):
provided it easy to prepare nutrient dense food supply for
the Industrial Revolution, as factory workers toiled away for up
to sixteen hours a day. The potato played an important
role in driving population growth, with modern studies showing strong
correlations with increased population and better health. The European population
grew from one hundred forty million in seventeen fifty to
four hundred million one hundred and fifty years later. A
(10:40):
two thousand and nine study found that the increase in
nutritional caring capacity didn't just provide food for factory workers,
but actually helped to drive economic growth and urbanization. Well,
it's impossible to know just how much of the changes
directly due to potatoes, is certain that it was an
integral part of the Industrial revolution and modernization. Other product
(11:00):
from the Americas served to help agricultural production even more.
Guano In eighteen forty, just as vun Lebing published his
pioneering work describing the importance of nitrogen and plant growth
in the production of chlorophyll in it. He also extolled
guano as a major source of nitrogen, which revealed guano
as the world's first high intensity fertilizer. The guano boom
(11:21):
was historic in itself, and it again doubled or even
tripled agricultural yields. The one to two of guano and
potatoes created the bases for modern industrial agriculture. But all
this game came with a risk that no one predicted.
Because potatoes were grown using tubers, they were essentially clones
of each other, creating a dangerous monoculture across the continent.
(11:43):
Nowhere was this risk more exemplified than in Ireland. Unlike France,
England or Germany, in Ireland potatoes took off quickly. It's
not clear who first brought the potato to Ireland, but
certainly they arrived before sixteen hundred. Ireland was well suited
for the potato and also had a very rural population
that was always struggling with the food supply. Much of
the best land was used for raising cattle and cash
(12:04):
crops for British markets, leaving marginal land to the peasants.
Government policy had allowed subdivision of land sous that no
crop other than potatoes would suffice to feed a family,
while war and shortage drove the adoption of potatoes elsewhere,
in Ireland, they already had no other options. By eighteen hundred,
nearly forty percent of the Irish ate no solid food
(12:25):
other than potatoes, with the number being ten to thirty
percent in countries like Belgium, the Netherlands and Prussia. Policies
had forced Ireland into monoculture, making the population particularly vulnerable
to a crop blight. Then came Phidopethora infestins, translating roughly
to vexing plant destroyer, and is a water mold that
causes potato blight. The European potato crop was particularly vulnerable
(12:48):
because of its lack of genetic diversity. PA infestins seems
to have originated in Central Mexico and specifically affects night
shade plants like the tomato and potato. It was probably
brought to Europe part of the huge volume of trade
from South America that was brought on by the Guanto Rush.
It seems to have first broken out in Flanders in
eighteen forty five, but the mold spread quickly to Denmark,
(13:09):
Germany and England. It was first reported in Ireland September thirteenth,
eighteen forty five. The blight destroyed twenty five to thirty
five percent of the crop that year, and the damage
only got worse until it wound down in eighteen fifty two.
The effects of the blight compounded by land policy that allowed,
for example, food to be exported from Ireland even during
the worst years of the famine, and evictions that left
(13:31):
people with no means to feed their family killed at
least a million Irish people and cost two million more
to flee the country. Damage to crops elsewhere, notably in Scotland,
were deep enough to give the eighteen forties the Moniker
the Hungry Forties, though nowhere as badly hit as Ireland. Historically,
potatoes had been an integral part of the development of
the modern world. Studies have repeatedly shown a correlation between
(13:52):
the introduction of the potato and improved health and increased population.
For the first time, a defendant solution had been down
to the world's food problem, wrote historian Christian banden Broke.
In the nineteen seventies. Potatoes, along with guano, marked the
beginning of industrial agriculture and the continued improvement of the
world's food production. Today, the potato is the number one
(14:15):
non grain food crop produced in the world. It's an
important part of countless diets around the world, from snacks
to hearty dinners, but blight and other threats remain issues
for modern growers, forcing producers continually find new pesticides to
deal with quickly adapting threats like the Colorado potato beetle
potatoes went from a local staple in the Peruvian mountains
to an ugly and edible route to one of the
(14:38):
most important food stuffs in history. That's quite a journey
for a simple tuber.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Now for the fun part, where I the history guy
himself and Brad Wagnan discuss what might have happened if
it had all gone a little differently. So I wrote
this episode when we originally did it, and one of
the things that still surprised me is just how important
the potato actually is to history. And so I'm very
excited for us to have this conversation because I think
(15:08):
that people will be surprised to just how different the
world might be if we didn't have the humble potato.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
I don't know if it's humble I mean, gosh, you
can just get a baked potato for lunch. And the
thing about this one in terms of a counterfactual.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Is that it's it's very real.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
I mean, first of all, potatoes, natural wild potatoes are poisoned.
I mean it was it took crazy effort for the people,
the andes to to domesticate the things. So I mean
you could you could see how it never become domesticated.
I mean, it wasn't it wasn't like corn or grain,
and so you can imagine, you know, what have there
not been potatoes? But since then we've also had, of course,
(15:45):
fungal blight and the Colorado potato beetle that have literally threatened,
you know, the entire existence of potatoes as a as
agricultural crop. So it's it's not hard to imagine that
the potato at some point in history could have disappear
because of the nature of how it grows, you know,
(16:05):
and you know that we that we grow up from
eyes instead from seeds, and so it's it's an interesting
counterfactual because it's one. I mean, yeah, you could ask
the question simply today, what if there was a potato
blight that struck as badly as the Irish potato blight
did to that potato crop. You know, we have all
sorts of other you know, agricultural methods now, but I mean,
(16:26):
what if you know, what if we had something that
was just resistant to our you know what we use
so that it's not inconceivable today we could ask the same.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
I mean, even if you don't look at history, just
look at the modern era.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
How would the world be affected if potatoes were to
you know, face a significant blight for three years, and
you know how many people would die because it would
be probably in the millions.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
I was just reading that in two thousand and seven,
the United Nations estimated, that's a while back, that we
were we were producing three hundred and twenty five point
three million metric tons of potatoes, which is, according to
that ter estimate, over one hundred pounds of potatoes for
every person on earth. And so that's I mean, that's wild.
