Usually, I avoid the comment sections on most websites, due to the alarmingly low quality...but the comments on this article are actually quite good, and provide some interesting counter arguments and additional historical context.
The curse of the potato
31–40 of 45 posts
Re: The curse of the potato
#32I loved the starting premise that it was so much better to develop large, hierarchical, societies. Better for whom? Better for surviving contact with other societies, sure. Better for quality of life for the average person? Probably not so much.
>Better for quality of life for the average person? Probably not so much. Sure, if you don't think medicine, technology, or literacy contribute to quality of life. All evidence suggests that, back then at least, large, organized social structures were very important for developing technology.
Even if technological progress was slowed, leading to a worse average quality of life compared to more advanced societies, wouldn't the lag be worthwhile if the society was more egalitarian by the time progress did happen?
Re: The curse of the potato
#33> Root crops, on the other hand, don't store well at all. They're heavy, full of water, and rot quickly once taken out of the ground.
"In the Altiplano, potatoes provided the principal energy source for the Inca Empire, its predecessors, and its Spanish successor. In Bolivia and Peru above 10,000 feet altitude, tubers exposed to the cold night air turned into chuño; when kept in permanently frozen underground storehouses, chuño can be stored for years with no loss of nutritional value."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato
Seems like the potato was more of a blessing than a curse.
Re: The curse of the potato
#34the paper, which isn't named in the wapo article, is 'cereals appropriability and hierarchy' here http://economics.mit.edu/files/10771.
The 'anthropological database' the wapo article describes is murdock's ethnographic atlas from 1967 and a geocoded 2013 derivative by fenske.
Re: The curse of the potato
#35Showing Ireland as being dependent on roots and tubers in pre-colonial times is just plain wrong. It was the colonisers who brought the potato to Ireland. This makes me suspect that the data is being made to fit the theory here and that they didn't want to leave out Ireland because, well, people would expect it to be there in any article about the impact of the potato :)
This article uses such a broad definition of pre-colonial times. When exactly is that? I don't believe India was almost empty around 1400 AD. Quite contrary, given that there were already well established empires at that time.
Not hardly, by that time, Muslim invaders were half-way through 4 centuries of slaughtering 100 million Hindus (and I'm sure Sikh and Janes), and were hardly depopulating the land. And, yeah, there was a lot of history of empires and such before the start of this in the 13th Century.
Re: The curse of the potato
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Better for quality of life for the average person? Probably not so much. Sure, if you don't think medicine, technology, or literacy contribute to quality of life. All evidence suggests that, back then at least, large, organized social structures were very important for developing technology.
Even if technological progress was slowed, leading to a worse average quality of life compared to more advanced societies, wouldn't the lag be worthwhile if the society was more egalitarian by the time progress did happen?
No. I don't care if your and my kids both starve equally.
Re: The curse of the potato
#37> Root crops, on the other hand, don't store well at all. They're heavy, full of water, and rot quickly once taken out of the ground. "In the Altiplano, potatoes provided the principal energy source for the Inca Empire, its predecessors, and its Spanish successor. In Bolivia and Peru above 10,000 feet altitude, tubers exposed to the cold night air turned into chuño; when kept in permanently frozen underground storeho…
Had you read the article, you'd have noticed that this exact fact is noted and asserted to support the hypothesis:
> And then there is the case of the Incas, who oversaw an empire that grew both grain and potatoes. The Incas developed a way of freeze-drying potatoes by leaving them out at high elevations. This technology allowed them to treat potatoes like a grain: non-perishable, transportable and taxable.
The inca was only one of the major pre-modern root-growing groups, and the only one which had access to freeze-drying conditions.
Re: The curse of the potato
#38> Root crops, on the other hand, don't store well at all. They're heavy, full of water, and rot quickly once taken out of the ground. "In the Altiplano, potatoes provided the principal energy source for the Inca Empire, its predecessors, and its Spanish successor. In Bolivia and Peru above 10,000 feet altitude, tubers exposed to the cold night air turned into chuño; when kept in permanently frozen underground storeho…
Had you read the article, you'd have noticed that this exact fact is noted and asserted to support the hypothesis: > And then there is the case of the Incas, who oversaw an empire that grew both grain and potatoes. The Incas developed a way of freeze-drying potatoes by leaving them out at high elevations. This technology allowed them to treat potatoes like a grain: non-perishable, transportable and taxable. The inca…
Obviously I did not read the article the whole way through. Thank you for setting me straight.
Re: The curse of the potato
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do we have good information on what the crop distributions were in Ireland prior to 1492 (I assume that's how they define "pre-colonial") ? I wonder how this could really be determined anywhere. I wouldn't think there would be enough archaeological evidence to determine this with much accuracy and it seems unlikely written records from that period would have given sufficient detail either.
They actually have a pretty good idea of what they ate. Interesting article on it here: http://www.ravensgard.org/prdunham/irishfood.html The TLDR of their diet is "mostly pottage and soups, heavy on meat and dairy. Some oats and barley were grown, but a lot of that ended up being made into alcoholic beverages."
Alcoholic beverages have the advantage of making contaminated water drinkable without losing much in the way of calories in the original grain. A really clever solution to a problem of how to avoid dysentery when your water supply is not safe to drink.
Re: The curse of the potato
#40I loved the starting premise that it was so much better to develop large, hierarchical, societies. Better for whom? Better for surviving contact with other societies, sure. Better for quality of life for the average person? Probably not so much.
While it's good to examine hidden assumptions---if you're on this site, you're probably an engineer, i.e. a knowledge worker, i.e. an occupant of a profession creation of which was made possible by the advent of large and complex (though perhaps not necessarily hierarchical, although they tend to be correlated) societies.