Pushing the Limits

 

Geographical facts tend (I find) to lodge quite firmly in one's mind after one teaches them to students. I've taught Native American history for nearly 25 years now, and in my lectures have usually stated that the northern growing limit of maize is the latitude of southern Ontario. This supposed geographic fact, I would go on to say, gave the Wendat nation, who originated in southwestern Ontario, a considerable commercial advantage: they could produce a large surplus of corn, then trade it to northern neighbors who could not grow the crop. I probably read this in grad school, in a book or article by an early American historian, and kept it in memory for the next two decades.

Ojibwa village, Sault Ste. Marie, 1846 - via Wikimedia Commons

 

It's now pretty clear that I was wrong about that. Monographs by Cary Miller (Ogimaag, 2010) and Brenda Child (Holding Our World Together, 2012) observed that the Minnesota Ojibwas could grow maize in raised-bed fields, at a latitude above that of the Wendat homeland. I didn't understand the mechanics of this form of cultivation, and assumed it was probably conducted on a small scale. Clearly I was wrong about this. A new LIDAR study of the Sixty Islands site near Michigan's Upper Peninsula, conducted by Madeleine McLeester, has revealed that the Menominees and their predecessors were raising corn on a large scale from approximately 1000 to 1600 CE. The techniques they used to farm in this marginal environment included field drainage, intensive use of compost, and the aforementioned raised beds, which kept a temperature a few degrees higher than that of the underlying topsoil. These sophisticated horticultural practices allowed the region's farmers to raise corn on a very large scale - approximately 300 hectares, in the case of Sixty Islands.

 

In future courses I plan to share these findings (as well as the earlier work of Child and Miller) with students. I'll add that when they want to raise a valuable crop, human beings often find a way to push the apparent natural limits on its cultivation. This was true of Menominee and Ojibwa women during the Little Ice Age; it was also the case with Euro-American farmers in Vincennes in the late 1700s. I've mentioned to students, and to any other hapless person I could trap in a conversational cul-de-sac, that the northern limit of cotton cultivation in the United States is just below the latitude of Cairo, Illinois; I've seen cotton fields in the Missouri "Bootheel" and Kentucky's Jackson Purchase district, but not any further north. During the first American cotton boom, however, white settlers in southern Indiana were happy to experiment with the crop, even though it requires 180 frost-free days to grow and one cannot be assured of them north of the Ohio River. Constantin Volney observed that white farmers in Vincennes raised cotton and tobacco, and suggested that the local climate was warm enough for both crops - the Wabash River moderated local temperatures in early spring and late fall (Harlow Lindley, ed., Indiana As Seen by Early Travelers [Indianapolis, 1916], 18-19). I suspect, though, that the Vincennes habitants could not reliably raise a large crop of the desirable fiber, and it eventually became cheaper to specialize in wheat or tobacco and buy cotton textiles elsewhere.

And When There Was No Crawdad to Be Found

The annals of the poor may be short and simple, but they need not remain so. The methodologies of social history, pioneered by the French Annalistes in the mid-twentieth century, have uncovered considerable details about the lives of rural peasants, urban workers, and other people who left few formal written records. Other professional disciplines can also add to our knowledge of the marginalized. Archaeologists and genetic specialists in Milan, for example, have spent the last decade and a half studying a unique historical archive: a crypt beneath the city’s old hospital for the poor, the Ca’Grande.

From 1637 to 1697, the hospital staff deposited the corpses of those who had died in their care - tens of thousands of people - in brick vaults beneath a nearby church. The depositors hoped the human remains would decay quickly. They hoped in vain. The city sewer lines ran near the vaults, creating a cold, humid atmosphere that inhibited decomposition. The bodies liquified, saponified, or putrified, creating a smell so intense that the hospital managers finally sealed the vaults.

 

Horsetail grass. Any port in a storm.

