Rebecca Earle. Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato.

Abstract

Although Feeding the People is ostensibly a book about the potato, its primary interest is when and why the everyday eating habits of regular people became a matter of concern to modern states. The book is wide-ranging. It provides evidence that wild potatoes were gathered and eaten thirteen thousand years ago in present-day Utah (where “funeral potatoes” are now the unofficial state dish) and documents the centrality of potato cultivation to Andean cultures since at least 7800 BCE. It records how the overthrow of the Incan empire in the sixteenth century put the potato into global circulation and highlights this food product’s place in state projects to change consumer habits in late twentieth-century China. But the book’s strength lies in its argument that it was during the eighteenth century that European countries in particular began to see the diet of the lower orders of the population as central to national strength and security.