Potato Famine Quotes

The children looked like remnants of themselves. Spectral. Some were naked to the waist.Many of them had sores on their faces. None had shoes. He could see the structures of them through their skin. The bony residue of their lives.

For the increase in the number of my Brennan cousins," Conall remarked dryly, "we must thank the potato.

She had hauled out Grandma O’Donnell’s crystal plates, the ones Gram claimed were hand-cut by our distant relatives in County Kerry during the potato famine. She also said Big Foot crashed her eighteenth birthday party.

Revolutions occurred in almost every European city with more than 50,000 inhabitants. The occasion for the revolutions was hunger.

They entered the wild country. Broken fences. Ruined castles. Stretches of bogland. Wooded headlands. Turfsmoke rose from cabins, thin and mean. On the muddy paths, they glimpsed moving rags. The rags seemed more animate than the bodies within. As they passed, the families regarded them. The children appeared marooned with hunger.

True the greater part of the Irish people was close to starvation. The numbers of weakened people dying from disease were rising. So few potatoes had been planted that, even if they escaped bight, they would not be enough to feed the poor folk who relied upon them. More and more of those small tenants and cottagers, besides, were being forced off the land and into a condition of helpless destitution. Ireland, that is to say, was a country utterly prostrated. Yet the Famine came to an end. And how was this wonderful thing accomplished? Why, in the simplest way imaginable. The famine was legislated out of existence. It had to be. The Whigs were facing a General Election.

A few words explanatory of that famine may not be amiss to some of our readers. The staple food of the Irish peasantry was the potato; all other agricultural produce, grains and cattle, was sold to pay the landlord’s rent. The ordinary value of the potato crop was yearly approximately twenty million pounds in English money; in 1848, in the midst of the famine the value of agricultural produce in Ireland was £44,958,120. In that year the entire potato crop was a failure, and to that fact the famine is placidly attributed, yet those figures amply prove that there was food enough in the country to feed double the population, were the laws of capitalist society set aside, and human rights elevated to their proper position.

It's often said that "the Irish built America. The truth is, not only did they build it, they also manufactured, repaired, and cleaned it, especially in the decades before and after the potato famine.

In a move that will remain in Irish annals as a stigma comparable to the potato famine, the Dublin government succumbed to ECB blackmail: make the German creditors of Ireland’s commercial banks whole, even a bank that was closed down and thus no longer systemically important for Ireland’s financial sector, or else.

Glasgow? Isn’t that in Sweden?” Dody was asking. He shook his head. “Scotland.” “Oh, yes, Scotland. Why, you must know Sean Connery then? He’s Scottish. Or is he German?” Des bit back a smile. “He is Scottish, but no, I never had the pleasure.” “Really? That’s surprising. Sweden is such a small country.” “Scotland.” “What? Oh, yes. Scotland. Why did you move from there, dear? Was it because of the potatoes?” She patted his hand sympathetically. “The potatoes?” “Potato famine was in Ireland, Mom,” Jasper said, banging the oven door shut. “In the 1840s,” I added, wanting to show off a little of my vast wealth of useless, esoteric facts.

The typical Irish peasant ate about 10 pounds of potatoes each day and soon towered in physical size over their rural English equivalents who mainly ate bread.

IRELAND Spenserian Sonnet abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee What is it about the Kelly velvet hillsides and the hoary avocado sea, The vertical cliffs where the Gulf Stream commences its southern bend, Slashing like a sculptor gone mad or a rancorous God who’s angry, Heaving galaxies of lichen shrouded stones for potato farmers to tend, Where the Famine and the Troubles such haunting aspects lend, Music and verse ring with such eloquence in their whimsical way, Let all, who can hear, rejoice as singers’ intonations mend, Gaelic souls from Sligo and Trinity Green to Cork and Dingle Bay, Where fiddle, bodhran, tin whistle, and even God, indulge to play, Ould sod to Beckett, Wilde and Yeats, Heaney and James Joyce, In this verdant, welcoming land, ‘tis the poet who rules the day. Where else can one hear a republic croon in so magnificent a voice? Primal hearts of Celtic chieftains pulse, setting inspiration free, In genial confines of chic caprice, we’re stirred by synchronicity.

Irish people marry late, as a rule. We have that potato-famine DNA from the old country, that mentality where you don't give birth to anything until you have the potatoes all stored up to feed it. My ancestors were all shepherds who got married in their thirties and then stayed together for life, who had long and happy marriages, no doubt because they were already deaf. My grandparents courted for nine years before they married in 1933.

A Magnum Paucity by Stewart Stafford Build the nation's mausoleum, Light the people's funeral pyre, For Hibernia's sons and daughters, In genocide to expire. Romantic Ireland has no grave, It died foraging at the roadside for bites, Or on a coffin ship out of reach of the New World, An empire's boot on the throat for last rites. Did you know your identity all along? Or find it struggling and aghast? Old Eireann was the first expendable colony, And egregiously, not Britannia's last. Constricting stomachs do not growl patriotic oaths, Freedom is a stranger to a starved mind, Force-feed our children grapes of wrath, With liberation dead on the vine. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

More food is good, but agricultural diets can provoke mismatch diseases. One of the biggest problems is a loss of nutritional variety and quality. Hunter-gatherers survive because they eat just about anything and everything that is edible. Hunter-gatherers therefore necessarily consume an extremely diverse diet, typically including many dozens of plant species in any given season.26 In contrast, farmers sacrifice quality and diversity for quantity by focusing their efforts on just a few staple crops with high yields. It is likely that more than 50 percent of the calories you consume today derived from rice, corn, wheat, or potatoes. Other crops that have sometimes served as staples for farmers include grains like millet, barley, and rye and starchy roots such as taro and cassava. Staple crops can be grown easily in massive quantities, they are rich in calories, and they can be stored for long periods of time after harvest. One of their chief drawbacks, however, is that they tend to be much less rich in vitamins and minerals than most of the wild plants consumed by hunter-gatherers and other primates.27 Farmers who rely too much on staple crops without supplemental foods such as meat, fruits, and other vegetables (especially legumes) risk nutritional deficiencies. Unlike hunter-gatherers, farmers are susceptible to diseases such as scurvy (from insufficient vitamin C), pellagra (from insufficient vitamin B3), beriberi (from insufficient vitamin B1), goiter (from insufficient iodine), and anemia (from insufficient iron).28 Relying heavily on a few crops—sometimes just one crop—has other serious disadvantages, the biggest being the potential for periodic food shortages and famine. Humans,

The foragers’ secret of success, which protected them from starvation and malnutrition, was their varied diet. Farmers tend to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet. Especially in premodern times, most of the calories feeding an agricultural population came from a single crop – such as wheat, potatoes or rice – that lacks some of the vitamins, minerals and other nutritional materials humans need. The typical peasant in traditional China ate rice for breakfast, rice for lunch and rice for dinner. If she was lucky, she could expect to eat the same on the following day. By contrast, ancient foragers regularly ate dozens of different foodstuffs. The peasant’s ancient ancestor, the forager, may have eaten berries and mushrooms for breakfast; fruits, snails and turtle for lunch; and rabbit steak with wild onions for dinner. Tomorrow’s menu might have been completely different. This variety ensured that the ancient foragers received all the necessary nutrients. Furthermore, by not being dependent on any single kind of food, they were less liable to suffer when one particular food source failed. Agricultural societies are ravaged by famine when drought, fire or earthquake devastates the annual rice or potato crop. Forager societies were hardly immune to natural disasters, and suffered from periods of want and hunger, but they were usually able to deal with such calamities more easily. If they lost some of their staple foodstuffs, they could gather or hunt other species, or move to a less affected area. Ancient foragers also suffered less from infectious diseases. Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution. Ancient foragers, who had domesticated only dogs, were free of these scourges. Moreover, most people in agricultural and industrial societies lived in dense, unhygienic permanent settlements – ideal hotbeds for disease. Foragers roamed the land in small bands that could not sustain epidemics. The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies’.

