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Potatoes!, Friday, Second Period
Friday, March 21st, 2025 09:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carbsliftthespiritRaiden's students had been told to meet at Portalocity this week, and when they got here, he greeted them with an enthusiastic wave and launched straight into explaining today's field trip. "St. Patrick's Day, the national holiday of Ireland, was earlier this week, and Ireland is one of the countries outside of South America whose history has been most dramatically impacted by the potato. You see, for a long time Ireland was ruled by the United Kingdom, and most of the land in Ireland was owned by English landlords, so the Irish didn't get to decide what to do with their own crops. One of the few things they could grow for their own consumption was potatoes, and the Irish diet came to rely on them heavily...and then a blight infested the potato crops, and from 1845 to 1852, they failed.
"This period is known in Irish as an Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, and in English as the Great Famine or Irish Potato Famine. It's estimated that one million people died, and another million emigrated to countries like the United States and Canada. The starting population was a little over eight million, so that's...that's a quarter. Ireland's population did not recover to what it was before the famine until 2022.
"The famine strained the already bad relationship between the Irish and their English landlords, because the English completely screwed up their whole response to the famine through a misguided belief that the market would just provide food. Ireland was actually producing plenty of food that wasn't potatoes during the famine! It was just all being exported to England, to feed the English, because the landlords could get higher prices there and they didn't care if--" Raiden cut himself off before he started ranting. This was heavy for a Raiden class, but he cared a lot about completely unnecessary hunger, okay? "Ireland, or, most of Ireland, the northern part is still part of the UK for complicated reasons that aren't relevant to this class, finally gained its independence from England in 1921. Yay!
"Modern Ireland, where we're going today, has a much more varied food scene than 'all potatoes all the time,' as you'll see through the food tour we'll be taking. I think only the Irish stew features potatoes. So let's go see what Ireland has to offer us in terms of delicious food, now that they actually, y'know...have some." He gestured his students toward the portal.
"This period is known in Irish as an Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, and in English as the Great Famine or Irish Potato Famine. It's estimated that one million people died, and another million emigrated to countries like the United States and Canada. The starting population was a little over eight million, so that's...that's a quarter. Ireland's population did not recover to what it was before the famine until 2022.
"The famine strained the already bad relationship between the Irish and their English landlords, because the English completely screwed up their whole response to the famine through a misguided belief that the market would just provide food. Ireland was actually producing plenty of food that wasn't potatoes during the famine! It was just all being exported to England, to feed the English, because the landlords could get higher prices there and they didn't care if--" Raiden cut himself off before he started ranting. This was heavy for a Raiden class, but he cared a lot about completely unnecessary hunger, okay? "Ireland, or, most of Ireland, the northern part is still part of the UK for complicated reasons that aren't relevant to this class, finally gained its independence from England in 1921. Yay!
"Modern Ireland, where we're going today, has a much more varied food scene than 'all potatoes all the time,' as you'll see through the food tour we'll be taking. I think only the Irish stew features potatoes. So let's go see what Ireland has to offer us in terms of delicious food, now that they actually, y'know...have some." He gestured his students toward the portal.