FEEDING THE PEOPLE

THE POLITICS OF THE POTATO

REBECCA EARLE

Cambridge University Press, 306pp, £20

This ‘wide-ranging, imaginative book joins a growing body of food writing that isn’t just concerned with what food is, but with what it means,’ Orlando Bird wrote in the Telegraph. ‘And just as potatoes have been turned into everything from vichyssoise to vodka, so their significance has evolved too.’

‘ Feeding the People is ostensibly a book about potatoes, but in truth they are only the side dish,’ Gerard Degroot noted in the Times. ‘This book is actually about how governments use food to manipulate citizens.’

When first introduced from America in the 16th century, a Spanish physician warned that ‘the new vegetable caused flatulence – and, somewhat counter-intuitively, lust.’ Yet by the 18th century, when governments needed large armies and a more productive workforce, potatoes were promoted as nourishing – at minimal cost.

‘Spuds offered “fiscal invisibility”’ because they grew underground, Degroot noted, ‘safe from the prying eyes of landowners and customs inspectors’. Potatoes normally provided a defence against starvation, but after the Irish Potato Famine a Treasury official decided that in future the Irish should buy their food rather than grow it.

Bird felt that the ‘prose can be testing’ and that ‘Earle’s style of argument often veers between the donnishly tentative and the bludgeoningly insistent’.

Degroot agreed, finding the book ‘fascinating’ but ‘too formulaic ... she needs to let her lighter side surface more ... there are not enough laughs in this rather po-faced book’.