I'd imagine how much actual calories that is depends on the size of the potatoes. When potatoes fail, they often do so by producing tiny tubers. The smallest I personally ate were less than an inch in diameter.

Also,people who don't do any farming don't realise how much effort goes into pest/disease control. Especially with potatoes the main pest around here(central Europe) is Colorado Potato Beetle (if that is the correct name for it in English). It is an extremely resilient organism. It very quickly starts tolerating all insecticides that are allowed around here. And between seasons it gets into the ground half meter deep. So unless you want to destroy your soil there is no getting rid of it once it establishes itself somewhere. The only option is to take the crop elsewhere.

It is such a pain in potato growing, during communist times it was used as a propaganda piece. There was (very likely fake) news that US was dropping that beetle from spy planes to ruin the crop. Of course the association of the beetle with one of the US's states didn't help.

Another way to deal with such infestation is to pick it up by hand and lots of people did that back then and now. You can imagine how unpleasant that is. Also you end up with 5l jars full of these bugs...

You have to eat the skins to get the vitamins and minerals

How big we these potatoes I wonder.

I wonder what size of potatoes they were back then? How many kilograms of potatoes that was?

I imagine they may have been much smaller than today's varieties.

I wonder how they ate the potatoes? Cooked in what way and with what additions like butter etc.?

That's roughly between 6000 and 10000 calories

Thanks for sharing this! I didn’t realizs the connections… just like I didn’t realize that the Bay of Pigs invasion was a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis because Cuba wanted to defend itself against the US “special military operations”, and made an alliance with USSR. Not at all dissimilar to what’s happening in Ukraine at the moment. Anyway, I like making these connections across disciplines — at the time the people reacted exactly to these things.

DOES ANYONE KNOW OF A BOOK THAT COVERS SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES IN THIS WAY?

The vast majority of ways science is taught, we just learn the shrinkwrapped version. I want to know how they finally figured out the mind was in the brain vs heart, how they got past spontaneous generation, humors, phlogiston, who was a proponent of luminiferous ether after the michelson moey experiment, and more importantly… how did they discover molecules and the atom, what did they know before they had electron microscopes… how did they use the older, worse theories and how did they eventually discover these new concepts like tectonic plates etc

did Popov and Marconi and Tesla know each other… in short how did science develop? Any books like that?

This is a very interesting chain of events. All European exploitation was cruel and history was written by victors. With China and India rising, a lot of the shenanigans are going to come out and made common knowledge. Right now, history is heavily tilted towards the western story.

Well, I am talking about the enforcement of private property of the landowning class, landlords and middlemen extracting rents for them — quintessential parts of Capitalism. And the Whigs explicitly going for laissez faire and attributing the famine to laziness — are not unlike the Republicans today, though today we have far more safety nets for everybody!

Ireland got independence in 1921. The great famine was 1845−1849.

The worst kind of ignorant is the smug one.

Ireland was a colony of Britain. The economic system of Britain was much more concerned with extracting value from its colony than it was in caring about the people in its colony.

I genuinely can't tell if you are being serious or not. Are you not familiar with Britain's and Ireland's "relationship"?

You've got a wealth of Irish history to catch up on it seems.

https://youtu.be/yvKTG8pE_70?t=516

English-based land owners of massive agricultural holdings in Ireland were literally exporting huge quantities of food from Ireland at the same time that people were starving.

Sure. The entire system that exacerbated the problem was of a thoroughly capitalist character. It revolved around the landlord class vs the poor tenants / sharecroppers, as well as exporting food at a time of famine (as did Bengal famine).

You’d do well to start in the wikipedia article that I linked. Some quotes:

Longer-term causes include the system of absentee landlordism[15][16] and single-crop dependence.[17][18] Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, in part because they believed the famine was due to lacking moral character,[19][20] and only resumed later. The refusal of London to bar export of food from Ireland during the famine was an immediate and continuing source of controversy, contributing to anti-British sentiment and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in tens of thousands of households being evicted, exacerbated by a provision forbidding access to workhouse aid while in possession of more than one-quarter acre of land.

…

Landlords and tenants Edit During the 18th century, the "middleman system" for managing landed property was introduced. Rent collection was left in the hands of the landlords' agents, or middlemen. This assured the landlord of a regular income and relieved them of direct responsibility while leaving tenants open to exploitation by the middlemen.[36]

Catholics, the majority of whom lived in conditions of poverty and insecurity, made up 80% of the population. At the top of the "social pyramid" was the "ascendancy class", the English and Anglo-Irish families who owned most of the land and held more or less unchecked power over their tenants. Some of their estates were vast; for example, the Earl of Lucan owned more than 60,000 acres (240 km2). Many of these absentee landlords lived in England. The rent revenue—collected from "impoverished tenants" who were paid minimal wages to raise crops and livestock for export[15]—was mostly sent to England.[16]

…

The Commission stated that bad relations between landlord and tenant were principally responsible. There was no hereditary loyalty, feudal tie, or mitigating tradition of paternalism as existed in Britain, as the Anglo-Irish aristocracy that supplanted the Gaelic aristocracy in the 17th century was of a different religion and newer. In 1800, the 1st Earl of Clare observed of landlords that "confiscation is their common title".[39][40] According to the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith, landlords regarded the land as a source of income, from which as much as possible was to be extracted. With the peasantry "brooding over their discontent in sullen indignation" (in the words of the Earl of Clare), the landlords largely viewed the countryside as a hostile place in which to live. Some landlords visited their property only once or twice in a lifetime, if ever.[39] The rents from Ireland were generally spent elsewhere; an estimated £6,000,000 was remitted out of Ireland in 1842.[39][a]

The ability of middlemen was measured by the rent income they could contrive to extract from tenants.[36] They were described in evidence before the commission as "land sharks", "bloodsuckers", and "the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country".[36] The middlemen leased large tracts of land from the landlords on long leases with fixed rents, which they sublet as they saw fit. They would split a holding into smaller and smaller parcels so as to increase the amount of rent they could obtain. Tenants could be evicted for reasons such as non-payment of rents (which were high), or a landlord's decision to raise sheep instead of grain crops. A cottier paid his rent by working for the landlord while the spalpeen, an itinerant labourer, paid his short-term lease through temporary day work.[41][42]

As any improvement made on a holding by a tenant became the property of the landlord when the lease expired or was terminated, the incentive to make improvements was limited. Most tenants had no security of tenure on the land; as tenants "at will", they could be turned out whenever the landlord chose.

…

Landlords in Ireland often used their powers without compunction, and tenants lived in dread of them. Woodham-Smith writes that, in these circumstances, "industry and enterprise were extinguished and a peasantry created which was one of the most destitute in Europe".[38]

Tenants and subdivisions Edit See also: Irish farm subdivision

A starving Irish family from Carraroe, County Galway, during the Great Famine (National Library of Ireland) The Popery Act (Penal Law) of 1704 required that when a tenant died, his land should be divided equally between his sons. Population growth, from about 2 million by 1700, to 8 million by the time of the Great Famine, led to increased division of holdings and a consequent reduction in their average size. By 1845, 24% of all Irish tenant farms were of 0.4–2 hectares (1–5 acres) in size, while 40% were of 2–6 hectares (5–15 acres). Holdings were so small that no crop other than potatoes would suffice to feed a family. Shortly before the famine, the British government reported that poverty was so widespread that one-third of all Irish small holdings could not support the tenant families after rent was paid; the families survived only by earnings as seasonal migrant labour in England and Scotland.[43]