There's always some smart ass Englishmen coming over here and telling us we're mean and vulgar. I agree. But they showed their hand way back during the Irish Potato Famine as instinctual Nazis.

May your coffin be made of the finest wood from a one-hundred-year-old tree that I’ll go plant tomorrow. —TRADITIONAL IRISH BLESSING

An English traveler, James H. Juke, was aghast that a day’s sail could take him from a well-fed nation to an island of the wretched and dying. He saw Irish trying to exist on sand eels, turnip tops and seaweed—“a diet which no one in England would consider fit for the meanest animal which he kept.” The potato blight had not spared England, nor Holland, parts of France and Germany. Their crops also failed. But only in Ireland were people dying en masse. The cause had been planted in the land—not the potato, but English rule that had driven a majority of Irish from ground their ancestors had owned. “The terrifying exactitude of memory,” in Tocqueville’s phrase. Famines had come before, epochs of hunger that killed upwards of 70,000 in the worst case. But this starvation reached across the island—it was now the Great Hunger, an Gorta Mór, with a fatal toll ten times that of the Great Plague of London in 1665. And here was the tragedy: there was plenty of food in Ireland while the people starved. Irish rains produced a prodigious amount of Irish grains. Almost three fourths of the country’s cultivable land was in corn, wheat, oats and barley. The food came from Irish land and Irish labor. But it didn’t go into Irish mouths. About 1.5 billion pounds of grain and other foodstuffs were exported. The natives were hired hands and witnesses to these money crops, grown by Anglo landlords. Same with cattle, sheep and hogs raised within eyesight of the hollow-bellied. Famine-ravaged Ireland exported more beef than any other part of the British Empire.

I once told Yuju that Ellen and Wansu are like potatoes and rice. Ellen's & Pat's families grew up eating potatoes. Wansu and Jonghyun had rice at nearly every meal. No home can be without one of those staples. They ward off malnutrition, have ended famines, provide comfort. You need one or the other in your life, and having both is a blessing.

Time-out,” Granuaile said. “Wasn’t there something you could have done about the potato famine?” “That was the first I’d heard of it, honestly, five years in progress by that time. It wasn’t something an elemental would have shared with me. The Irish had grown dependent on a monoculture of potatoes, a mold arrived to feast on that monoculture, and that’s why we should always grow a wide variety of cultivars. But of course Americans are ignoring that lesson now and growing a single potato for all of its French fries. French Frymageddon is coming, I promise you. It would have come already except for the tons of pesticides they’re using to keep the crop viable.

Even though the dying was still going on, they had to force themselves to think about it like the Irish potato famine, or like what had happened to the peoples of the New World when Columbus had arrived and infected them with a slew of deadly diseases. Regret, even horror were appropriate. But detachment was necessary.

Food cost rather than the absolute absence of food can often be the key factor in shortages and possible starvation. During the height of the Irish Potato Famine in 1845, Ireland was actually exporting food to England. The peasants starved because they could not afford to buy food at the local prices, enhanced by the loss of the potato crop. There was enough food, in absolute terms, to keep everyone alive; they died because they had no money to buy it.

This book attempts to evaluate the roles of the traditional landowners (whose reckless lifestyles led to bankruptcy and the acquisition of their lands by commercially-minded entrepreneurs); the new breed of accountant trustees (for whom financial probity was paramount); the Highland Potato Famine; James Cheyne, the clearing landlord; events elsewhere on Lismore, particularly on the Baleveolan estate, factored by Allan MacDougall; the influence of the Lismore Agricultural Society; investment in infrastructure on the Airds estate; the differing fates of farmers and cottars; the lack of alternative employment for the young; and opportunites elsewhere, particularly in the Central Belt of Scotland.