That's that's just a wild amount of potatoes. And it's
(17:08):
not the it's not in general, I don't think it's
the most grown crop, but it's significant. It's providing a
significant amounts well.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
I saw sources it said it's either third fourth or fifth,
and they don't seem they're very bad, but it said
an absolute critical crop in certain parts of the world,
and it is a critical crop is a reserve, which
it always has been because there's there's things that it can.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Do that you can't do with grain crops.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
And so even if it's not the world's most important crop,
it is that it's the backup crop for huge, significant
parts of the world. So it's you know, it isn't
just McDonald's fries that we would lose, I mean's countries
where the starvation would would be and that gives us
an idea of what starvation might have been like if
the potato had not gone worldwide.
Speaker 4 (17:53):
Yeah, I think that it's interesting that China is now
taking a page from the Western playbook and they're pushing
the development of potatoes as well. And in a geographically
diverse country as China, there are certainly some areas where
other grains, rice or wheat, even corn might not be
(18:14):
nearly as productive as the potatoes. And potatoes in a
certain sense they suffer if you will, or they are are.
They are buoyed by their own simplicity. You don't even
have to harvest last year's crop plant next year's. You
just take a few extra potatoes, chop them up and
(18:35):
you're dut. It really is an incredibly, incredibly easy cropped plant,
and it takes very very well to climates that you
would consider to be pretty marginal. I remember reading during
the Napoleonic Wars the soldiers basically rating potatoes all over
(18:56):
northern Poland, and that is because of a whole lot
else would grow there.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
When you're growing grains, then you have to leave fields
fallow and you have to rotate, and you can grow
potatoes in the rotated crops. So essentially it doubled the
food supply in Europe because they took all the fallow
fields and they do something you could grow in it
that was that was nutrition dense. So it's not pretty
much wherever there are people, they've been able to grow potatoes.
The things are incredibly hearty, which is I guess not
(19:25):
a surprise given where they you know, it's hard for
a crop to develop and the top of mountains, and
the reason that the wild potato is fairly poisonous is
to protect itself from being eaten by everything in sundry.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Well, the facts that you know, the first ones that
they were eating, as you mentioned, these were I mean poisonous,
and that even the Llamas that ate them, you know,
they would just go with the poison. How did a lama?
How did figure things out?
Speaker 3 (19:50):
And the first one they've figured it out? How did
he tell the other llamas? Yeah? How does that spread
among them? I don't know.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
I get how we got it from, you know, ones
we were like, oh, what are the Lamas doing?
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Okay?
Speaker 2 (20:02):
But yeah, I see, I mean theoretically Darwinian the ones
that don't die, so you know, the only ones I
would figure it out would pass on the jeans I suppose,
But I mean how yeah, how?
Speaker 3 (20:11):
Yeah, I don't know. Mamma poisoned all the dumb ones? Yeah,
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
But and when you look at how important the potato is,
you realized because these were these were not necessarily Incans.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
These are proto Incans. There were actually lots of different
tribes there.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
But they think how important forgotten names even today, think
how important these Indian tribes were. When you see how
important the potato is. Uh and and that also shows
how important the Colombian exchange was.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Uh and uh what it meant?
Speaker 2 (20:39):
So uh you know, there's at least one historian who
essentially argues that you couldn't have had European empires were
it not for potatoes, because that was the only thing
that allowed the few food security that allowed the population,
uh to go out and and and so I mean
some people might, you know, no, no, no, no colonialism.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
But I mean we've talked before about it.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Is there really a realistic idea where the New World
doesn't invade the Old World? Is there really a realistic
way for North and South America to have developed on
their own? And for the most part, we come to
the conclusion that was pretty much inevitable that if it
wasn't Columbus, that it would have been somebody else. That
if it wasn't you know, Spain, it would have been England.
But here's a real possibility, and that is if these
guys in the Andes had not domesticated potatoes, the New
(21:24):
World or the Old World might never have had enough
population to overcome the New World.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
So yeah, yeah, that was how vital that was, because yeah,
without the potato, you don't have civilization in the Andes.
I think that's that's just the only reason anyone was
living up there. Was because they were able to farm potatoes.
You couldn't do grain up there. They were they relied
very much on the potato and sony anything pre Inca,
(21:49):
but then the Inca too. In fact, I was reading
about how essentially the whole reason civilization grew there is
because you started having, yeah, the potatoes. Then you can
freeze the potatoes and that's that that was called a juno.
Is this these frozen potatoes, and then you started paying
that as a tax. And so I mean like literally,
potatoes are the basis of civilization in the Andes. And
(22:11):
if you don't have civilization in the Andes, you know
you don't have the Inca.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
And that means when Francisco Pisaro shows up in Peru,
there's nothing. There's nothing there, or certainly nothing on the
scale that that was there with the Inca. And people.
People aren't going to go where they have food.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
But of course humans have been remarkably there's there's civilization
in Greenland. There were people living there and they built
houses and managed it. But the Andes was a particularly
difficult place to do that because you couldn't grow anything.
I guess, I guess what I'm saying there is that
maybe something would have developed, but it would have been vitally.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
Yeah, that's not different.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Is there an alternative? I mean, like carrots that you're
on the ground too, right, human on the ground. I
don't know, I mean, is there is there an alternative?
