Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

people always raid before they starve

I have heard that the Irish Potato Famine gets remembered because it was the last big famine, at least in the developed world. Before that, famine wasn't newsworthy.

People in the Irish Potato Famine mostly didn't die of starvation. They mostly died of disease, in part due to being in a weakened state.

One thing that contributed to disease: Desperate people would go to the beach and dig up clams or mussels or something and eat them raw because they didn't have the strength to also cut peat and wait for it to cook and raw seafood can be a source of germs.

There was an outmigration from Ireland and at least some of those people came to the US. Most European countries were hoarding food and Ireland was selling and that came back to bite them.

Irish land laws and land use patterns changed because of the famine. The smallest farms were the ones most heavily dependent on potatoes because it's an excellent staple. You can nearly live on potatoes alone, plus some B vitamins from somewhere like buttermilk.

So large, poor families with small farms grew only potatoes or mostly potatoes and those are the people who died or left for the most part. Land got consolidated in the aftermath. Those small farms stopped being a thing.

I personally think we need to promote stability by moving towards more local economic activity. We are too globalized and it's already hurting us with supply chain issues, among other things.

> I personally think we need to promote stability by moving towards more local economic activity.

I agree that more local resilience is good. At the same time, let's not forget the principle of pooling for insurance in a broad sense. Climate change means more extreme, more enduring weather patterns (due to more energy in the system and slowing jet streams caused by a decreased temperature differential with the poles). These extreme weather situations can easily overwhelm even the best resilience efforts of a region, and so a system of mutual aid is important.

There was no developed world at that point. Pointing later developments backwards into history like that is tricky, makes things seem inevitable or causally linked when they are neither.

Anyway though that's barely relevant. IIRC in most modern famines the starving areas continued to export food, which is a large part of why some historians have shifted to viewing famine as a political phenomenon caused by food shortages.

I think the dying of illness thing is also typical. It's actually kind of hard for an adult to starve to death, but malnutrition fucks you up bad and famines also cause large scale human migration and concentration, creating more opportunity for disease. There's a reason famine and epidemics are closely linked in historical memory.

There was a series of "world droughts" caused by el nino in the late 1800s. Famines killed like 40 million people in 30 years then. They coincided with and were arguably directly caused by the emergence of the global market system. So I think you're correct, long-distance market forces are basically the defining attribute of a modern famine.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse get various names. Sometimes they are listed as War, Famine, Pestilence and Death.

I imagine that's sort of a meme in the collective unconscious of humanity for a reason. In localized "end times," those four things tend to be associated and even intertwined.

I was always taught that one of the reasons for the Irish Potato Famine were that the English (feudal overlords at the time) forced the Irish to grow potatoes for export.

Not unusual; the British did the same with sheep in Australia to feed the British wool industry which caused ecological mayhem here too.

That doesn't make sense. Potatoes have never been a particularly good cash crop. What they are marvelous at is subsistence agriculture.

In their own lands the feudal overlords had eliminated both feudal overlordship and subsistence agriculture trough some incredibly unpopular land reforms - the highland clearances of Scotland and the enclosure acts of England. Basically they told the peasants the land is now property of the feudal overlord and that they should get a job.

For various political reasons nobody wanted to do the same in Ireland.

> I personally think we need to promote stability by moving towards more local economic activity. We are too globalized and it's already hurting us with supply chain issues, among other things.

And stronger, more local, communities. I can't believe life is that hard sometimes, especially when you have kids, and having a close and big circle of people around you would help tremendously.

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