April showers bring May flowers – unless they bring floods, famine, and fear. This month, I’m looking at the moment in French history when farmers turned their nose up at the foods of the New World – until they realized what the potato had to offer. Antoine Parmentier, one of the great hype men of food history, features in this month’s episode all about the tastiest of tubers!

Episode 68: “Antoine Parmentier & The History of the Potato”

Antoine Parmentier, “the apostle of the potato”

Portrait of Antoine Parmentier holding wheat and potato blossoms

Illustration of Antoine Parmentier offering a potato blossom to King Louis XIV — that moment when u run into the king and it’s potato blossom season

Transcript

“Le légume de la cabane et du château.” – Le marquis de Cussy

Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and most of this script was written over the course of a gloomy, rainy weekend here in San Francisco. As always, the arrival of rain in the Bay Area has only one appropriate response: “Ah, but we need the rain” – and it’s true, California is always in a fluctuating state of drought, and this year is particularly bad. I say this to explain that I have climate shifts on the brain right now, and my recent reading all focuses on the relationships between humans, cities, and weather. This month, as we wait to see whether April showers really do turn into May flowers, I’d like to do a prequel episode, if you will. If you’ve been a listener from the start – or if you’ve taken a dig through the archives – you’ll remember that the debut episode of this podcast centers around the volcanic explosion which kicked off a series of bread riots in France, acting as kindling for the French Revolution. Today, let’s ask this question: why didn’t that volcano trigger riots in Britain, or other countries in Europe? Or to put it another way, we associate the French Revolution with an uprising of millions of French peasants. It was the 1780s, why on earth did France still have so many peasants? Today, we’re taking a closer look at a dreadful century when France was – horror of horrors – out of date, behind the times, and out of fashion. As the rest of the West underwent an agricultural revolution, the French kept her ancient farming practices – no matter what the cost. One of the greatest revolutions in French history didn’t take place in Paris, or even Versailles, but out in the sticks, where wheat – the so-called staff of life – gave way to new crops, and a whole new way of life. In this episode, let us appreciate one of the great changemakers of French history: the potato.

Subsistence farming/the old ways

“And six years thou shalt sow thy land, and shalt gather in the fruits thereof: but the seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie still; that the poor of thy people may eat: and what they leave the beasts of the field shall eat.” This passage from the book of Exodus perfectly captures the shmita, or the Sabbath year of the ancient world, in which farmers would spend an entire year letting their fields sit, fallow, as the soil rested and recovered. Though they wouldn’t have known why at the time, the chemistry checks out. Cereal grains, like wheat and rye, are “scavenger” plants – their roots dig down, down, down into the soil, gobbling up nutrients and incorporating them into the the stems and leaves, thus producing a nutritious crop with enough vitamins and minerals to sustain, oh, the human race. But scavenging the soil comes at a cost: planting cereal grains like wheat and barley in the same dirt year after year eventually leeches those nutrients, especially nitrogen, out of the soil. Things stop growing. Giving the farm a break – a sabbatical, if you will, eh eh – let those biblical farms recover and kept the soil from eroding. There was just one problem: what do you do during, you know, the year without a harvest?