JUSTIFYING OPPRESSION While history has proven Malthusianism empirically false, however, it provides the ideal foundation for justifying human oppression and tyranny. The theory holds that there isn’t enough to go around, and can never be. Therefore human aspirations and liberties must be constrained, and authorities must be empowered to enforce the constraining. During Malthus’s own time, his theory was used to justify regressive legislation directed against England’s lower classes, most notably the Poor Law Act of 1834, which forced hundreds of thousands of poor Britons into virtual slavery. 11 However, a far more horrifying example of the impact of Malthusianism was to occur a few years later, when the doctrine motivated the British government’s refusal to provide relief during the great Irish famine of 1846. In a letter to economist David Ricardo, Malthus laid out the basis for this policy: “The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.” 12 For the last century and a half, the Irish famine has been cited by Malthusians as proof of their theory of overpopulation, so a few words are in order here to set the record straight. 13 Ireland was certainly not overpopulated in 1846. In fact, based on census data from 1841 and 1851, the Emerald Isle boasted a mere 7.5 million people in 1846, less than half of England’s 15.8 million, living on a land mass about two-thirds that of England and of similar quality. So compared to England, Ireland before the famine was if anything somewhat underpopulated. 14 Nor, as is sometimes said, was the famine caused by a foolish decision of the Irish to confine their diet to potatoes, thereby exposing themselves to starvation when a blight destroyed their only crop. In fact, in 1846 alone, at the height of the famine, Ireland exported over 730,000 cattle and other livestock, and over 3 million quarts of corn and grain flour to Great Britain. 15 The Irish diet was confined to potatoes because—having had their land expropriated, having been forced to endure merciless rack-rents and taxes, and having been denied any opportunity to acquire income through manufactures or other means—tubers were the only food the Irish could afford. So when the potato crop failed, there was nothing for the Irish themselves to eat, despite the fact that throughout the famine, their homeland continued to export massive amounts of grain, butter, cheese, and meat for foreign consumption. As English reformer William Cobbett noted in his Political Register: Hundreds of thousands of living hogs, thousands upon thousands of sheep and oxen alive; thousands upon thousands of barrels of beef, pork, and butter; thousands upon thousands of sides of bacon; and thousands and thousands of hams; shiploads and boats coming daily and hourly from Ireland to feed the west of Scotland; to feed a million and a half people in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and in Lancashire; to feed London and its vicinity; and to fill the country shops in the southern counties of England; we beheld all this, while famine raged in Ireland amongst the raisers of this very food. 16 “The population should be swept from the soil.” Evicted from their homes, millions of Irish men, women, and children starved to death or died of exposure. (Contemporary drawings from Illustrated London News.)

Irish Potato Famine.

Until the industrial revolution, most wealth was held in land. Primogeniture was a powerful tool for aristocrats aiming to avoid fractionation among heirs, the outcome inflicted on Black and Native American owners—and on the Irish. Fractionation was in part responsible for the Irish Potato Famine and the resulting wave of immigration to the United States. Following the Popery Act of 1703, England did not allow primogeniture for Catholics in Ireland, so their farms fractured as generations passed. Plots shrank to the point that planting a diversified range of crops became impossible. Eventually, potatoes were the only viable, nutrient-dense food that could be farmed. When a blight killed that sole crop, there was no alternative. A million Irish people starved to death; an exodus of survivors came to America.

But venereal diseases, hepatitis, and diarrhea continued to ravage the French. In addition, recent evidence demonstrates that trench fever, a debilitating but rarely fatal disease borne by the same body lice that transmit typhus, also afflicted Napoleon’s troops. Thus multiple comorbidities compounded the misery of the retreating troops and compromised their resistance. Furthermore, typhus is well known to be especially lethal when it runs its course in populations that are undernourished. The nineteenth-century epidemiologist Rudolf Virchow reminds us that the disease fully earned yet another of its many nicknames—“famine fever.” The classic case is Ireland, where famine and typhus accompanied one another in successive crises between the end of the eighteenth century and the potato famine of 1846–1848.

