I learned through twitter (and accepted as my truth) that the potato famine was fake and only happened coz england was taking potatoes.
No, the famine was absolutely real. It was CAUSED by the English but it happened. Yada yada, politics, refusing to share provisions, most likely adding to the spread of the contamination, yes. Was it fake? Absolutely not. I'm not going to go into any details because you don't care.
If you're getting your history lessons from Twitter of all places, I don't expect to change your mind. The fact that you want to rewrite history to suit your narrative is worrying and is exactly what people who have destroyed nations in the past have done, but no one can stop you from actively making the world a worse place.
lol I'm not that close minded and I don't mind being proven wrong. it's just a nice tidbit of info. I don't really need coz I don't live in potatoland and have other local starchy vegetables to choose from. Just because there's a famine doesn't mean it's not a good crop to grow. They grow fast so if that day comes just grow another crop? like that's a risk farmers always make. Doesn't erase that it's easy to grow in non ideal soil conditions and nutrient dense.
basically, the problem was never potatoes, potatoes are amazing. they'rehardy, grow in all kinds of soil and grow easily, on top of being very nourishing. it was that irish farmers only grew 1 kind of potato for personal consumption and when that kind of potato got an infection that spread to the whole country, they lost their primary source of daily calories, bc England forced them to export their other crops to England instead of sharing resources. basically, England forced Ireland to starve bc farmers were only allowed grow potatoes for themselves and all their other crops had to be exported to England, so when those potatoes got an infection, they starved.
that's why saying the potato famine was fake is a lie, it's not that it didn't happen, it's that it was purely due to the irish being forced to rely on potatoes and thus starving when they got infected, when England could've provided aid to prevent it from happening in the forst place
Not so much a rant as just an observation. I've noticed a lot of manga and manhwa use potatoes as the "go to" plant for food. It's not that I don't understand. Potatoes are hardy, produce a great many in short time, yada yada. However, every time I see it, I can't help but think of the various potato famines in the 1840s. It wasn't just Ireland, although they got hit the hardest. The reason it hit certain areas so hard, like Ireland, is BECAUSE of their heavy reliance on potatoes. So every time I read it and they are like, "Potatoes are a cure all!" I'm just sitting over here, screaming in my head, "Not again!"
I know this isn't the point of the story. I know she's looking at other crops. Most of them do. But every single time, they pick potatoes first and I can only gape in horror at the idea of a fictional world, 200 years from now, having the same kind of famine because they didn't have the thought of what heavy reliance on one plant might mean.