William Cobbett vs the Potato
Part 2: The Lone Voice Against a Deadly Elite Consensus
“To get this quantity of food, fit to be eaten, in the shape of potatoes, how many fires! What a washing, what a boiling, what a peeling, what a slopping, and what a messing! The cottage everlastingly in a litter; the woman’s hands everlastingly wet and dirty; the children grimed up to the eyes with dust fixed on by potatoe starch; and ragged as colts, the poor mother’s time all being devoted to the everlasting boiling of the pot!”
- William Cobbett
This is the second part of a two-part article. If you want the background on William Cobbett see part 1, William Cobbett: The Original New Right Shitposter.
Note: Even for the time, William Cobbett was known for his idiosyncratic spellings and stylistic choices. I have retained his exact language in quotations.
It is an ancient phenomenon that the elites lead the people into folly, but it is incredible that the bird-based prognostications of the ancient seers seem to have produced better results than our modern academic elites, who bring about one failure after another. Of all the stories of elite folly since the rise of the modern “expert” class around 250 years ago, there is one, besides the covid response, which the most stands out: the potato policy. This is, of course, the most known from Ireland’s Potato Famine. There are two primary schools of thought on the Potato Famine, which are not mutually exclusive. The first is that switching the diet of the poor to potatoes was a benevolent thought but that the dangers of a monoculture staple crop were improperly considered and thus the potato blight led to mass starvation. The other is that it was an intentional genocide, something reinforced by the fact that the “experts” also opposed food aid to Ireland on the grounds it would distort the economy and that Ireland was still a net food exporter. Regardless, the elite consensus across Europe providing the underlying justification was that replacing wheat bread with potatoes as the staple crop for the poor would provide more food for the public at a lower cost. This was always incorrect, and it shouldn’t have been all that hard to figure out.
“Potatomania” first took off in the mid-18th century, but despite periodic food shortages, the true impact of the policy wasn’t seen for around 100 years, and when it was seen, it wasn’t understood. Millions of people died because the elites believed the poor should eat potatoes, that era’s version of “You will eat the bugs.” The very premise of changing the diet of the poor to potatoes was never discredited among the elites, as shown by the fact that as recently as 2008 the United Nations declared “The Year of the Potato” based on the same beliefs about the potato’s utility for solving food insecurity. I believed this myself most of my life, that the potato was unique among the crops for its ability to produce an astounding amount of calories in a smaller space at a lower cost than grain. I must admit I believed this despite the fact that it is easily disproven by buying a 5 pound bag of flour and a 5 pound bag of potatoes- at roughly the same cost- and preparing both of them for consumption.
One man, did, however, bravely stand against the potato promoters: William Cobbett, the publisher of the Political Register and the father of alternative media. Cobbett laid out a clear, rational, mathematical explanation proving that potatoes simply did not provide the poor more nutrition at a lower cost than wheat- even before blight. Cobbett was dismissed as a contrarian crank, which he kind of was, but he was also correct. Cobbett has never received proper credit for this, and has faded into obscurity. What’s more, his explanation was so simple that you would have to be an “expert,” or in their thrall, to be foolish enough to not believe it. Cobbett also showed that compared to bread the potato wastes a good deal of time and effort and makes the life of the poor even more dismal: the potato doesn’t just lose in raw expense, it loses in every way. This is one of my favorite stories, and was the inspiration to tell my readers about Cobbett’s life in the prior essay. He wrote against potatoes countless times over his prolific career, but my source for his argument is from the potato section of the Cobbett’s Country Book collection, sourced from Journal of a Year’s Residence in America. In this piece Cobbett shares an 1815 letter he wrote to the editor of Agriculture Magazine with expanded commentary.
