Rebecca Earle's "Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato"

Rebecca Earle is Head of the Department of History at the University of Warwick. Her publications include The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (2012) and The Return of the Native: Indians and Mythmaking in Spanish America, 1810–1930 (2007). She has also edited a cookery book.

Earle applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato, and reported the following:

Page 99 discusses soup kitchens. As today, in eighteenth-century Europe ordinary people often found it difficult to feed themselves and their families. In response individuals and organisations in a number of countries set up soup kitchens, dispensing ‘poor soups’, usually based on potatoes mixed with barley or other grains, some vegetables, and a small amount of meat. Surprisingly, the organisers of these soup kitchens were at pains to stress that their soups were not only economical and nourishing, but also tasty. They tested their recipes on likely recipients, and adapted them in light of the responses. These adaptations reflect local culinary traditions. In Germany soups often included a hefty dose of vinegar, whereas in France they were seasoned with fines herbes. In Spain charitable organisations added cumin, paprika and olive oil. The resultant soups, they reported confidently, pleased local tastes, and were consumed with pleasure by the poor. Whether the beneficiaries of these charitable initiatives shared the enthusiasm of the organisers is another matter. ‘This is washy stuff, that affords no nourishment’, was the assessment of poor people in the south of England when offered charity soups.

Page 99 captures some recurrent themes in Feeding the People. Specifically, it touches on the ways in which the rhetoric of individual choice has become central to how we talk about freedom. Even the organisers of soup kitchens felt it was important to stress that poor people were ‘choosing’ to eat their soups. This is why they put some effort into testing their recipes and (so they alleged) adapting them to local tastes. Given these efforts, they felt able to dismiss any criticisms.

Being able to make one’s own choices is a cornerstone of liberal definitions of freedom, and it is interesting to see how these ideas, born in the Enlightenment, shaped even the ways in which the organisers of soup kitchens thought about their activities. Of course, many factors, including poverty, constrain our actual ability to choose what we eat and how we live our lives. Beyond this, not everyone would agree that individual choice should lie at the centre of how we organise society. These debates, and their links to eating, emerged in the eighteenth century, which is why a small history of eighteenth-century soup kitchens can reveal how the rhetoric of individualism became entangled with how we talk about eating.

Learn more about Feeding the People at  the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue