Rebecca Earle, "Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
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How to Insure That the Population Is Well Feed
There was a strong interest in building up not just a large population, but a healthy, productive population. So how do you insure that the population is well fed? Well, one approach might be to have a substantial distribution of wealth that would direct more resources to poor people than allow them to feed themselves better. Enter the potato. The potato then became the topic of governance, because it was seen as being a cheap, nourishing, population building staple. Malthus wrote at the end of the eighteenth century and his views were so surprising they flew in the face of what had really become conventional wisdom.
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