And I was wed this is funny, but two guys
in our family in New Zealand got what they thought
was an eighteen pound potato, which would have been the
world's record, and then Guinness did genetic test on it
(23:07):
said it's not a potato, it's a it's a tuber
that's a type of gourd. But apparently they're still edible, right,
and enough so that when the reason they thought it
was a potato because it tasted like a potato. So
I don't know if they tried to cook the thing,
But I mean, would we I mean, that's that's interesting
in terms of counterfactuals. Would we simply have replaced the
potato with something else? But we know that we really didn't.
(23:27):
Prior to Columbus that famine was very, very common all
the way across Europe, and they did not seem to
have come to an answer for it that was anything
like potatoes, And so there's an argument that the wars
of the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, of the wars
of succession and all that stuff sixteen seventeen to eighteenth century,
that they could not have been fought. So I mean,
(23:48):
if the potato potato is producing enough surplus population that
they can kill each other. The New World did not
start the Old World, I'm sorry, did not seem to
find a potato alternative before the potato.
Speaker 4 (23:59):
Yeah, and I think that brings up I think that
brings up in an interesting question. Is the potato really
the most valuable thing that came from the Old World
to the New World. I think that a lot of
us would probably say yes, but you can make it
really really good. Case that, and I'm going to drive
my European friends crazy by saying corn instead of maize.
(24:19):
Maize fundamentally changed quite a bit in with its region
as well the sweet potato. The only thing that limits
the sweet potato from having the same impact I think
that the potato does is that it is much more
a warm weather prop so it tends to do very
very well in Africa, to the point where there are
(24:41):
a lot of national cuisines in Africa who basically have
adopted the sweet potato in the same way that Western
Europe has adopted what we call the white potato.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
So yeah, However, it's I do think that just based
on caloric caloric output per acre ease of planting, it's
not particularly finicky for most environments. It's Yeah, it would
be hard to make a case that anything else. I'd
say that corn or maize would probably be a close second.
That of course suffered from the from the from the
(25:16):
primary fault that unless you process it correctly, you end
up with nutritional deficiencies.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
You know, during the potato fam which it's interesting to say,
could there have been the potato famine without the potato?
Because could the English plantation system have ever been sustainable
without the potato? Because the whole way that the English
could grow all the food on the arable land in
Ireland was to have the people who were tending that
land eating potatoes.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
So I mean, could that system.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Have ever have ever worked, you know, without something as
clerically dense as potato. But then the potato because it's
so subject too, because they're essential outclones of each other,
because it's so subject to fungus. Could you have had, so,
I mean, how different would Ireland be. I mean, how
different would the US where there are more people of
Irish descent living in America than there are living in Ireland,
(26:04):
which has a lot to do with the blight. Absolutely, Yeah,
let's drove the huge starve a huge jungle of the population.
Drove a huge jungle of the population to America. I
mean you step back beyond that, because you know, does
any of that, you know, is Ireland even anywhere near the.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
Same without the potato.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
But if you just take it in that period, I mean,
it is the potato responsible for the potato famine because
we made this huge part of the population depended upon
of course, you know, the Irish famine. I mean, there
was plenty of food being grown in Ireland if it
had been kept in Ireland. But what brought that to
mind though, is that during the potato famine, the United
States was offering to send maze. That's what we had,
was offering the sand maze to feed and there was
(26:43):
some resistance in the general idea that corn was just
not part of Irish culture and they kind.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Of know what to do with the stuff.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
And I think we ended up sending some corn but
I mean it was it was kind of not considered
to be a you know, a ready replacement for potato.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Well, it certainly wasn't wasn't to be able to be
quite quite whoop. It's just a different plant, right, It
grows different.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Than you think.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
The point people eating grass, you know, any kind of
food has been usual.
Speaker 4 (27:09):
I mean, yeah, anecdotally up until the nineteen seventies. My wife,
who is of German descent, had relatives from Germany come
to the United States and they were served maize or corn,
and they were almost insulted because how dare someone put animal.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
Food in front of them?
Speaker 4 (27:32):
So there's still a cultural stigma, at least until fairly recently.
So you know, things like corn on the cob. You
don't run into very much corn in the cob on Germany.
I think the Irish may have had a similar a
similar out.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Yeah, that's that's a fair and that's when you don't
have much else too than other than your dignity, that
might be.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
That might be.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
I think still the majority of corn grown in America
is grown for animal consumption, you know, that which isn't
grown for fuel these days, right, I mean, it's a
relatively small part of the corn crop that's actually eaten
as corn, eaten as food, yeah or maze. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
Interesting.
Speaker 4 (28:11):
This is true of the potato as well, both corn
and potato. They end up in so many different foods
in various ways. Everything from cooking oil to corn starch
is used wide variety of applications, food preparation, food preservation,
as is potato starch. It's just something it's everywhere, and
(28:32):
it's it's interesting. I mean, it's so ubiquitous that we
don't see it.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
Well.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
I wonder sometimes to think back on, like what percentage
of my meals includes, you know, potatoes, some kinds, and
it's large. It's it's larger than I wouldn't necessarily guess.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
I think it's mean. It's considered the standard side dish
in America really with anything.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
We call it meat and potatoes, right, Yeah. And you
can't get fast food without French fries. I mean, every
every fast food there is, then it comes with the
side of the fries.
Speaker 3 (29:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Yeah, it's a but.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
When we go back, you know, one of the important
things about the potato was where it became so important,
Because it became important in Ireland a little less important
in England in Scotland, but it was still important there.
It was also very important throughout France, Prussia, Poland into
(29:25):
into Russia. And you know, I think that when you
see what happened, like to say, the Seven Years War,
where the Prussian populace was able to survive largely because
they had supplies of potatoes, you think that that without
that during the Seven Years War and Prussia is depopulated.
