Adam Smith on Chair-Men, Coal-Heavers, Porters, Prostitutes, and Potatoes

Adam Smith is definitely pro-potato: He thinks potato-eaters are Buff and Gorgeous--"the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions.

Jack of http://elephantstrunk.net/ writes in comments:

Actually, [Adam] Smith was quite nice about potatoes:

In some parts of Lancashire, it is pretended, I have been told, that bread of oatmeal is a heartier food for labouring people than wheaten bread, and I have frequently heard the same doctrine held in Scotland. I am, however, somewhat doubtful of the truth of it. The common people in Scotland, who are fed with oatmeal, are in general neither so strong nor so handsome as the same rank of people in England, who are fed with wheaten bread. They neither work so well, nor look so well; and as there is not the same difference between the people of fashion in the two countries, experience would seem to shew, that the food of the common people in Scotland is not so suitable to the human constitution as that of their neighbours of the same rank in England. But it seems to be otherwise with potatoes. The chairmen, porters, and coal-heavers in London, and those unfortunate women who live by prostitution, the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions, are said to be, the greater part of them, from the lowest rank of people in Ireland, who are generally fed with this root. No food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality, or of its being peculiarly suitable to the health of the human constitution...

Adam Smith (1776), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: William Strahan) Book I, Chapter 11.

Comments

[SW]

Kirstie Allie must love that.

[P O'Neill]

But was Smith confusing the effects of a carb-loaded diet with the appearance of good health?

[battlepanda]

Man, for a scot Adam Smith is certainly down on his people's cereal of choice.

[bakho]

Potatoes are tubers, not roots.

The potatoes were cultivated and bred by the Incas. The Incas would cut the potatoes and put them out at night. They would freeze in the cold, then dry in the sun the next day (Freeze drying). Potatoes provide the most calories per acre of any food crop.

The Spaniards would not eat potatoes themselves but fed them to their horses. In general, Euorpeans were reluctant to eat new world foods. This is why they brought their wheat, vegetables and livestock with them.

Europeans were reluctant to eat potatoes, even in the midst of failures of other grain crops. Peasants ordered to plant potatoes by day would dig them up at night. The reluctance came in part because potatoes were not mentioned in the Bible and the tubers grow underground (associated with Satan). At the time it was believed that all the foods good to eat were given to man in the Garden of Eden. The Europeans were clueless about the centuries of plant breeding conducted by native Americans.

The Irish ate potatoes because they had to ship their wheat and Barley to England. Even in the midst of the potato famine and starvation, the English took their other grains for export.

[Kieran]

Marx's comments on the potato are largely confined to the famine. Engels assigns it its true place in history:

"The next step leads us to the upper stage of barbarism, the period when all civilized peoples have their Heroic Age: the age of the iron sword, but also of the iron plowshare and ax. Iron was now at the service of man, the last and most important of all the raw materials which played a historically revolutionary role - until the potato." (Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, Ch 9).

The Potato Age! Stone, Bronze, Iron ... Spud!

Elsewhere he speaks specifically about my people:

"[N]o worker will work for less than he needs to subsist. ... True, this limit is relative; one needs more than another, one is accustomed to more comfort than another; the Englishman, who is still somewhat civilised, needs more than the Irishman, who goes in rags, eats potatoes, and sleeps in a pig-sty." (Condition of the Working Class in England).

Hmm, not so flattering. However, here he is writing about Daniel O'Connell's entourage:

"People who have nothing to lose, two-thirds of whom are clothed in rags, genuine proletarians and sansculottes and, moreover, Irishmen, wild, headstrong, fanatical Gaels. One who has never seen Irishmen cannot know them. Give me two hundred thousand Irishmen and I will overthrow the entire British monarchy. The Irishman is a carefree, cheerful, potato-eating child of nature."

Or as Yeats later said:

"Come away, potato-eating child
With the spicy and the mild
And a utensil hand in hand
For the world's more full of starches
Than you can understand ..."

