Potatoes Combated Scurvy

Potatoes’ plentiful vitamin C may surprise readers who connect it with citrus fruits. Chapter 2 noted European use of lemon (Citrus limon), orange (Citrus sinensis and Citrus aurantium), and lime (Citrus aurantiifolia) aboard ships to prevent scurvy. English captain James Cook (1728-1779) banished it by giving his men pineapple, cabbage (Brassica oleracea var. capitata) and other leafy vegetables, yams (Dioscorea species), and coconuts (Cocos nucifera).¹³⁵ But these fruits were absent from U.S. ship Empress of China, which in 1784 left New York City for China in the most ambitious American voyage to that date. At sea for 14 months, the crew had no fresh fruit until they gathered oranges at the Cape Verde Islands west of Senegal. Instead, their diet featured pork, beef, bread, and potatoes. Only the last had vitamin C, protecting against scurvy. The medical officer reported no instances of it. Between 1831 and 1836, Britain’s Her Majesty’s Ship (H. M. S.) Beagle circumnavigated Earth. Aboard it, British naturalist Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) wrote that the crew ate potatoes collected on Chile’s Chiloe Island.¹³⁶ Again, the tuber banished scurvy.

Potatoes’ value against scurvy led London’s Royal Society—England’s national scientific society— in 1662 to urge their nationwide planting and consumption.¹³⁷ Authors repeated this recommendation through the eighteenth century. The tuber’s prevalence, especially in Ireland into the nineteenth century boosted vitamin C intake some fifty times above what was necessary to thwart scurvy. Summarizing these developments, British biochemist Richard Elwyn Hughes (1928-2015) praised potatoes as “the prime protector against scurvy.”¹³⁸

Barriers to Potatoes’ Adoption

Despite the potato’s benefits, impediments slowed adoption. As noted, Europeans favored wheat, rye, peas, and other seed crops. To be sure, the tuber was not unique in yielding food underground given Europe’s cultivation of carrots, turnips, and other roots, but it came from a land unknown to almost all Europeans and from heathens, though this circumstance did not delay corn and beans’ acceptance. Because carrots and kindred crops were planted from seeds, the Andean preference for planting potato buds rather than seeds discomforted Spaniards.¹³⁹

Clergymen emphasized that the bible would have mentioned the tuber had it been important.¹⁴⁰ This rationale implies that biblical writers knew about the potato and chose to omit it, an impossibility given ignorance of the western hemisphere. Detractors labeled potatoes “Devil’s apples” and “forbidden fruit of Eden.”¹⁴¹ Catholics sought to purge seed potatoes (budding sections) of paganism by sprinkling them with holy water before planting.¹⁴² Protestant disdain for Catholic Ireland made the tuber “Ireland’s lazy root.”¹⁴³ Because the potato was lumpy, some Europeans feared it might cause leprosy, among early modernity’s most frightful diseases.¹⁴⁴ This supposed danger led seventeenth century Burgundy, France, to outlaw the tuber. Critics who associated potatoes and syphilis with the Americas blamed them for the disease. Syphilis turned attention to sex, with some claiming that potatoes stimulated the libido and others that they caused sterility. Moreover, botanists understood that the potato was a nightshade, belonging to the Solanaceae family. Its members, including the potato plant, contain toxins. Its foliage cannot feed people or livestock.

Geography was another obstacle. As noted, potatoes originated at elevations with a cool climate despite tropical latitude. In Europe, the north had a climate closest to this requirement. But in the tropics, daylength was roughly 12hours year-round. Having evolved in this environment, potatoes were unsuited to northern Europe’s fluctuations in daylength by virtue of its distance from the equator. This disjunction prevented plants from forming tubers until autumn, when daylength approached 12 hours. For this reason, Swiss physician and botanist Casper Bauhin (1560-1624) wrote in 1620 that potatoes were not harvested until November.¹⁴⁵ Only in the eighteenth century did botanists derive varieties suitable for high latitudes, triggering the tuber’s expansion and emergence as a staple.

Even the mismatch between potatoes and daylength did not obscure their value. During the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), armies pillaged central and northern Europe.¹⁴⁶ As they had in previous conflicts, soldiers took grain from barns, leaving peasants nothing. Potatoes temporarily ended confiscation because soldiers would not take time to unearth them. Under these circumstances, the tuber not only improved diets but also became essential to national security. Prussian king Frederick William I (1688-1740) ordered peasants to plant potatoes.¹⁴⁷ Son Frederick II (1712-1786)—who is known as Frederick the Great and whose interest in the tuber was “almost an obsession”—distributed free seed potatoes to enlarge cultivation and consumption.¹⁴⁸ Eastern Europe and Scandinavia emulated Prussia, now part of Germany. In 1778 and 1779, soldiers adjusted to the potato, digging it wherever they halted during the War of the Bavarian Succession (the “potato war”).¹⁴⁹

FIGURE 13.5 Frederick the Great. (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/ item/2005692976/.)