I must admit that when I was first reading Cobbett but had not yet reached his potato argument, I myself assumed it would be full of amusing crackpot content, perhaps about how potatoes were foreign and root crops were facing the devil [later in the 19th century, some American Transcendentalists made such arguments.] In reality, Cobbett was no opponent of imported food crops or agricultural innovations, and in fact was an enormous proponent of sweetcorn, both as a cash crop and as a dish. He was such an advocate for sweetcorn and American black locust trees that he was primarily responsible for introducing them to Britain1 and believed that would be the main thing for which he would be remembered after his death, I suppose like Johnny Appleseed [as it turned out, after a while he wasn’t remembered by many at all.] Though Cobbett rants out a good digression as well as anyone, there is nothing strange about his core argument. What was unusual among his contemporaries was his willingness to make the argument at all, as to people at the time this was like denying evolution is now or something. Cobbett proved, in my view definitively, that the elites were simply wrong about a potato diet saving the poor money compared to wheat. While Cobbett did hate the potato, what he truly hated was what the elites pushing this dangerous and counterproductive social engineering scheme. Something of a libertarian in both general sentiment and policy, he explains at length that eating potatoes as a matter of preference is a harmless personal choice, even if not one he holds in high esteem:
“If any one will buy dirt to eat, and if one can get dirt to him with more profit than one can get wheat to him, let us supply him with dirt by all means. It is his taste to eat dirt; and if his taste have nothing immoral in it, let him in the name of all that is ridiculous, follow his taste. I know a Prime Minister who picks his knows and regales himself with the content. I solemnly declare this to be true. I have witnessed the worse than beastly act scores of times; and yet I do not know that he is much more of a beast than the greater part of his associates. Yet, if this were all; if he were chargeable with nothing but this; if he would confine his swallow to this, I do not know that the nation would have any right to interfere between his nostrils and his gullet.”2
In the modern era with talk radio, social media, and 24 hour news we sometimes move through trends fast and with an overwhelming consensus, but it is also usually easy to find the dissenters. We have seen everything from claiming margarine is healthier than butter to a counter-movement against all seed oils. The nutritionists also decided that all fat as bad for you and that red meat would kill you, and then pushed synthetic, chemical-laden foods: people just got ever more unhealthy. They have dumped fluoride in our water for decades insisting that because it works topically you should drink it. Countless products make claims about “conservation,” using less water, less energy, or less plastic, no matter how counter-productive such things are in terms of needing to flush the toilet more times or whatever else. We are told we must be vaccinated for endless diseases that were previously normal and fine to get. Nothing, of course, went so far as the elite consensus about covid lockdowns and then masks and mRNA shots. In short, as was the story of Cobbett’s life, the thinking skeptic is bombarded with nonsense on all fronts and is considered crazy for resisting.
The potato policy was like all of these things combined, however there was not talk radio or social media and the man in opposition may struggle to find his people, which is how it was with the potato. Prussia began to mandate potato production on a national level, one of many pro-potato policies implemented by European governments. Others pressured lords to pressure their peasants to replace their wheat fields with potatoes. Just today I saw AI slop content on Facebook claiming in France they posted guards outside potato fields to trick the peasants into stealing them and developing a taste for the root! There was a constant din of propaganda. The potato was the ultimate “current thing” of its era and to speak against it was seen as an affront to decency, intelligence, and anyway, do you want to kill the peasants! For a man who spent his life speaking against all forms of corruption and concentrated power, it seems to be this that got Cobbett the most hatred.
Cobbett describes the stir he was causing as follows,
“So much has been said and written against me on account of my scouting the idea of this root being proper as food for men, I will, out of respect for public opinion, here state my reasons for thinking that the Potatoe is a root worse than useless…
When I published some articles on this subject, in England, I was attacked by the Irish writers with…much fury…my attack upon Potatoes was no attack up on the sons of St. Patrick, to whom, on the contrary, I wished a better sort of diet be afforded. Nevertheless, I was told, in the Irish papers, not that I was a fool: that might have been rational; but, when I was, by these zealous Hibernians, called a liar, a slanderer, a viper, and was reminded of all my political sins, I could help help thinking that, to use an Irish peeress’s expression with regard to her Lord, there was a little Potatoe sprouting out of their head.”
Such responses, and all of them anonymous, will of course be familiar to anyone who has stood up against any idiot current thing consensus. Cobbett continues,
“Of one thing I am very glad; and that is, that the Irish do not like to live upon what their accomplished countryman Doctor Drennan calls ‘Ireland’s lazy root’…When I called it a lazy root; when I satyrized the use of it; the Irish seemed to think that their national honour was touched. But I am happy to find that it is not taste but necessity, which makes them mess-mates with the pig.”
He notes that when Irishmen are in England they will in fact eat almost anything in preference to the potato; but even today I’ve heard the joke that Ireland is surrounded by ocean but they’re so devoted to the potato they will starve instead of live off of fish.
At this point Cobbett gets to his 1815 letter to the editor, which he wrote because that magazine had criticized his writing on the subject, saying “As to a former diatribe of his on potatoes, we regarded it as a pleasant example of argument for argument’s sake; as an agreeable jumble of truth and mental rambling.” This too I can relate to, as many times in my life I have been told “You just like to play the Devil’s Advocate” when I am expressing my actual opinion, and generally one that is correct but opposes the current consensus. Of course, no one bothered to counter Cobbett’s actual argument.
In Cobbett’s view, it was solely fashion that has made people like the potato so much, “I regard the praises of this root…to have arisen from a sort of monkey-like imitation. It has become, of late years, the fashion to extol the virtues of potatoes, as it has to admire the writings of Milton and Shakespear.” Not content to simply say, “you only like Milton and Shakespeare because you were taught to” he goes on for a full four pages about why they are terrible and only popular because of some national madness. He says of Milton,
“It is the fashion to turn up the eyes, when Paradise Lost is mentioned: and if you fail herein you want taste; you want judgment even, if you do not admire this absurd and ridiculous stuff, when, if one of your relations were to write a letter in the same strain you would send him to a mad-house and take his estate. It is the sacrificing of reason to fashion.”
He has even more acid for Shakespeare, telling a forgotten story much like our own “fake academic papers” affair where nonsense was submitted to a journal and published. Back then, a young man released imitations of Shakespeare’s work and most of the leading lights of the day announced confidently that they must be lost Shakespeare plays discovered as no one else could write them. Of course when he was discovered, all of those Very Serious People were infuriated and attacked the young man’s moral character, taking no lesson about what it might say about their “Divine Bard” if he can be so convincingly imitated. Briefly getting back to his main topic, Cobbett writes,
“It is fashion, Sir, to which in these most striking instances sense and reason have yielded; and it is to fashion that the potatoe owes its general cultivation and use. If you ask me whether fashion can possibly make a nation prefer one sort of diet to another, I ask you what is it that can make a nation admire Shakespeare? What is it that can make them call him a Divine Bard, nine-tenths of whose works are made up of such trash as no decent man now-a-days would not be ashamed, and even afraid to put his name to it?”
To the modern reader it is both strange and depressing that he had to justify the possibility of a fad diet sweeping a nation, now that it seems to happen every few years. Remember people pretending to like kale? Have you seen articles about how people are over fake meat? Of course we have all developed a taste for potatoes, but few would say they are better to eat than bread.
After listing countless instances in Shakespeare he considers to be ridiculous, Cobbett says,
“I know of one other and only one other book so obscene as this3; and, if I were to judge from the high favour in which these two books seem to stand, I should conclude that wild and improbable fiction, bad principles of morality and politicks, obscurity in meaning, bombastical language, forced jokes, puns and smut were fitted to the mind of the people4. But I do not thus judge. It is fashion. These books are in fashion. Everyone is ashamed not to be in fashion. It is the fashion to extol potatoes and to eat potatoes. Everyone joins in extolling potatoes, and all the world likes potatoes, or pretend to like them, which is the same thing in effect.”
[In his commentary after the letter Cobbett says that this argument accomplished nothing but adding hate mail from Shakespeare and Milton fans to the hate mail he was already receiving from potato advocates, which is perhaps my favorite part of the whole thing.]
Nutritional advice has always been all over the place, but in this particular era bulk was revered, whereas now they claim potatoes provide all the necessary nutrients for survival if combined with eggs or dairy. 1800 and 1801 were particularly lean years in Britain, due to both bad harvests and the War of the Second Coalition and the government endlessly debated how to “help” the public. They went so far as to mandate bakeries sell only stale bread on the grounds that it is more filling. Cobbett mentions that they tried to mandate potato planting, something which was only prevented due to a Mr. Horne Tooke attacking the entire “system of petty legislation.” He notes,
“Will it be believed, in another century, that the law-givers of a great nation actually passed a law to compel the people to eat pollard in their bread and that, too, not for the purpose of degrading or punishing them but for the purpose of doing said people good by adding to the quantity of bread in a time of scarcity? Will this be believed?”
I actually had significant trouble getting Grok to identify the law in question and acknowledge it was true- it said William Cobbett was probably lying. But I did find the law, and indeed the mandated the discarded parts of wheat, usually used as animal feed, be included in bread. As Cobbett says, these things make livestock fat but men thin, which makes sense as those animals have multiple stomachs whereas the rough matter would presumably stop humans from absorbing the rest of the food. He also notes, crucially, that what the hell are they supposed to be feeding their livestock if the animal feed part of the grain is baked into bread because of the idiots in Parliament? Do men not also eat butter and cheese and meat? According to Cobbett, who in fairness to Grok did get sued for libel all the time, “it is a real fact, that Pitt did suggest making beer out of straw.” This was also a peak of potatomania, where bigwigs such as Lord Grenville were throwing dinners with no bread and only potato cakes, but of course, also many meats fattened on grain.
Having wasted significant space on his amusing digressions, Cobbett gets to the heart of the matter: potatoes are not cheaper than wheat flour. In Cobbett’s time, one bushel of flour was worth four to five times as much as a bushel of potatoes. In modern America they cost the same, allowing for the fact that potatoes don’t store nearly as well and as such go on deep sales sometimes [it must be said that in Cobbett’s day flour had more natural oils and moisture and was relatively less shelf-stable than our flour.] Even now most believe that the potato is a better and cheaper food, but a 5 pound bag of flour makes around 8 baguettes, with no other ingredients but some salt if you use your own sourdough starter, whereas 5 pounds of potatoes is 2 1/2 standard bags of frozen French fries. It’s quite obvious that the bread is more and better food, if you had to rely on one as a staple [bearing in mind here we discuss good homemade bread, not what passes for bread at American stores.] Of course, not every family is in a position to buy or store a bushel of flour at the time, much less four bushels of potatoes, and he says that by the pound sometimes flour was only half as much as potatoes, “yet the tradesman’s wife, looking narrowly into every halfpenny, trudges away to the potatoe shop to get fix or six pounds of this wretched root for the purpose of saving flour!”
Cobbett says that a bushel of potatoes is 60 pounds whereas a bushel of potatoes is 56 pounds, but once you deduct the dirt from the potatoes this is roughly the same weight. He tells us extensively of the lives of his invented Englishmen, Dick who has bought three hundred pounds of potatoes, and John who has 56 pounds of flour. Baked with a bit of yeast and salt the flour yields 72 pounds of bread. By the time you clean them and deduct peelings, eyes, bad bits and everything else, the potatoes are about 200 pounds. However, according to Cobbett, each pound of potatoes has 11 ounces of water; I don’t know about that, but for modern dehydrated mashed potatoes you add an equal amount of water, so those potatoes are reduced by at least half when you get down to what part of them is food. According to Cobbett, those 300 pounds of potatoes are only 50 pounds of food, though perhaps 100 is closer to the truth.
Beyond this, the disadvantages of the potato are many. Flour requires no trick to buy or store, whereas potatoes can easily rot and must be inspected before purchase. Any potatoes in the bunch may be bad in a number of ways, but a child can be sent to buy as much flour as he can carry. Potatoes also have to be stored both to stay good and because they take up a lot of space. They could be “pied” in the ground after harvest, but these can only be accessed in fairly mild weather, and perhaps at least 10% of them go bad in that process, and anyway this requires owning land. This was an era without modern refrigeration and with worse hygiene, so one has to imagine the waste to rot is much worse than your potatoes at home which still get covered with fruit flies if left in a corner for too long.
The real, truly unforgivable oversight by all of the Very Serious potato advocates is the cost of fuel. This is not such a problem in the modern world, but at the time we are talking about bringing a pot to boil over a fire three times a day. That is 1095 fires a year to cook your potatoes. Figuring that you would otherwise still bake and boil once a week, as well as warm the house in the winter, this is 500 extra fires per year for your potatoes. At a penny a fire, they are spending the equivalent of 288 pounds of bread on fires alone every year, or 41 days worth of food for a family that eats 7 pounds of bread a day. Cobbett, something of a feminist by early 19th century standards, laments the woman who is enslaved to the cauldron. Someone is waking up an hour before dawn every day to start the fire to boil potatoes. This also reduces the productivity of the household as this becomes a primary task of women instead of spending one afternoon per week baking bread,
“His wife, or stout daughter, cannot go out to work to help earn the means of buying potatoes. She must stay home to boil the pot, the everlasting pot! There is no such thing as a cold dinner. No such thing as a woman sitting down on a haycock…to their dinner…home they must tramp, if it be three miles, to the fire that ceaseth not, and the pot as black as Satan. No wonder in the busiest seasons of the year, you see from every cottage door, staring out at you as you pass, a smoky capped, greasy heeled woman. The pot which keeps her at home, also gives her the colour of the chimney, while long inactivity swells her heels.”
And what is this like for our working man as he goes about his day, farming in England’s dreary weather? Does he have a nice piece of bread made by his loving wife, with perhaps some cheese or a slab of meat? No, he stands on a bleak hill in the winter and eats a cold potato for lunch. Have you ever heard anything more dismal? And this has been the peasant, how much worse is this for the city dweller, who has no opportunity to store potatoes or gather his own fuel, and must go out and buy potatoes by the five or ten pounds, subject to all market fluctuations, giving all his meager earnings to the potato and fuel merchants. One must also think of the second order events, particularly regarding air quality, both inside and outside: did you ever consider just why every chimney was smoking in all images of this era? How much of the woodland of Europe was cleared for potato boiling alone?
Cobbett finishes his letter mocking the bourgeois women trying to push this on the poor,
“When broad-faced Mrs. Wilkins tells Mrs. Tomkins that so that she has a potatoe for her dinner, she does not care a farthing for bread, I only laugh knowing that she will twist down a half pound of beef with her ‘potatoe’ and has twisted down a half pound of buttered toast in the morning, and means to do the same at tea-time without prejudice to her supper and grog. But when Mrs. Tomkins gravely answers, “yes, Ma’am, there is nothing like a potatoe, it is such a saving in a family,” I should not be very much out of humour to see the tete-a-tete broken up by the application of a broom-stick.”
It needs to be emphasized again that Cobbett is not being unreasonable here, just iconoclastic because the potato was basically a religion for the wealthy do-gooders and they successfully proselytized the lower classes. He distills his point at the end of this entry,
“Nor do I say it is filthy to eat potatoes. I do not ridicule using them as sauce5. What I laugh at is the idea of the use of them being a saving: of their going further than bread; of the cultivation of them in lieu of wheat adding to the human sustenance of a country. This is what I laugh at; and laugh I must as long as I have the above estimate before me.”