I mean that could mean the difference between there being
(29:46):
a German power starting starting then is that without without
the potatoes, you might really seriously be saying Germany as
we know it doesn't exist because Prussia, Prussia suffers so
much during that war that they didn't have to because
of the potato.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
Honestly, would any of the Western European nations have been
able to conduct those wars like the Warbock, Postrian Succession,
of the Ward, Spanish succession, a Seven Years War.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
And all that.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Would they have been able to even conduct those words
if they didn't have the food security of the potato.
Another history was arguing that we couldn't have had the
Industrial Revolution without it because we still would have had
the whole population outgrowing, you know, meager food.
Speaker 4 (30:25):
Yeah, I think that that's a very valid point because
the ability to get lots of people into cities that
is certainly a direct consequence of bringing the potato and
having it widely available. Going down the alternate timeline where
the potato does not make it back to the New World,
(30:46):
the first thing that I think happens is is that
Northern Europe and Germany, so North and central Europe do
not become the major players that they are. Perhaps we
don't get an era when Swen is a virtual superpower
around the Baltic Prussia itself is so far north that,
(31:06):
you know, you have to think that if they had
suffered a humiliating defeat during the alternate timelines seven Years
War or something similar, Prussia gets partitioned so old and
the unification of Germany in its current forms under the
leadership mostly of Prussia does not occur. So you know,
(31:28):
perhaps there's a you know, perhaps the Rhineland becomes the
major power in Germany and we get a somewhat less
militaristic or.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
But I mean the whole the whole nationalization movement and
within the eighteen forties, the revolutions of the eighteen forties,
any of that possible without food security. I mean, so,
I mean, if you think about exactly what people are saying,
you could not have had the empire without without the potatoes,
you could have industrialization. We're talking about Europe still being
today a pre industrial society that faces starvation, you know,
(32:03):
on a regular basis, at least once a decade. This
is you know, large scale famine.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
And if you're having to constantly deal with that, I mean,
it's it's true, is that we can't You can't do
almost anything that was done since seventeen fifty without without
some population growth. And so unless we could figure out
I mean, because we certainly have learned ways to intensively
grow grain and things like that much better than we
were in seventeen fifty. But there is some question to say,
(32:30):
you know, do you find that or how you know
when you find that? If that's different, if you don't
have the potato, which really in some ways drove you know,
the modern the modern kind of agro business and how
we run our farms had a lot to do with,
you know, growing potatoes, and that influenced so much. And
so even then you know, maybe maybe it doesn't And
if you don't, I mean, whatever you want to say
(32:51):
about colonialism, it massively.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Altered the world. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
The face of the world as we know it relies
completely on how those great powers acted in the early
modern period, right.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Yeah, almost almost inconceivably different world. Yeah, but I mean
it's hard for people today to imagine a pre industrial
world that if we were living essentially the way we
did in the eighteenth century, but without the same food security.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
I saw someone comparing that saying essentially that you know,
medieval peasants in those in that early sixteenth seventeenth century,
we were talking essentially living on along the lines of
like you know, how people are living in some desperate
third world countries today in terms of starvation, And that's
just that was normal life was constantly getting famines because
(33:44):
your lives dependent on those crops, Your lives dependent on
the fact that an army doesn't come through and steal
all your grain.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
The other things you mentioned too, by the way, in
terms of agribusiness, and that is fertilization and pesticides are
also largely part of the glen in exchange. For a
long time, our fertilizer was you know, Peruvian batp or
Peruvian burden.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yeah, well, it's actually interesting to see how much are
not just fertilization, how much that was driven specifically for
farming things, not just but for the potato pesticides. How
pesticides came about fighting protecting the potato. You know, our
first pesticides, which were arsenic and came from like Paris Green.
I mean, that was used specifically to start to stop
(34:26):
the Colorado potato beetle and the need to have continually
essentially changed and gotten new pesticides. One of the reasons
we did that was because Colorado potato beetles kept becoming, uh,
you know, the resistant to the ones we were using.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Other crop production is lower if it's not for the
it's not just what the potato does, but I mean
what we got from potatoes and also from you know,
from the New World connection. So, I mean, Malthus argued
that the population is always going to grow faster than
the food supply, and he essentially said population is self regulating.
We're just gonna have mass die offs every now and again.
And the reason that that hasn't occurred is because food
(35:03):
production went up much faster than Mouth has.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
Assumed that it could.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
And so I mean, so much of I mean it
good and bad on the world today comes from the
fact that we have had that steady food supply and
we weren't having a you know, so could could We
could never have sustained the Second World War if we
were facing you know, recurrent famine.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
There was something I read that I thought was interesting,
and it was that in every war since essentially since
the potato was started to be cultivated in Europe. In Europe,
every war led to more acreage being dedicated to the potato,
including World War Two, and that just proves that in
times of trouble people turned to the potato. It was
(35:46):
it was, as you said, a backup food.
Speaker 4 (35:49):
The estimate that I read that I thought really drives
that home was that an Irish family considered themselves to
be secure more or less in their ability to feed
themselves as long as they had at least one acre
that they could dedicate to potato growth and had a
cow to provide dairy other other proteins.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
That was I also saw that they were using sometimes
that the ice would use the potatoes to feed.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
A pig, and that meant that, you know, you could
sell the pig. See, potatoes have always gone with bacon,
so well, we're really catching it. I mean, I think
that was kind of the point of the two. This one,
as a katafactual, is how tremendously important potatoes were and
if potatoes had not come across with the New World,
it is it is a drastically different world and you know,
(36:37):
very likely one where we don't have automobiles, we don't
walk on the moon, and we uh uh, you know,
just deal with the fact that large chunks of the
population are going to starve off every few years and
then you know, start again.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
And it's it's of course, like like Brad said, it's
not just the potato. Corn maze did have a big impact,
and especially in some other parts where potatoes didn't necessary
because potatoes grow in a lot of places, but there
are places that are you know, less good for potatoes.