Potatoes Enlarged Populations and Improved Health

Eighteenth-century enthusiasm for potatoes doubled Europe’s food supply by century’s end. enlarging populations.¹⁵⁰ The tuber reached Sweden in 1658—the year Swedish physician and naturalist Olaus Rudbeck (1630-1702) mentioned it—though production increased only in the nineteenth century, when the harvest leapt thirteenfold between 1800 and 1850.¹⁵¹ Population rose as mortality fell, especially among infants. Between 1810 and 1812, Sweden averaged thirty deaths per 1,000 inhabitants. Forty years later, mortality had declined by one-third. Plentiful and inexpensive, the potato nourished Sweden’s masses, who had subsisted on oats, rye, and barley. By the mid-nineteenth century, Sweden became a grain exporter because potatoes supplanted it in diets, freeing it for long-distance trade. American economists Lars G. Sandberg and Richard Hall Steckel (b. 1944) summarized the potato’s benefits in Sweden, where it “became an essentially new, and very cheap, source of calories, minerals, and vitamins.”¹⁵²

Elsewhere in Scandinavia, Finland’s population grew after potatoes’ arrival, which Chapter 7 mentioned as a poorly documented event. As noted, Sweden acquired them in 1658. To the east, tradition credited Czar Peter I (1672-1725)—known as Peter the Great—with introducing potatoes into Russia in 1697.¹⁵³ This date is too late because Russian religious conservatives denounced them as nonbiblical in 1667, implying cultivation and consumption by then.¹⁵⁴ Between the two nations, Finland probably received potatoes about 1660 as they moved east from Sweden.

The conventional account holds that Russian peasants resisted potatoes even after Czarina Catherine II (1729-1796)—known as Catherine the Great—required cultivation in 1765.¹⁵⁵ Czar Nicholas I (1796-1855), frustrated with noncompliance, enforced Catherine’s mandate in 1850. This gradualism does not square with population growth after 1650. Between 1600 and 1650, Table 13.5 shows that Russia’s population remained 7 million.¹⁵⁶ Its 12 million in 1700 grew to 16 million in 1750, 38 million in 1800, 56 million in 1850, and 97 million in 1900. That is, gains came soon after potatoes’ arrival no later than 1667.

Inexpensiveness enabled the tuber to feed the masses. After roughly 1750, the Industrial Revolution cemented the relationship between potatoes and poverty. By paying a pittance, factories forced workers to subsist on the cheapest items, potatoes first among them.¹⁵⁷ By the mid-eighteenth century, therefore, the tuber sustained inequalities in countryside and city.

By then, potatoes yielded five times more food per hectare than wheat in the United Provinces (now the Netherlands), increasing population after 1750.¹⁵⁸ Another estimate put potato yields over tenfold greater than wheat and almost ten times above rye.¹⁵⁹ Growth was sluggish wherever the Dutch clung to grains. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German states—Germany became a nation in 1871—the potato “saved many people from starvation because of its high content in starch and vitamin C.”¹⁶⁰

Moving to German state Bavaria in 1785, British-American physicist and inventor Benjamin Thompson (1753-1814)—a forerunner of thermodynamics—encouraged the tuber’s cultivation and consumption and established soup kitchens to serve the poor potatoes.¹⁶¹ He “introduced the potato into Central Europe,” wrote American physicist Sanborn Conner Brown (1913-1981).¹⁶² A self- taught nutritionist, Thompson—named Count Rumford in 1793—ranked it among the best foods.¹⁶³

TABLE 13.5

Russia's Population from Lucassen

FIGURE 13.6 Benjamin Thompson. (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/ item/2005679822/.)

Germans boiled it with apples (Mains domestica) and bacon to make Himmel and Erde (Heaven and Earth) and shaped it into pancakes with butter and applesauce.¹⁶⁴ European and North American Jews likewise made potato pancakes, known as latke. After 1900, Germany’s potato consumption declined, and undernutrition and infectious diseases like typhus recurred.¹⁶⁵

The tuber doubled England and Wales from 9 to 18 million inhabitants between 1801 and 1850.¹⁶⁶ Beneficiaries included Gloucester County Gaol inmates, whose Thursday and Sunday rations featured 0.45 kilograms (1 pound) of potatoes in the early nineteenth century.¹⁶⁷ When officials eliminated them in July 1822, 118 of 850 prisoners exhibited scurvy by February 1823. That April, it afflicted 448 inmates. The sick received oranges, and potatoes were reinstated in 1824. Scurvy vanished. In 1842, a Parliamentary committee recommended potatoes for all English prisoners.¹⁶⁸ Scurvy disappeared from jails nationwide. These improvements led critics to fear that the poor might commit infractions solely to enjoy potatoes and other prison luxuries.