A terrible side effect of shipping guano to Europe was the transfer from Peru to Ireland of the late blight (Phytophthora infestans) that rotted Ireland’s potatoes, the primary source of food for that impoverished country’s eight million people. Between 1845, when the potato famine first struck, and 1860, more than a million Irish died of starvation. Another 1.5 million emigrated, most to the United States. Guano ships had carried the blight from Peru, probably in the form of infected potatoes taken aboard to feed their crews.

On the way to scouting out this building, I was handed a pamphlet in the street which argues that only when each individual human being holds a unique set of beliefs–for example, only one person in the whole world is a French-speaking Alawite Muslim who believes the Flemings were justified in the Route des Larmes but the Poles were right to say the Saxons deliberately starved them in the potato famine and the English were justified in killing Colquhoun’s band in 1834… you get the idea… only then will the mission of Diversitarianism be truly complete and Societism will be completely destroyed.

Sometimes we ate raw onions like apples, too, I wanted to tell her. Sometimes, the tin foil held shredded chicken petrified in aspic. A fish head to suck on! I was filled with shame and hateful glee: everything I was feeling turned out at the person next to me. I was the one with an uncut cow's tongue uncoiling in the refrigerator of his undergraduate quad, my roommates' Gatorades and half-finished pad Thai keeping a nervous distance. I sliced it thinly, and down it went with horseradish and cold vodka like the worry of a long day sloughing off, those little dots of fat between the cold meet like garlic roasted to paste. I am the one who fried liver. Who brought his own lunch in an old Tupperware to his cubicle in the Conde Nast Building; who accidentally warmed it too long, and now the scent of buckwheat, stewed chicken, and carrots hung like radiation over the floor, few of those inhabitants brought lunch from home, fewer of whom were careless enough to heat it for too long if they did, and none of whom brought a scent bomb in the first place. Fifteen floors below, the storks who staffed the fashion magazines grazed on greens in the Frank Gehry cafeteria. I was the one who ate mashed potatoes and frankfurters for breakfast. Who ate a sandwich for breakfast. Strange? But Americans ate cereal for dinner. Americans ate cereal, period, that oddment. They had a whole thing called 'breakfast for dinner.' And the only reason they were right and I was wrong was that it was their country. The problem with my desire to pass for native was that everything in the tinfoil was so f*****g good. When the world thinks of Soviet food, it thinks of all the wrong things. Though it was due to incompetence rather than ideology, we were local, seasonal, and organic long before Chez Panisse opened its doors. You just had to have it in a home instead of a restaurant, like British cooking after the war, as Orwell wrote. For me, the food also had cooked into it the memory of my grandmother's famine; my grandfather's black-marketeering to get us the 'deficit' goods that, in his view, we deserved no less than the political VIPs; all the family arguments that paused while we filled our mouths and our eyes rolled back in our heads. Food was so valuable that it was a kind of currency - and it was how you showed loved. If, as a person on the cusp of thirty, I wished to find sanity, I had to figure out how to temper this hunger without losing hold of what it fed, how to retain a connection to my past without being consumed by its poison.

Stuck In One's Craw by Stewart Stafford Nobody's beeswax,' still, you nosily ask: 'Is it the last supper to eat that fast?' Try blackened potato skin's bitter taste, A heritage of hunger's grim, gaunt waste. From Celtic mist, this heir apparent, My grandparent's grandparent(s), Survived Ireland's holocaust famine, As a local catch, not New World salmon. Crop blight drove their starving plea, With lots cast bleak to die or flee Genetic appetite fed the strongest, Those who eat fastest live longest. © 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.

Marylebone, in common with workhouses across London, was overwhelmed by a flood of applicants fleeing the potato famine in Ireland. The highest number accommodated on a single day was 2,264 (there were beds for 1,500), when even the workshops were pressed into service as additional dormitories.