But that that still leans on the fact that, you know,
if Spain goes to the New World and they're going
to get the gold from the Aztecs, the Aztecs weren't
(37:13):
relying on potatoes. But if there's no Inca, that means
there's no poto c and with and that that makes.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
It Yeah, it's a photo c is not a type
of potato that's the silver mines, yah yah, yeah yeah,
and so yeah, there's so if you don't have the
if you don't have the incas because they never dug
the potato, then you don't have that huge amount of
silver that comes out of whereas in Bolivia it's it's
South anyway, it's in South America, right. But anyway, if
you don't have those mines, then is the New World
(37:43):
such so valuable? Is it worth conquering? Is it worth
the time that, especially when your population is food and secure?
Speaker 4 (37:49):
Yeah, I think that putting the crystal ball to use here,
I think that without the potato, first of all, we
don't have the food security. So the migration of the
pre industrial and industrial revolution, where you have massive amounts
of the population picking up from rural areas and moving
(38:12):
into urban areas, that takes place much less quickly, meaning
that the pace of human progress slows down. So that
would have ramifications. If Europe does not reach its I
hesitated to call it pinnacle, but they reach the heights
(38:33):
that they reach visit other powers in the world largely
because of industrialization. So that would give perhaps China the
Chinese civilization, which you know, already has basically thousands of
years of existence. If European colonial powers had not come
(38:54):
in and basically wrecked their system, what would China have
looked like?
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Yeah, it's hard to say because China fought a lot
of civil wars and stuff too.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
But I mean that's a good question, is that. So
is it China that rises?
Speaker 1 (39:08):
You could include India in that as well, which was
in a similar position. Uh, a place that was you know,
wrecked by colonialism.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
That might not have happened, but again.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
Another place that was often split between various powers, and
you wonder what that does that just mean? You know,
it's it's the status quo for another one hundred years
of them fighting fighting each other. And or do they
you know, do they beat Europe to the West?
Speaker 3 (39:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Do they beat Europe to the Industrial Revolution?
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (39:37):
You know, as much as we're talking about this, though
India rose, China rose before potatoes or were in the
in the old world. I mean, the Roman Empire was
pre potato. And matter of fact, even Europe was fairly
slow to adopt the potato because they trust the thing
it's not was it was not mentioned in the Bible.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
And so that's which is potatoes are not the only
thing that that's been argued against. But and of course
also that this was a problem with tomatoes as well
as that they they're in the night shade family, and
they're like, well, I know, nightshade will kill me.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
So you can see why we don't trust it. So
it is to say, I mean, as most as we're
talking about potatoes, that I mean, prior to probably the
eighteenth century and really not ubiquitous until the nineteenth century,
Europe did live without potatoes, and your plot wars and
did all sorts of stuff. You know, there's a massive
amount of change that comes with industrialization that it seems
(40:32):
to occur kind of at the same time that you
get food security, which seems to be largely tied to
the potato. So it is to say, you know, if
we were stuck in the early eighteenth century, would that
have meant the ability to really I mean, there were
colonies in the New World before we were eating a
lot of potatoes. But could we have you know, could
the could the old world have ever had the population
(40:53):
or the interest to conquer the New world? That's it is,
even though potatoes are relatively late, you know, addition, to Europe.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
It's a radical part of the world that we know today.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Essentially, that enormous population growth between roughly seventeen fifty and
nineteen fifty, there's I've seen various estimates, but even even
the fairly conservative ones suggests, you know, a quarter of
that population growth is probably due directly to the potato,
and possibly even more than that. And it starts to
(41:26):
get extremely the possibilities branch out very quickly when you
start thinking about how that, how that could have gone,
because you're talking all kinds of different power vacuums and
different ways that that entire countries could have gone, just
based on whether or not there was a potato to
adopt it.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
Was a potato, Yeah, yeah, And in a different timeline,
if if the Andes has the potato, and you know,
if they weren't We've talked about this too, if they
weren't finding a civil war when Pizarro shows up, then
you know, it's quite possible that pulled them off. If
the Andes has the potato and Europe does not, I mean,
does does the new world conquer the old world? I mean,
is there is there is is there still colonialization? Is
(42:07):
there still enslavement. Is there still all the things we
talk about today, But that's that's that's you know, the
the the Incas, uh, you know, competing like you know,
Portugal and Spain did over over their conquest of the
rest of the world because of the power of potato.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
The Inca specifically, I mean, you know, they grew so fast.
It was explosive growth over just a handful of generations.
They I mean, they were at perfectly they were in
you know, we've Brad has talked about that before and
took kind of how long an empire lasts? Uh, The
Inca were right on and the same the same kind
of idea. But you wonder how, you know, how much
more could they have grown? And do they keep growing
(42:44):
to powers to you know, later powers that are essentially
on top of the Inca support structure. Do they grow
And I mean what happens if you have an Inca
group that you know, like say, meets the Aztecs. And
that's that's an interesting because the Aztexts too were of
very imperial, very more like very aggressive and expansionist.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
They don't have potatoes.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
They don't have potatoes. Potatoes might be the difference, right,
They really might yeah, and of course we haven't asked
Russia with that vodka.
Speaker 4 (43:16):
I mean, yeah, exactly. Now, another thing that I think
that the potato is definitely responsible for, and another way
in which the non potato timeline looks like is that
I don't think that we get the rise of the
middle class. I don't think that we get the intellectual
(43:38):
revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth century in addition to,
or in partnership with, the industrial revolution. So I think
that a non potato timeline it I think you see
a lot more preservation of the status quo when those
(44:00):
populations do not move from the countryside into the city,
where they are exposed perhaps sort of the first time,
to some sort of systematic education, data distribution, media schools,
communities founded around churches.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
Creating markets for I mean that these were without without
the without the city. So everything that they that we
were selling or coming up with, invention, stuff like that,
so much of that had to do not only with
people's ability to be in the city and not just
you know, growing your food for yourself because that's all
you can do, but also the ability for them to have.
