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Lessons from the Great Irish Famine [1845–1850] Nutrition Along with the politics of starvation, we have in the last three chapters examined the biology of nutrition and malnutrition. Here, with nutrition as our theme, we transpose that analysis to the Great Irish Famine, which offers several lessons about the central role that poor nutrition and food shortages play as “catalysts” to starvation and famine. As mentioned, a large peasant and laboring class in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland became increasingly dependent on a single food staple, the potato. The potato was a cheap and nutritious crop, easily grown on small plots, which allowed increasing acreage to be converted to production of grains for export out of Ireland. For the Irish, this was a prescription for disaster. As our first Lesson detailed, the “predisposing cause” of that disaster was the poverty and vulnerability of the Irish peasant worker and peasant families. The agents of Irish poverty were “changes in entitlements,” reduced wages, and reduced access to food that in turn eroded the peasants’ ability to withstand the loss of their basic potato diet. We do not, however, simply dismiss the Malthusian argument that Irish population growth and its impact on the food supply played a significant role in the Famine, although recent research indicates that the Irish population was emigrating at a steady enough pace since 1800 to offset a Malthusian “positive check” (starvation) of the Irish people.1 And, as discussed in chapter 1, Malthus’s later work seems to shift his focus from population and the “positive check” of starvation to a lack of employment opportunities and thus to poverty. Here we explore the Great Irish Famine as an early example of the more current nutritional crisis that is occurring among the world’s very poor. We discuss the “catalytic causes” or “triggers” of the Famine. We examine the potato’s nutritional value and central place in the Irish diet. When that single crop failed not once but for three successive harvests, starvation increased, and Irish peasants succumbed by the hundreds of thousands to diseases “that thrived in its wake.”2 We next detail the Great Famine relief efforts, one of the first examples of international food aid and one that mirrors responses today. By 1846–1847, in the absence of concerted government response, private relief groups from Europe and the United States stepped in to provide aid to the Lessons from the Great Irish Famine [] 111 Irish poor in the form of donations of money and food and in the operation of soup kitchens and food-for-work schemes.3 There were questions about the nutritional value of relief food and accusations of contaminated shelters; some religious groups tried to take advantage of the plight of the starving Irish and demanded their conversion to Protestantism before feeding them. All of these are important concerns, and they continue to occur even today among relief agencies, donors, and some religious-based aid groups. “Catalytic Causes” What were the catalytic causes—the triggers—of the Great Irish Famine? Whereas predisposing causes of starvation and famine are often long-term, slowacting , and connected, the catalytic causes are more likely to be short-term, sudden incidents such as a flood, a cyclone, or an insect infestation. But they may also be repetitive events, such as a prolonged drought or the failure of a staple crop over the course of several harvests. The single important factor is that catalytic causes strike vulnerable populations, with catastrophic effect. In the Great Famine the possible list of causes is long and debatable. We believe , however, that Ireland in 1845–1850 closely follows Scrimshaw’s definition of famine discussed in chapter 2: that large numbers of the impoverished Irish peasantry went “without sufficient food” for long periods and suffered from chronic hunger and malnutrition; that their economic and nutritional poverty made them vulnerable to “a relatively sudden collapse in food consumption” that affected “large numbers” of them, resulting in high mortality. We argue that the failure of the Irish diet—the result of the potato blight—is a principal catalytic cause of this famine. We look closely at three characteristics of this catalytic cause: the dependency of the Irish peasant on the potato, its nutritional content, and its sudden collapse. Dependency on the Potato The potato, first domesticated in the Andes and carried to Europe in the sixteenth century, reached Ireland by way of Spain about 1590. The potato soon became a staple crop in Europe, where it...

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