An improving climate did not bring lasting relief from famine to eighteenth-century Europeans. France, the most populous kingdom on the continent, suffered from food shortages every decade until the nineteenth century. After one of the nation’s many failed harvests (1769-70), the Académie de Besançon offered a prize for the most compelling essay on alimentary alternatives to wheat and flour. The prize winner, who published his essay in 1771, was Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a fervent advocate of potato cultivation and a pioneer in the field of food chemistry. His scientific achievements brought him the acclaim of the French elite, culminating in the cross of the Legion d’Honneur in 1802. In an important sense, however, Parmentier’s career ended in failure: he did not, in his lifetime, persuade French farmers to take up the cultivation of his favorite plant, the potato. That particular social revolution had to come from below.
"Mass of foliage, or delicious snack?"
Mssr. Parmentier’s introduction to the humble spud came during the Seven Years’ War, when as an Army druggist he was captured and imprisoned by the Prussians. Prussia’s autocratic monarch Frederick II had obliged farmers to begin growing potatoes a generation earlier, and the nutritious tuber became a staple food of the east German peasantry. In prison Parmentier subsisted on three potatoey lumps per day, and upon his release found himself healthier than before. He subsequently became the leading French advocate of the pomme de terre, persuading the Sorbonne faculty of medicine to endorse potatoes’ salubriousness (1772) and winning converts to the cause at Versailles, where he gifted the high-born with potato flowers and potato-based dishes. One suspects the aristocracy, who enjoyed affecting rusticity, found the ingestion of pig food (as many European farmers used potatoes) charmingly earthy and authentic. One is reminded of P.J. O’Rourke’s joke about the Michelin-starred restaurant that served the hoi polloi a good meal but reserved for the true elite the opportunity to squat on the pavement and eat offal.
Parmentier in his later career conducted chemical analyses of wheat, chestnuts, and chocolate; developed sugar substitutes from grapes and beetroot; and opened a cooking school in Paris. He also tried to spread interest in solanum tuberosum by borrowing a trick from Frederick of Prussia: stationing guards around the test plot where he was growing potatoes, thus enticing the curious to steal samples of his secret and obviously valuable crop. Unfortunately, this won few lasting converts to the cause, and Parmentier died before spuds became popular with the rural majority. French peasants had believed for decades that potatoes caused leprosy, and even those who didn’t share this belief tended to avoid new crops. The French method of raising food on communal land divided into small, irregular family plots placed a premium on conformity and monocropping, and discouraged experimentation. Not until after the Napoleonic Wars and the devastating Year Without a Summer (1816) did large numbers of peasants begin adding potatoes to their crop rotation, whereupon the end of regular famines and concurrent rural population growth encouraged more cultivators to plant more potatoes. By the twentieth century France was the principal producer of pommes de terres in Europe. Though not of French fries, which are apparently Belgian. Which would explain the mayonnaise fixation.
Sources: Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity (Walker and Co., 2009), 120-22; Diana S., “Antoine Parmentier & the History of the Potato,” landofdesire.com, 29 April 2021.