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Someone to sell that stuff to.
Speaker 4 (44:45):
Yeah, you don't get the same you don't get the
same hyper specialization that you have in the pre modern
modern world. There is no reason for someone who can't
feed themselves to develop software. Their primary concern is going
to be, Okay, am I going to feed my family?
Speaker 1 (45:03):
Uh Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right, That is that if
if you're worrying about feeding yourself all the time, and
so once once Europe has.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
The potato, they're out there able to do.
Speaker 3 (45:12):
Yeah, that's it. Definitely can't self.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
So if you buy the story that potatoes are what
provided food security, then absolutely it would be very difficult
for middle Clasterized, be very difficult for an educated Clasterized.
I mean we had Da Vinci before potatoes, but I
mean that, you know, the the literacy pretty potato was
actually very very.
Speaker 3 (45:33):
Low, you know.
Speaker 4 (45:33):
And yeah, and Da Vinci is actually a very good
product that shows what happens when your bright when your
best and brightest essentially are owned.
Speaker 3 (45:48):
Yeah, because that's the only way to have the ability
or mm hmm. So yeah, that's.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
Essentially the whole the whole renaissance.
Speaker 4 (45:59):
Yeah, so yeah, definitely, Yeah, I think that the non
Podata timeline were probably even in even the alternate Universes
twenty twenty five, we're probably stuck at nineteenth maybe early
twentieth century technological levels. I do think that at one
(46:19):
point or another someone would have had a bright idea
that would have made the potatoes replacement possible, whether that's
continued hybridization and refinement of maize, or perhaps someone gets
really creative with the sweet potato and makes it a
(46:41):
crop that will grow in a wider range of ecological settings.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
I mean, think about I'm not sure that we even
know today if there was a massive potato plight, that
we know exactly how we replace those calories more or less.
I mean, there's some unique thing and the thing about
you know, there's other.
Speaker 3 (46:59):
Things about the potato.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
You know, in war, potatoes in the ground, grains in
the in the silo, and so the army comes to
and takes all the all the grain out of the silo,
and you'll eat what's in the ground. So I don't
it would be nice to think that, but I don't
know that we know what that is for sure, even today.
If we know what that is for sure, and again,
when you're spending your whole time trying not to starve
it's hard to apply time to the science that would
(47:23):
be necessary to come up with a replacement, but.
Speaker 3 (47:26):
You can argue.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
I mean, there's always been this sort of argument that
the time is really sort of inevitable and that you know,
whatever obstacle we came upon, we would have, you know,
come some other answer for it. I think it's certainly possible,
but I think it's it's very possible to say that
you know that we don't have a replacement for the potato,
and that we continue to deal with food insecurity, and
(47:47):
you know.
Speaker 3 (47:47):
There's there's risk of food insecurity today.
Speaker 2 (47:50):
We haven't had a major famine in a very long time,
and so I mean, you know, what happens, what happens
if we have another year without a summer. I think
I think we're maybe more on the edge than we realize.
We've fished the ocean so much. But here's something, and
I think that this is interesting. First of all, I
did try to research this, and it's a difficult question
to ask.
Speaker 3 (48:07):
Does bigfoot eat potatoes?
Speaker 2 (48:10):
I could not find any instance of that, but I
did find that bigfoots eat the same thing that bears do,
and bears will dig into a garden after potatoes. So
it is possible to say that there's at least a
big foot potato connection, and maybe we wouldn't have big
foot without them.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
But there is a bigfoot like creature.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
In the Andes that is kind of a demon, and
it's called a and I'll pryp perduce the song in
Utnar you see nar. And so if people don't domesticate
the potato and people don't live in the Andes.
Speaker 3 (48:42):
Then maybe the Utnar thrive.
Speaker 2 (48:45):
And maybe it is the Upnar kingdoms that are able
to overthrow the starving, you know, food insecure human kingdoms.
Speaker 3 (48:53):
And we literally have a bigfoot.
Speaker 2 (48:55):
World, a bigfoot world because they're the ones relying on
the potato. That's because well, or are they were killed
because of the potato. I mean, they're their population was
destroyed because of the potato.
Speaker 3 (49:06):
Because humans, if we hadn't domesticated potato, then they're they
run free in the Andes. Uh.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
And then they when they start coming out of the
Andes in numbers. Uh, then you know we're all too
starved and famine starved and stuff to be able to
resist they overrun us.
Speaker 3 (49:23):
Yeah, we are. We are overrun by the Peruvian Bigfoot.
Speaker 4 (49:27):
A French fryless world succumbs to the.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
When you're talking because because I mean there's you know,
there's a lot of diaces that you were talking about
when we have come up with an alternative, but I
mean that we still don't know what's the alternative French fries, right,
I mean still to always do what fries with that.
I get the side salad in some places, but I mean,
you know, it's most restaurants don't even know what to
do if you won't eat the fries.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
And of course, I mean there's other there are other
important crops, but there's it's hard to think of one
that had quite as significant an impact as potatoes. And
you're certainly looking at the New world that there's other
very important crops. I mean rice and grain. Of course,
wheat has remained very very important. And any without any
(50:11):
one of those, I mean, you know, the world changes
and with.
Speaker 3 (50:13):
How absolute grain.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
If we had never domesticated crops, if we never created agriculture,
well we're probably somewhat like that. Yeah, we're probably living
with somewhat like like the Koisson, Right, We're wading around
in small groups eating whatever critter we can run down
and that's.
Speaker 1 (50:31):
You know, with with without grain, there's no civilization, right, that's.
