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Lessons from the Great Irish Famine [1845–1850] Who Starves and Why? Why did some Irish starve, and not others? We know that the failing structure of the Irish economy made the Irish peasant and laborers vulnerable to an environmental disaster like the potato blight. But Clarkson and Crawford at the Centre for Social Research in Belfast question the assumption that the Irish were “born” to famine. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, along with early shifts in landholding patterns, Irish wage laborers were often paid in small holdings on which they grew potatoes. At the time the potato was supplemental to their diet. Clarkson and Crawford cite the Irish diet of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that included cereals and legumes, livestock meat, cheese, milk, and butter for the gentry, and meat scraps and offal for the poorer classes. Potatoes were an additional food.1 By 1800, those Irish who were “very well off” continued consuming a diet that included stirabout,2 potatoes, maslin bread,3 milk products, meat, poultry, fish, and fruit.4 Even wage laborers in the linen trade and weavers, for example, who lived plainly, sometimes consumed stirabout and meat, dairy products, perhaps some salted herring, along with occasional tea and oatbread in a diet to which potatoes were also added.5 During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, rising births, continuing emigration, the weakening of the Irish economy, land reallocations, and the increasing concentration of Ireland’s productive land in the hands of a small, wealthy class, began displacing large numbers of Irish poor, intensifying their hardship and narrowing their diet. Between 1800 and the 1830s, the rising exportation of livestock, dairy products, and grains further reduced the diet of rural Irish laborers to one based primarily on potatoes. Unless fed by their employer, they ate little else. In effect, a “nutritional transition” was taking place, as the gap between the diets of the wealthy and the Irish peasant and labor classes widened. This is also an early example of our current “nutritional crisis.” In Ireland, it was the landed wealthy who made the “transition” to a more diverse diet, much as rising incomes are shifting diets today in the “nutritional transition.” The peasant diet narrowed into a “crisis.” When The Poor Inquiry of 1835–1836 gathered information about diets from two-thirds of the 2500 parishes in Ireland, it “demonstrated that dependence on the potato by 248 [] why people starve and die the poor was virtually complete.”6 They were in a “nutritional crisis” and one “ecological accident” away from tragedy.7 We discover similar patterns of diet change, single food crop dependencies, and wealth disparities as we examine modern developing states early in the twenty-first century. In sub-Saharan Africa today, for example, we find widespread dependence on a single food crop, maize (corn). This crop, like the potato, is easy to grow and requires little preparation before eating. Also like the potato, maize was an introduced crop brought to Africa from the Americas and moved inland with the slave trade. Maize was also a colonial crop, widely grown in “settler” (or agriculturally based) colonies. Maize adapted well to the sub-SaharanAfricanclimateof thosecolonies,especiallyinKenya,Tanganyika/ Tanzania, Nyasaland/Malawi, the Rhodesias/Zambia and Zimbabwe, Ghana, Nigeria, and parts of South Africa. Like the potato, maize became a “political ” crop supporting a colonial economic system. White settlers in Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, for example, produced large amounts of maize during the colonial period and exported it to the metropole, Great Britain, in a closed economic system that guaranteed an overseas market at a fixed price. Maize transformed Africa, much as the potato did Ireland and Europe during the Industrial Revolution. Depending on the researcher, the introduction of maize into Africa during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created a “maize revolution,” a “delayed green revolution,” or a “failure” that caused “peasant impoverishment.”8 Today, maize is planted almost everywhere in modern Africa, even in city parks and along the edges of roadways. It is widely eaten—raw, cooked over an open fire, or pounded into flour. Maize is also fed to livestock, as was the potato in Ireland. Ground maize is served across subSaharan Africa as coarse grits, sometimes supplemented (as income allows) with greens or the occasional chicken. As one travels southward from Kenya to South Africa, only its food name changes, from ugali to fufu to sadsa to pap. But it is still maize. In Africa, maize replaced a balanced, indigenous diet...

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