A few centuries later, modern forensic researchers realized that the Ca’Grande patients’ remains could reveal a great deal about their personal lives, particularly their dietary and medical histories. Since 2010 they have exhumed and analyzed about one-tenth of the bones and teeth in the vaults. The patients’ skeletons reveal that many of them were afflicted with tuberculosis and syphilis. Their dental plaque, meanwhile, reveals widespread malnourishment. Most ate a diet comprised entirely of grain; some ate horsetail grass, a northern-Italian famine food. Some were apparently willing to eat potatoes, a new import from South America that many other Europeans avoided. That many potato-eaters wound up dying (of other causes) in hospital would not have recommended the crop to their neighbors.

Particular surprises came from analysis of brain tissue clinging to some of the skulls. Some of the tissue contained a variety of opioids, end products of the opium that some patients took for pain relief. In a few cases the researchers found telltale evidence of consumption of another South American import: coca leaf. Scholars had no previous evidence of coca or cocaine consumption in Europe prior to the late nineteenth century, so this was quite a find. If this mild stimulant was in use in Milan, moreover, other workmen probably consumed it in other southern European cities. Writers of historical fiction who want to create a seventeenth-century analogue of Sherlock Holmes take note: if you place your fictional detective in the right city, you don’t have to deprive him of his favorite seven percent solution. 

Some Underground Movements Begin at Versailles

 

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.   

More Dairy, Less Empire

“I will moo harder!” says Comrade Cow.

 

Some time ago on This Here Blog I wrote very favorably about Yegor Gaidar’s 2007 paper “The Soviet Collapse: Grain and Oil.” In that essay Gaidar attributed the fall of the Soviet empire to a shortage of the one and a worldwide oversupply of the latter. More specifically: Soviet agriculture stagmated in the 1960s, and the USSR had to import grain to feed a growing population. Lacking hard currency, the Soviets sold oil and gas to pay for the imports. This worked until the oil price collapse of the mid-1980s. Thereafter Soviet officials made up the difference by borrowing abroad, which made their government an economic dependency of West Germany. When Bonn decided it didn’t like the Russian occupation of Eastern Europe, Gorbachev had to agree; Deutschmark uber alles.

 

Gaidar’s explanation was oversimplified, but not incorrect. At any rate, it had the advantage of attributing the Soviet collapse to economic crisis and bad political decisions, a more believable explanation than the dolchstoss theory favored by Vladimir Putin and his minions, or the Victory-through-Star-Wars narrative of American neoconservatives. Mr. Gaidar underestimated, however, how much bad political decisions accounted for the USSR’s later food shortages. I refer here not to the collectivization of agriculture - which, admittedly, didn’t help - but to something just noted by historian Ian Sheldon: Moscow’s decision in the early 1970s to ramp up domestic meat and dairy production. This was part of an overall effort by Eastern Bloc nations to quash political discontent by raising living standards. In the Soviet Union, government ministers believed that more beefsteaks and sour cream would pacify the population and head off challenges to Moscow’s authority.

 

The peoples of the USSR got a temporary improvement in their diets, but the cost was the reallocation of grain to livestock, and substitution via an unstable raw-materials market and then excessive borrowing. It proved a dumb decision in the long run, but the Soviet system (five-year plans to the contrary) prioritized short- and medium-term fixes. Such are the consequences of filling one’s leadership cadre with decrepit septuagenerians, lifelong drunkards, and great shambling bags of Lorezepam (looking at you, Leonid).  

 

In his article “Ukraine: The Breadbasket of Europe” (link above), Sheldon reports that the fall of the USSR ended Moscow’s subsidization of the meat and dairy industries, and the larger republics (like Ukraine) began privatizing most of their farms. Corn and wheat production took off, and by 2010 Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine exported more grain that the entire Soviet Union had imported in 1990. By 2020 many other nations had become dependent either on Russian and Ukrainian foodstuffs or Russian hydrocarbons, which is what made the outbreak of war between the two former Soviet republics so economically devastating. 

The price of eliminating communism was finding something to fill the ideological gap, in this case a combination of regional authoritarianism and neoliberalism, both of which have proven widely damaging to a vastly more interconnected world.