[Bruce Webb]

"the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions"

Agreed. But it has nothing to do with potatoes. Freckles and temperment on the other hand ...

My biggest regret is that I am from the wrong branch of Irishmen (dour Scotch-Irish Protestants - good providers but not much fun at the pub).

[Tad Brennan]

Wouldn't the flavor of Smith's comment about the Irish here be better approximated by how it would sound in the mouth of a white American talking about black men and women? I.e. the genre of 'good sense of rhythm' compliments that reveal profound racism? My, what good porters and prostitutes they make!

Of course, since the point of the paragraph is to assess the nutritive qualities of a foodstuff vis a vis the bodies of those that consume it, his point did not require him to address the humanity of the subjects at all--it would have been just as germane to compare two groups of cattle fed oats and potatoes. (Or slightly less, since it is human nutrition that is at issue. But humans qua large omnivores, not qua thinking persons.)

At any rate, I have always thought this a better compliment to the potato than to the Irish.

Kieran--bravo on the Yeats parody.

[P.M.Lawrence]

Adam Smith sensibly used a control group for Scotland, in sorting out whether it was more likely diet or heredity that influenced the Scots. But he didn't make the right adjustment about the Irish; he only assessed those in London, i.e. those who found it practical to migrate for longer or shorter periods. So he was selecting out gurra women and the like.

I was going to say that about potatoes being tubers ("you will, Oscar, you will"). But there are a few more observations to make.

Potatoes took off in Europe, as it were, when it turned out that they survived devastation better than cereals (remember Brad's discussion of "chevauchee" a while back?).

What happened in Ireland was different. In particular, it wasn't a case of "the Irish had to send their grain to England", not precisely. Rather, the potato was introduced about the same time that the Irish were being forcibly settled in agricultural pursuits instead of more pastoral lifestyles. In many cases they didn't switch their own land from cereal growing to potatoes but from pasture. The cereal for export was generally - not 100% - grown on the landlord's own land, and the Irish contribution was rent in the form of labour, often via cottier middlemen.

One rather important thing is this: cereals work well as capital, since they can be easily stored and transported, but they need equipment to grow and process; rice has the same advantage but needs little equipment (though it does take capital, you can start with extensive hill rice); and potatoes are poor stores of portable wealth but need little equipment or accumulated capital.

That last point made the potato less fungible for rent etc., which highlighted the extraction of Irish labour and whether Paddy's pig was being taken. Also, different cultural concepts of land tenure emphasised the alien nature of rent when that was introduced. Grievances remained glaringly visible from those among other things.

Declaration of interest: I am myself half Scottish and half Irish, though not of Ulster stock.

[Bruce Webb]

Adam Smith meet Dean Swift:

I was a little tongue in cheek, the English habit of treating the Irish as basically sub-human is long documented and carried over to the United States in the early years of the Potatoe (or Potato) Famine.

See Jonathon Swift's Modest Proposal. http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html Yum, yum, lets serve it with curry and solve the Third World problem once and for all.

(And yes I know that the Good Dean was being satirical and in many ways I admire Adam Smith but more nonsense has been spawned from Wealth of Nations than we can begin to address. Invisible Hand my ass. Ken Lay had his hand up the ass of this nation's wealth for years and is still on the streets as we speak.)

[trostky]

The unfortunate prostitutes are the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions? I learn more about Adam Smith every day.

[piotr]

Some of them were presumably fortunate enough to get acquainted with the father of modern economics. Mind you, the acquaintance could mean just being in the same pub in the same time.

[John Emerson]

Marx also said, talking about the disorganization of the German working class, something like "The mass of the German nation is formed by simple agglomeration, the way you form a sack of potatos by putting potatoes in a sack".

For the record, however, lumpen-proletariat does not mean "lumpy ptoletariat" but "ragged proletariat".

Needham claimed that the Chinese population multiplied manyfold with the advent of the potato, since potatoes were grown in different soils than rice, so that there was a backup crop in case of the failure of the rice crop. Chinese seem to think of potatoes as poverty food, and a guy I know who studied in Germany really disliked the fact that potatoes were a staple there.