West of England and Wales, Ireland—which other chapters mentioned as dependent on the tuber—adopted it between 1587 and 1602.¹⁶⁹ As in Britain, potatoes protected the Irish from scurvy, sustaining “exceptionally healthy, vigorous (and desperately poor)” farmworkers.¹⁷⁰ Population was about 1.4 million in 1600,2 million in 1700, and 5 million a century later.¹⁷¹ Of the 8.5 million Irish in 1845, 4-6 million clung to tiny plots of land and were destitute.¹⁷² Of them, over 3.3 million ate nothing but potatoes and so were vulnerable to shortages.¹⁷³ Milton Meltzer estimated that 90 percent of Irish ate little but potatoes, which replaced their past reliance on meat, dairy, and oats, by the nineteenth century.¹⁷⁴ When available, buttermilk—discussed in Chapter 7—and salt supplemented the tuber.

In 1845, the mold Phytophthora infestans ruined the crop. Having arisen at elevations with few pests and pathogens, the potato was vulnerable to destruction.¹⁷⁵ Chapters 1 and 3 detailed the ensuing famine. This section emphasizes that suffering and starvation were not due to deficiencies in potatoes’ nutriment. Chapter 2 noted that on famine’s eve, Irish men ate up to 9.5 kilograms (21 pounds) of potatoes daily, though from 4.5 to 6.5 kilograms (10 to 14 pounds) might have been the norm.¹⁷⁶

American botanist Beryl Brintnall Simpson (b. 1942) and American botanist and science educator Molly Conner Ogorzaly undercut these numbers, supposing that daily consumption averaged 0.5 kilograms (1.1 pounds) per person.¹⁷⁷ Intake was low, they believed, because the Irish also ingested bread, mutton, butter, sucrose, beer, and tea. This claim of diversity contradicted their reference to “potato monoculture” and their remark that “By the 1840s not only was Ireland fond of potatoes; its population was completely dependent on them.”¹⁷⁸ Moreover, had the Irish eaten several foods, absence of one—potatoes—should not have caused catastrophe. When available, milk and vegetables like cabbage and turnips supplemented the tuber but never rivaled it.¹⁷⁹

Subsisting on the potato, the Irish demonstrated its healthfulness. Travelers unexperienced with it assumed that the tuber was harmful given the above prejudices. Visiting Ireland, they were prepared to criticize it, yet finding the Irish energetic and tall, they acknowledged its virtues.¹⁸⁰ It invigorated men and women for arduous labor.¹⁸¹ Women were spry and fertile.¹⁸² Eating potatoes, the Irish enjoyed better nutrition than English bread and pork consumers.¹⁸³

Ireland adopted potatoes even in Ulster—a province that is today split between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland—where Scots rather than Irish occupied land. These farmers retained their historic allegiance to oats until 1720, when 2 years’ poor harvests convinced them to plant potatoes.¹⁸⁴ Their success convinced the Scottish Highlands to begin growing potatoes around 1730.¹⁸⁵

Before the 1750s, Torbel, Switzerland, relied on grains, but not even hardy rye grew' above 1,100 meters (1,203 yards or 3,608.9 feet).¹⁸⁶ Potatoes provided harvests above 1,500 meters (1,640.4 yards or 4,921.3 feet). Better nourished than in the past, w'omen recovered fertility soon after weaning a child. More infants weaned on softened potatoes and cow', sheep, or goat’s milk survived than on substitutes. This phenomenon paralleled Caribbean island Trinidad, w'here slaves fed potato soup beginning around age 3 had low'er mortality and grew' more rapidly than on another diet.¹⁸⁷ In American colony Georgia, German immigrant and Lutheran minister John Martin Bolzius (1703-1765) in 1734 praised potatoes as especially nourishing, fortifying slaves for strenuous exertions.¹⁸⁸ The tuber’s nutrients and calories strengthened the immune system, reducing respiratory infections.¹⁸⁹ Like Finland, Sweden, Ireland, England, Wales, Scotland, the Netherlands, Russia, Germany, and elsew'here in northern latitudes, Torbel’s population swelled as birthrate increased and mortality fell. By the 1880s, Swiss textile w'orkers ate potatoes at breakfast and lunch.¹⁹⁰