its important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato -- during the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of Desire, Irelands was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly. But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and other crops thrived, why did people starve? Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddys Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry -- food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad. The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 15:14:05 +0000
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