In Taiwan French Fries are made with sweet potatoes.

[peBird]

This HAS to be a question on your next Econ quiz.

[obscure]

Yeah, but I want to talk about Smith's legendary worm-like gait.

And his propensity for getting lost in thought and walking into or off of things.

[MonkeyBoy]

http://www.bawarchi.com/health/potato.html:

"Content of minerals and water soluble B group vitamins in potatoes is small but significant. The vitamin C content of freshly dug potato is high being 30mg per 100 gm but is reduced to 8 mg after storage of 9 months. Cooking potatoes unpeeled conserves most of the vitamin B, C and salts."

...

"Solanine and chaconin are alkaloid present in green and sprouted potatoes. Consumption of these alkaloids in excess can be poisonous."

I can't easily find information on early practices of potato storage and peeling. My guess is that many grower/consumers dug up potatoes just before eating them, did not have the problem of green skins, and ate the skins and their vitamins.

Only when potatoes became a trade item did the problem of improper storage and green skins become a problem that was solved via peeling. Also contributing to peeling may have been an upper class conceit that the whiter foods are better.

When did people stop eating peels and what is the history of the baked potato? This history is probably intertwined with that of commercial food preperation - e.g. can you really trust someone selling cooked potatoes from a food stall not to have used the cheaper green potatoes?

Finally, when did peeling potatoes go from a somewhat motivated practice to a form of orthodoxy for which no explanation is needed?

[Tad Brennan]

"when did peeling potatoes go from a somewhat motivated practice to a form of orthodoxy"

Uh...Never? I still eat them unpeeled. I see them served in restaurants "in their jackets" as they say in the UK. Sometimes folks disdain to eat the jacket. But sometimes, as in steak-fries, the peel is intended for consumption as well.

[Jim]

I did a trip to England once very much on the cheap. I lived off jacket potatoes with ham and cheese in them that cost about 3 pounds. They were very filling and were perfect with the masses of beer I was drinking.

[Carlos]

... you know, when an extra spud a day visibly contributes enough to one's nutrient intake to improve one's looks, it's probably not a surplus of calories in one's diet one is worried about.

I suspect Brad will pair Smith's observation with Orwell's comments from On the Road to Wigan Pier in one of his classes.

[bakho]

The History of potato and French Fries

http://www.stim.com/Stim-x/9.2/fries/fries-09.2.html

[Ralph]

Interesting note about the effect of the potato on Chinese demographics. Prof Jonathan Steinberg mentioned that Adam Smith had the same belief on the effect of the potato on the Irish population which increased three fold after its introduction.

[Elaine Supkis]

The potato caused a huge population boom in the peasantry. This was ruthlessly dealt with in all the potato regions by forced or encouraged immigration to "open lands" which, in turn, meant killing natives in far lands, and in forced immigration into cities.

Once the villages were emptied out, they were set afire and sheep and cattle set agrazing. Many thousands of villages dissppeared during the 18th to 20th centuries.

[John Emerson]

Supkis's story about the relationship between agricultral and pastoral land use seems to be the opposite of Lawrence's here, unless we're talking about a very complex back an forth movement.

[P.M.Lawrence]

Oral history to the rescue. The peasants did NOT eat potato peel. For one thing, even before going green it has a slight bowel irritant effect, which matters if you are eating them by the stone.

But more importantly the peel was too valuable to waste eating it. My mother told me that you deliberately peeled the potato coarsely so you could start a new crop from the parts with eyes in them. It meant you didn't have to set aside seed potatoes.

The "driving peasants off the land" thing wasn't practical in Ireland before the 18th century. The problem before that, for the occupiers, was getting them settled where they could be policed; their former lifestyle facilitated support for resistance. It was a policy on a par with concentration camps in South Africa or Reconcentrado in Cuba - take away the water, the fish die.

