Reforming food in post-Famine Ireland: Medicine, science and improvement, 1845–1922

By Ian Miller

Reforming food in post-famine Ireland: Medicine, science and improvement, 1845–1922 is the first dedicated study of how and why Irish eating habits dramatically transformed between the famine and independence. It also investigates the simultaneous reshaping of Irish food production after the famine. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the book draws from the diverse methodological disciplines of medical history, history of science, cultural studies, Irish studies, gender studies and food studies. Making use of an impressive range of sources, it maps the pivotal role of food in the shaping of Irish society onto a political and social backdrop of famine, Land Wars, political turbulence, the First World War and the struggle for independence. It will be of interest to historians of medicine and science as well as historians of modern Irish social, economic, political and cultural history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781526102638

Ian Miller

Earth's first off-world colony on Zhinu, twenty-five light years away and established more than a century earlier in 2235 AD, has mysteriously gone silent. Probes have identified small remnant communities, but the capital with its thousands of colonists has become a ghost town. Macpherson Yenko, famed yet controversial quantum physicist, joins the hazardous rescue mission to the remote colony . . . and finds himself uncovering the deadly truth that threatens the extinction of humanity itself.

Book preview

I

Science, improvement and food, c.1845–80

1

The chemistry of famine: nutritional discourse and dietary transformation

In 1845, approximately 45 per cent of the Irish population depended on the potato as a dietary staple, consumed with buttermilk, water, fish or whiskey.¹ In stark contrast to countries such as Italy where, as David Gentilcore demonstrates, state bodies actively encouraged potato consumption, British politicians and social commentators criticised Ireland’s mono-crop existence, routinely blaming it for the country’s intransigent lack of socio-economic development.² Political economists derided the potato as easy to produce. In doing so, they affirmed their stereotypical, self-produced views of the Irish peasantry as inherently idle. Easy cultivation meant less time labouring, so they insisted, which, in turn, caused over-population as peasants were left with excess free time spent procreating rather than labouring.³ Political economists and improvers sought to halt this mono-crop existence to stabilise Irish society, steer the country’s inhabitants into modernity and promote moral values of restraint.

Abstract economic theory aside, the potato was undeniably prone to recurrent failures – a challenging concern given the relative lack of availability of alternative foodstuffs. Poor nationwide harvests occurred in 1740–1, 1800–1, 1816–18, 1822 and 1831 while partial, regional potato scarcities were common in intermittent years.⁴ In this context, dietary transformation came to be widely agreed upon as an indispensable mechanism for resolving deep-rooted problems in Ireland’s socio-economic infrastructure.⁵ This chapter explores the emerging interest in the potato diet among certain groups of scientists with an interest in nutrition in mid-century Ireland and how they used their ideas on food, diet and nutrition to input into broader debates on national dietary regeneration. Prior to and during the Famine, nutritional scientists produced new knowledge of the physiology of food and its nutritional impact in the human body; a step that ultimately granted them opportunities to engage with famine relief activities between 1845 and 1847. Importantly, a new nutritional consciousness emerged in this period meaning that discussion of the large quantities of potatoes being consumed in Ireland gradually gave way to debates on how the Irish populace could obtain the nutritional quality previously attained from the potato. This chapter also explores the surfacing of public resistance to nutritional science, a discipline that became popularly dismissed in Famine-period Ireland as a woefully inadequate tool being used by a state disinterested in forming an adequate response to widespread starvation. Overall, this chapter explores the mid-century production of empirical knowledge on the potato, the complex ways in which it was applied for the purpose of improving and the layers of resistance that formed to medico-scientific ideas during the Famine.

Analysing the peasant body

Throughout the early nineteenth century, the Irish potato diet was increasingly considered in biological and physiological terms, a development that added important new contours to contemporary discussion of the fabric of Irish socioeconomic life. Shifting medico-scientific approaches to food provided a key impulse. Traditionally, physicians had tended to assess the ways in which human bodies respond to food with reference to constitution. They were less concerned with identifying the specific properties of individual foodstuffs as they understood the manner by which food was assimilated as variable from person to person and as contingent on a range of factors such as lifestyle, health and environment. In contrast, from around the 1820s, physicians and medical scientists subjected human food intake to new, empirically driven analytical investigations. The physiology of digestion now captured the attention of numerous medical investigators who sought to configure nuanced, empirically grounded understandings of how the human body digests and processes food.⁶ Physicians, pathological anatomists and physiologists speculated on how food was taken into the bodily system, assimilated into the blood and passed into the tissues. They explored the mastication of food, its admixture with saliva, its digestion by the stomach’s muscular powers, how it was propelled into the bowels, its assimilation into human blood and its transformation into excrement.⁷ Methods of chewing, stomach sizes, the ideal time spent by the body digesting, and so on, all came to be scrutinised by new techniques of internal exploration.⁸ Importantly, this allowed physicians to establish new norms of healthy digestion and to deem deviation from these as unhealthy and unnatural.

Given the unique nature of Irish dietary customs, it is unsurprising that the Irish peasant gradually fell under the gaze of ever more sophisticated forms of digestive analysis. Ireland’s curious mono-crop tradition – characterised by remarkably high levels of potato consumption – clashed profoundly with the ideals of a burgeoning dietetic science whose proponents venerated variation, restraint and moderation.⁹ In response, physicians sought to determine new ways of measuring and describing Irish digestive health. Considerable attention was awarded to the potato diet in Derry-born physician James Johnson’s widely read A Tour of Ireland (1844). Although best remembered for attending the Duke of Clarence and editing the popular Medico-Chirurgical Review, Johnson also penned a series of influential works on digestion. It was perhaps Johnson’s interest in exploring the workings of the stomach, combined with his Irish background, that fostered his enthusiasm for linking the potato to Irish physiology.¹⁰ In A Tour of Ireland, Johnson expressed bewilderment at a widespread habit of only half-boiling potatoes, leaving the centre so solid that it was colloquially referred to as the ‘bone of the potatoe’. This custom no doubt made sense to the Irish peasant as consuming harder material allayed hunger for longer. However, it fitted uneasily with Johnson’s opinion on healthy digestion. Accordingly, in his text, he proclaimed that ‘there is scarcely a more indigestible substance taken into the human stomach than a half-boiled potatoe; and, to, a moderately dyspeptic Englishman – such diet would be little less than