The potato has and will be a vital food that people consume apart of their diets. It has many nutrients that make it an important part of an ideal diet. It has been highly praised and relied by many people, especially the Irish before and during the famine. For many a good baked stuffed potato with cheese, bacon, chives, and butter is a great side dish for dinner but the Irish used it for more than that. Their diets consisted of just the potato for breakfast, lunch and dinner and could be filler for any snack. The potato was very important because first the Irish people relied heavily on it. It was the main source of nutrients they received. It gave an abundance of quality, healthy energies and sources to be broken down and used by the body (proteins, sugars, salts, etc.). A normal diet for an Irishman that could allow you to live a very healthy life consisted of potatoes and milk with sometimes the addition of cabbage and salt. And with that alone they met all of their required nutrients to sustain life. The potato also was very easy to grow. The health benefits greatly outweighed the labor investment when growing potatoes. It was an ideal crop for the area and a whole country relied on its accessibility.
The biggest societal/political factors we can see that led to he severity of the potato blight in Ireland really has to do with the dependence on the crop. By 1840 nearly half of the population was dependent on potatoes. This is not good when a fungus comes in and makes the crop die and not edible. As a society they were very poor, the way they lived was dirty and was low living conditions. The potato was all they grew and as a political side it was all they used to really trade with. They could grow so much of it they had the power when trading and selling the potato. The potato for the Irish was so highly praised they didn’t really have much back up plan with growing other crops or such. They didn’t see the need to do so because they were doing so well with the potato and how it was. The blight started in 1845 and was the Phytophthora Infestans fungus. This is what caused the crop to die and not be able to be eaten anymore. It moved quick and efficiently as almost ¾’s of the crop was gone by 1846. It is believed to be from North America, and then carried on boats to the European countries to where it then hit Ireland and completely took out the potato. The potato was hit extremely hard from this fungus because it does not have a defense for it. Nowadays they spray the fields to kill off the fungus but the potato genes themselves do not make anything to prevent this outbreak from occurring. Of course the Irish of the time did not know that this existed and were not prepared. The weather was almost a additive in helping the fungus thrive and destroy because it allowed it to stay and grow throughout the years.
The Great Famine was devastating to the country of Ireland. More than a million people died and then a million more fled and went to different countries, places like North America. Things weren’t easy for those that migrated either they got harassed and treated very poorly especially in America. There was mass starvation during the famine and because everyone was getting so weak diseases were able to spread throughout Ireland very easily because immune systems were very weak. Dieses like TB, measles, respiratory infections, whooping cough, different kinds of intestinal parasites, cholera, and diarrhea hit the whole country impacting majority of the population that was still alive and there.
From class discussion we got to see how technology today has really helped with the growth of plants and animals. If we can modify crops, animals and insect vectors we can see a potential rise in how much growth of things we would get. There would be a lot more food available with this production. Then also we would see the capabilities of removing genes that could potentially harm the crop or such and when we get rid of those things we can take away the vulnerability to infection. This would allow more consistent growth on crops and foods, eliminating the fear of possible failure due to an outbreak or things like that amongst the crops, animals, and insect vectors. There are downfalls to this though. We see things like GMO’s today and our food becomes genetically modified but we have to pump things like testosterone and estrogen into the food we eat, so there is an abundance of hormones that we as the consumer take on and because of that we can see/have seen changes to our bodies. It is a great idea and would prevent a lot of starving around the world because we could implicate this into different areas, but we do not know the full effects that this has on us as a human race and it could or couldn’t be very detrimental, so we need to really explore this topic and make sure it would be very beneficial.