Speaker 3 (50:35):
Yeah, yeah, we're still we're still hunter gathered.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
Yeah, I mean, so domestication of crops is incredibly important throughout.
So yeah, if you took away if you took away wheat,
or if you took away rice, and of course we
have a radically different world.
Speaker 3 (50:48):
Yeah, so, I mean maybe more so than you know, potatoes.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
But if only because the potato came later, much much later.
Speaker 2 (50:56):
For much of the world.
Speaker 1 (50:59):
You do wonder one of the things I had looked
at was that it was relying on the idea that
essentially because the Spanish were able to get stuff like
Potosi and the silver and the gold and stuff out
of out of the out of Peru, that that was
the silver especially caused inflation globally, and that that caused
(51:19):
such disruption to to ways of life all over the world.
Speaker 2 (51:26):
That that that that caused you caused migrations, it caused
fans its that that that inflation purely purely from them
pulling all the mineral wealth out of South America, which
would not have been possible without the potato, not only
because they might not have found it, but because everyone
who was pulling silver out of out of Potosa was
was eating potatoes.
Speaker 3 (51:45):
I was eating potatoes.
Speaker 2 (51:46):
Yeah, that was what they were doing. And so with
without that, you know, you have more of a status
quo purely because there isn't this this huge status quota
shaking which funded wars and funded also something, so we're
for thought about it. That's it's so funny because the
reason that we give precious metals value is because they're rare. Yeah,
(52:07):
and then we find them, we dig them up, and
we don't understand this starts.
Speaker 3 (52:10):
So if if this meteor has come to hit us,
if it turns out that thing's made out of gold.
Speaker 2 (52:14):
You know that people got to run up there and
dig it out of the media. And then yeah, in theory,
you're only going to make every ans of gold you
add to the popp to this, it will make gold
that much less valuable.
Speaker 3 (52:25):
Yeah, it's going to equal equal.
Speaker 1 (52:28):
The Spanish certainly figured that out, is that despite the
fact that they got the lion's share of mineral worth
out of the New World, they i mean, the whole
Spanish Empire essentially correct collapses because they can't they can't
pay for their own wars, which was partially due to
the inflation brought.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
On by their own mind. Well, and the wars disrupted
their ability to import gold from the New World, Right,
there were years they couldn't take they couldn't take their
treasure fleet.
Speaker 3 (52:55):
So yeah, it's it's kind of funny that they found
that out.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
Yeah, you know, mensa musa found out to the gold
off the back of your candle. Then gold loses its value. Yeah,
that's always have changed the world more.
Speaker 4 (53:08):
Yeah, yeah, Now, I do want to point out that
had the Spanish not been able to bring the gold
supplies back to Europe at the time that they did, uh,
then two centuries later the vindication to President Nixon, who
took the US off the gold standard, would not have occurred.
And so such small connections through the centuries that but yeah,
(53:34):
I mean, you cannot underestimate how much the temporary, the
temporary change of Spain from a relatively wealthy and somewhat
powerful nation I'm going to argue, amongst equals, suddenly has
the financial resources to dominate well beyond and punch well
(53:57):
above its weight class.
Speaker 2 (54:00):
To bring war to you know, constantly across all of Europe. Yeah,
but yeah, it is if they could not have gotten
the silver.
Speaker 3 (54:06):
It significantly changes European history. That's certainly true.
Speaker 2 (54:10):
You know, much of the twentieth century was really driven
by the War of Spaning Succession, to make the warst
Spenting Succession of the War of Austrian Succession. It's amazing
how much those two changed things. And you know, we
do we bother, you know, without without focusing the because
that that that really drove so much of that.
Speaker 4 (54:28):
Yeah, and for a period of time, the focus of
military and political might was not focused on the central
portion of Europe. It was focused more on the periphery
and specifically in the Iberian Peninsula and the connections that
were that were made there and the strings that were
pulled from that particular direction. Yeah, definitely not uh, definitely
(54:52):
not possible. Furthermore, let's face it, when you dump that
much silver into a geographic area with millions and millions
of people who are not using money on a regular basis,
suddenly you give the advantage that China for the longest time,
(55:14):
and that is you create the amount of precious metals
necessary for coinage and national coinage, which is certainly it
goes hand in hand with the creation of the nation
state and preservation of the nation state.
Speaker 2 (55:31):
It's possible that the entire you know, the entire concept,
the political concept, the economic concepts that we we take.
Speaker 1 (55:38):
For granted today relied on the ability of these these
empires to build themselves and the idea of nation states
to grow and without the potato, does that change happen
or because because of the growth of bureaucracy and and
things like that, you know that if that doesn't happen,
are we are we talking?
Speaker 2 (55:55):
You know, go back to the.
Speaker 1 (55:56):
More patchwork idea of what even makes up a country
or a people or a nation.
Speaker 4 (56:04):
Yeah, And I think that Germany is a great example
of what a potitalist world would have looked like. A
very large number of very regionally focused peoples who are
trying to form polities based on their immediate surroundings and
the people that they share a particular region with or
(56:26):
in some cases even a city with, as opposed to
what we consider a modern nation state, which is largely
built around a shared language and culture, and those those
tend to get wider when you've got food, security and storytellers,
(56:46):
movie makers, poets, all of the trappings of a truly
intellectual society can actually have time to do something besides
grubb in the ground to try to make a living.
Speaker 1 (56:58):
People who can really build, you know, a culture and
also kind of the the rhetorical tent posts that you
need to keep everybody inside of it. I mean, that's
you know, the shared culture has so much to do
with with stories and and art and of course all
that existed before the potato, existed before the nation state.
(57:19):
But that in kind of coupled with you know, the
growth of cities and the growth of bureaucratic power and
the centralization of government and stuff like that creates you
know what we what we see in the world today.
Speaker 4 (57:34):
Okay, so next fun question, what is the best way
to eat a potato? Is it French fries? Is it
a loaded baked potato.