Of course, no one responded to the substance of his argument, they simply called him a bad actor and a crackpot and attacked him over irrelevant things. Why doesn’t he trust the experts? As far as I know these arguments were never refuted. People still claim that the potato producers perhaps 2 to 3 times the nutrition per acre as wheat, yet it costs the same per pound as flour, making it an even worse value than in Cobbett’s day [in fact I just checked Walmart’s website and flour is about 20% less per pound.] That said, the cost of cooking is no longer an issue but on the other hand in modern America these staple foods are so cheap that it is trivial in the first place. Still, the premise that any man in the modern world would improve his life by switching his smallholding to potatoes instead of growing something else and simply buying cheap imported grain if necessary is questionable at best.
What is the most incredible about this story is that the entire elite class didn’t bother to do the math, though it’s also not surprising, as they are still just like this. They may have considered the moisture of potatoes, but they don’t seem to have ever considered the cost of fuel and the wasted labor; the cost and time to prepare food are not some sort of “unknown unknown,” it is a core fact of the whole program. Someone besides Cobbett should have looked into this. They certainly didn’t care about what this does for the spirit of the working man, whom they fated to eat cold potatoes in the rain as he tended yet more of this root. Surely the decline in the skill of home breadmaking was if anything an asset for them as they tried to get people off the small farm and into the factory.
William Cobbett cannot be given full credit for predicting the Potato Famine, since as far as I can find he didn’t predict that a blight would wipe out the crop [there isn’t a practical way to search the thousands of pages of his newspaper at once.] However, listening to him would have prevented it. He knew that this entire policy was bad, but the English were as devoted to the belief in feeding the poor potatoes as they are to Shakespeare. It perpetuated poverty and sapped the peasantry and the land. It enslaved women to the cauldron and filled the skies with soot. One can only imagine how many people died in fires as a result of millions of families lighting 500 extra fires a year to boil their potatoes. How many men ended up more malnourished than ever because they simply couldn’t stand eating another potato? None of these considerations stopped or slowed the government or the Very Serious People encouraging them. The government introduced the Corn Laws, which Cobbett bitterly opposed, putting a steep protective tariff on the import of grain, ensuring that the man on the street couldn’t have bread cheaply and must live on the potato. Even with 19th century technology wheat was quite easy to import, but the government policy was to feed them on potatoes.
For all of this, no one ever learned the lesson, not just about distrusting the elites, but even specifically about the falseness of the premise that the potato is better than wheat for feeding the poor. This intellectual trend proved one of the most deadly in history, and exposing it doesn’t seem to have accomplished anything but frustrating William Cobbett.
Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main articles are free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.
Cobbett claims that before he brought seeds home from America black locust did not exist outside of ornamental gardens in Britain, but that he ultimately sold over a million saplings. He was a big believer in the wood’s ability to resist decay, going so far as to bring a fence post home from America with an affidavit about its age and inviting readers to come to his office and inspect it. According to some sources this tree was already common in Britain under different names and the whole thing was a con to sell them at well above market value.
This is presumably a reference to Robert Jenkinson, the PM from 1812-1827. Despite that Cobbett says “I solemnly swear this to be true” he could be making things up, as he was, after all, prosecuted or sued for libel many times.
Rousseau’s Confessions is perhaps the best candidate for what he is referring to, though the Marquis de Sade was also current.
I like Shakespeare, but some of his most popular plays, most notably A Midsummer Night’s Dream, are outright nonsense. This also sounds a lot like me ranting against the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“Sauce” seems to mean “side dish” in this context.
Oh man, I was planning on having mashed potatoes with dinner tonight.
Cobbett sounds like a very impressive myth buster and shrewd observer of the mind set of elites. When visiting an Irish castle, we were told that the rich used bread during their feasts to clean their greasy hands. That bread was handed out to the poor for food. Elite disdain for the peasants but at least no potato. Of course, high protein meat was reserved for the rich.