P.S. I forgot to mention how Parmentier tricked his peasantry into growing potatoes. He had his own patch, which he set guards over to prevent theft. When the guards were "carelessly" (actually deliberately) withdrawn at night the avaricious and fundamentally dishonest peasants sneaked in and stole them, convinced they must be valuable just as Parmentier foresaw. Talk about leading a pig.

[opit]

This was of course before bread was made from flour treated so that weevils couldn't survive on it. Or potatoes were dried or routinely fat fried in slivers.

[Maynard Handley]

I'd like to point out that while someone earlier listed potato nutrients, he didn't make a big deal out of them. Potatoes, surprisingly, are rich in vitamin C; add to that that poor people in the past, living on the same thing day after day, were prone to trace deficiency diseases like scurvy. It's likely that it was not just the caloric content of potatoes that helped.

(This raises the interesting question of what these people did for protein. I never think of kwashiorkor as a European disease. Clearly soy was not an issue, and lentils are not a very European dish. Was there always enough meat/fish, or were beans and peas the unsung heroes of the European diet?)

[Bob B]

In Dr Johnson's Dictionary (of 1755, twenty-one years before Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations), the entry for Oats famously read:

OATS.n.s. A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.
http://www.varsity.cam.ac.uk/802567B80049EF7D/Pages/232000_DictionaryJohnson.html

James Boswell, Dr Johnson's biographer and a Scotsman, is said to have retorted, "Which is why England is known for its horses and Scotland for its men."
http://www.answers.com/topic/oatmeal

[bakho]

The seed potatoes I have planted are all more than just a bit of course peel. They are whole potatoes cut into 8-12 pieces.

[chris Borthwick]

Claud Cockburn wrote in _Aspects of English History_ that having read Smith all the Irish women insisted that their husbands plant nothing but potatoes, thus leading directly to the great famine; I must admit that at the time I thought he'd made the quote up, but here it is. Can anybody now supply a source for the other item I remember from _Aspects_, possibly relating to this very quote - "It was generally thought that he had, as the French say, missed a splendid opportunity to keep his mouth shut"? Which French?

[DanQ]

It's spelled p-o-t-a-t-o-e. Potatoe.

[P.M.Lawrence]

MH, the Irish mostly got their main protein and fat needs from milk (they needed acces to many cattle, but only one cow each - even if that was nominally the landlord's).

Bakho, your seed potato(e) method comes close to what you get by coarse peeling, except it leaves nothing over to eat. Cutting seed potatoes that much is making them rather smaller than comfort if you want to give them a good start.

A good bit of pre-potato description of Ireland is in Spenser's view of the current state of Ireland, available on line somewhere.

But yes, the typical mediaeval European peasant had a bread and bean diet as staple. But don't forget, all of them (including the Irish) supplemented it as and when possible from other sources, like Paddy's pig or the kind of animals you could keep with the help of commoner's rights (NOT as simplistic as some tragedy of the commons accounts make out).

[John Emerson]

I just read that there was an XIXc Dutch potato famine which (in part) caused some of my ancestors to migrate to Iowa. They were Separatists too ("afgescheidenen"), like the guys who came over from Holland to Plymouth Rock.

Apparently they were unimaginative and borrowed all their reasons for emigrating from others.

[Stanley Baldwin]

Just as the results of inebriety are most painful to the habitually sober, and just as the greatest saints have often been the greatest sinners, so, when the first class brain does something stupid, the stupidity of that occasion is colossal

[Captain Button]

"This raises the interesting question of what these people did for protein. I never think of kwashiorkor as a European disease. Clearly soy was not an issue, and lentils are not a very European dish. Was there always enough meat/fish, or were beans and peas the unsung heroes of the European diet?"

'But yes, the typical mediaeval European peasant had a bread and bean diet as staple.'

As I recall from my one course on medieval history, one of the advantages of the shift from the two-field farming system to the three-field farming system was that the added crops were peas and/or beans, giving a diet higher in protein. A quick google turns up this web page agreeing with me:

http://www.ku.edu/kansas/medieval/108/lectures/towns.html