Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 2 (2021), p. 314

Feeding the people is at once a compelling account of the potato’s journey to become a global staple, and a seminal history of how eating came to feature in modern politics. It is a thoroughly researched, ambitious, and engaging study that builds on Rebecca Earle’s work on the potato, including her hugely enjoyable short book, Potato, published in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series (2019). The potato warrants such scholarly attention as it is now the fourth most important food crop in the world, an incredible feat considering that it was known only to those occupying the Andean mountains until the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of the Incan Empire set in motion its global dispersal. Through the lens of the potato – this ‘exemplary modern food’ (p. 3) – Feeding the people argues that our contemporary neoliberal conviction that ‘what we eat is at once an individual concern and a matter of public interest’ (p. 21) has its roots in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

The argument proceeds logically and with a broadly chronological structure. Chapter 1 considers Europeans’ first encounter with the potato in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its assimilation into European diets; chapters 2 and 3 focus on the Enlightenment campaign to encourage potato consumption; chapter 4 traces the global spread of the potato beyond Europe; chapter 5 explores the role of the potato in nineteenth-century discourses on capitalism; and chapter 6 brings the story into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially with regard to wartime expansion of state-led public health initiatives.

Through meticulous research, Earle carefully debunks a major enduring myth that has established itself in the historiography of the potato: that European peasants were slow to accept – and even feared – this new world food. Anxieties are commonly attributed to the knobbly shape of the tuber (which supposedly resembled the limbs of those afflicted with leprosy) and the familial relation between the potato and the poisonous henbane and deadly nightshade (all of the Solanaceae family). The only evidence Earle finds for the association between leprosy and potatoes, for example, is a second-hand comment in a Swiss herbal published in 1620. Instead, Earle argues that peasants and labourers in many parts of Europe had adopted the potato over the course of the seventeenth century, long before eighteenth-century elites encouraged them to do so. Only in the Enlightenment did philosophers, scientists, and statesmen become convinced of the benefits of potato consumption, as part of an emergent notion of statecraft in which the success of a nation relied on maintaining a healthy population.

This finding has significant consequences, not only for how we understand the history of the potato, but also for how we understand historical change. Reversing the traditional top-down historical narrative, it shows how ordinary people contributed ‘to agricultural and dietary innovation’ (p. 205). Foreseeably, some may object to the lack of quantitative evidence used to support this claim, but I find the accumulative use of a variety of qualitative examples convincing, including examinations of tithe disputes, dietaries, and customs records. This can, however, only apply to those regions from which this data is drawn; Earle notes that elsewhere, including Russia and Finland, there is little evidence for the potato’s early dispersion. It would have been interesting to consider why certain areas did not adopt the potato so readily.

Issues of food security, food sovereignty, and statecraft continue to feature in the fourth chapter, which follows the global pathways of potato production. Just as elite Europeans from the mid-eighteenth century took credit for the uptake of potatoes among the labouring classes, by the end of the century Europeans claimed to have introduced the potato in Iran, India, and other areas of colonial interest with the benevolent intent of improving the well-being of local peoples. This chapter begins by suggesting that in certain localities the potato had already been introduced before these top-down schemes, but this becomes less clear in later examples. Across Africa, for instance, Earle maintains that dissemination ‘owes much to the activities of colonists, colonial bureaucrats and missionaries’ (p. 123), whilst in Kenya, British attempts to enforce potato cultivation were so unfit that they led to the failure of native ecologies. Addressing this local diversity, however, is precisely what is so impressive about this chapter in particular. Moving gracefully between geographical nuances and broad trends makes this an exemplary piece of global history. As Earle indeed writes, ‘global processes of imperialism and trade, and the emergence of new political languages, are always articulated locally’ (p. 130). The acknowledgements page of the book demonstrates just how much work and scholarly collaboration has been necessary to research sources in several languages across the world.

This is a book of great academic merit and one that will undoubtedly also appeal to a wider audience. Moving across centuries and countries, Earle packs in a great deal of information but maintains an enthusiastic and clear writing style that prevents it from feeling too dense. I particularly enjoyed the eight potato recipes, which add further colour to the book’s thesis. It is also refreshing to see repeated efforts to make clear the relevance of historical findings to the present and future. For instance, if it was small-scale growers who cultivated the potato, rather than states and industrial processes, should modern governments empower ordinary people to determine their own agricultural practices? In telling a story about the humble spud, Feeding the people does what all good food history should do: it shows us that food is never just sustenance, but is intricately connected to broader cultural, economic, and political processes that continue to shape the present day.