Speaker 2 (57:43):
Tater top and a fan of mashed potatoes to be
honest too, but yeah, tat tat tat. They were like
originally made from like the leftover potatoes. Yeah, so yeah,
but yeah, I don't know, You've got choice between you know,
fries and curly fries or waffle fries and fries so
many different you go, you go to five guys, can
(58:03):
we you know where they're not pantis? But you go
to five guys, they tell you where the potato came from, right,
But I mean those are those are like the greasy
fries like you used to get it an old.
Speaker 3 (58:10):
Sort of style diner.
Speaker 2 (58:12):
But then there's the mcdonald' styles fries that have you know,
a sugar cutting so they get so they're crispy. I mean,
there's this there's so many endless ways to make a potato.
Speaker 1 (58:22):
All with with essentially, I mean, you know, the hundreds
of varieties and even the many.
Speaker 2 (58:26):
Species of potatoes.
Speaker 1 (58:28):
Almost all potatoes and any no matter what we were
eating them is essentially based on like one subspecies of
potato that we pulled out of out of the andes uh.
And that there's all kinds of cultivars of them, and
they've got different colors and all this stuff, but they're
almost all, like ninety nine percent of them traces back
to this one kind of potato. And so we're we're
(58:50):
very much for It's it's kind of a fake variety
because ultimately, almost all of our potatoes are essentially the
same because you.
Speaker 2 (58:57):
Go there's red, there's red ones, and there's an you know,
there's there's you know, and I guess if you want recipes,
go to the Andes apparently have an enormous number of
ways that think that they can cook potatoes there in
some ways that we don't typically cook potatoes here.
Speaker 1 (59:10):
The I saw one they grow so many varieties of
potatoes that I saw someone say, if you looked at
like the average Andean garden, they've got more potato varieties
than like ninety nine percent of the world, just just
sitting right there. Not a surprise. Yeah, they've got.
Speaker 2 (59:27):
Kinds of potatoes we've never never heard of or thought
of eating. But that's very much.
Speaker 1 (59:31):
I mean, if we want to talk about, you know,
kind of agribusiness, the monoculture of potato, you know that
presaged so many different things from you know, from the
banana to to I mean, that's that's essentially that is
a a underpinning of the entire ability of us to
feed people. The way we do with this agriculture is
(59:52):
that monoculture is necessary so that we can figure out
specific ways to maximize.
Speaker 2 (59:57):
We picked cult of ours that that very specific conditions
in terms of being able to grow them in mass
and get them to market in still palatable form, and
that ends up, you know, way narrowing down the amount
of food or you know, the amount of fod variety.
Speaker 3 (01:00:11):
That we have, which then makes us more vulnerable lights. Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
You know most people have eaten maybe at the outside
six or seven different varieties of apple, and there used
to be tens of thousands.
Speaker 3 (01:00:22):
Yeah, but they just don't make it a store. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:00:25):
And this is as an aside the airloom food movement.
This is a wonderful time to be alive because not
only do we have zoom meetings where we can discuss
matters of weighty importance, however we can actually have a
reasonably good chance of finding that deep blue Andian potato
(01:00:47):
that we had never seen before, strictly because it is
not the common potato that you go down to the
local grocery store and it comes in one of those
ten pound net bags.
Speaker 3 (01:00:59):
I'm pretty sure i've little blue potatoes before.
Speaker 2 (01:01:01):
We are taping this on February seventeenth, and if you
look at at you know, like this day in History
sort of sites, they will tell you that in seventeen
ninety five, on February seventeenth, that a dude in Chester, England,
picked an eighteen and a half pound potato and the
problem is that there's there doesn't seem to be any
you know, good explanation for how we came to believe that,
(01:01:25):
because there doesn't seem to be any like seventeen ninety
five period reference to this eighteen and a half pound potato.
So so I don't know, but this is this is
a potato Day because it is supposedly the day an
eighteen and a half pound potato was. And then of
course we mentioned Doug the potato there, which turned.
Speaker 3 (01:01:45):
Out not to be a potato.
Speaker 2 (01:01:46):
I did also see something that suggested that there was
a twenty five pound potato in Zimbabwe, but if that's true,
it was never it's not in the Guinness Book, the
Guinness Book of Records, is is a ten pound, fourteen
ounce potato.
Speaker 3 (01:01:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:02:00):
Now I do have to say that, you know, I'm
I am a big fan of the five guys.
Speaker 3 (01:02:05):
Those actually kind of I.
Speaker 4 (01:02:07):
Think that they they are very far up on the
list of give you that.
Speaker 2 (01:02:14):
I mean, it's not just it's just not just that
bonus bag fry you might get a McDonald's.
Speaker 3 (01:02:18):
It is a whole bonus bag oh fries.
Speaker 4 (01:02:22):
So I there, Yeah, and I must say that the
reassuring thing about a McDonald's French fry is that even
when I'm in Europe and I have a sudden panic
attack and need a taste of home, there's probably on
the corner. So they're just going to serve me a
fry that tastes more or less like it tastes.
Speaker 3 (01:02:40):
Something else on the menu that you totally I've never
heard of, dear.
Speaker 2 (01:02:43):
It is more to say that neither McDonald's nor Five
Guys sponsors the History Guy podcast, but we are certainly available.
Speaker 3 (01:02:54):
If you want to get a hold of it.
Speaker 1 (01:02:58):
Email us at business at the History guys dot net.
Speaker 4 (01:03:03):
Yes, have our have your people talk to our people.
Speaker 2 (01:03:05):
Well, taking care of it.
Speaker 1 (01:03:08):
Thank you for listening to this episode of the History
Guy podcast. We hope you enjoyed this episode of counterfactual history,
and if you did, you can find lots more history
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