Why didn't the French eat potatoes sooner? It would have

there was this guy Parmentier who did time in a prussian jail and they hadn´t nothing but potato to eat, so he comes out and organizes potato banquets in Versailles and convinced the king that potato was the solution for famine in Europe

>>1933809
Because of misinformed "Common knowledge" and anti-Anglo sentiments.

Potatos, like Tomatos, are members of the Solanaceae plant family- Nightshades. The greens and leaves are poisonous, and for most plant life, its a fair assumption that if one part is poison, the rest is too.

>>1933849
I remember a story about how when they brought potatoes to Greece nobody wanted them because they were covered in roots and were green and ugly. They were giving them away for free but nobody wanted anyway. Someone had the idea to store them away and hire guards. The people thought they were valuable so they were stolen overnight and planted.

>>1934646
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_riots

>>1934646
That story is about Friedrich II. of Prussia, not Greece.

>>1934766
Apologies, I have no idea where I got Greece from

File: why not go fishing.png (15KB, 357x513px) Image search: [Google]

15KB, 357x513px

>>1933809
>It would have helped during bad harvests

>>1934965
Except in Ireland the problem was that the potato was being relied on as the breadwinner, so to speak, of the Irish diet. No potato harvest, no food.

In France, it was the wheat harvest that failed, meaning no bread, the staple of their diet. They grew potatoes and the potatoes were not affected by the periods of bad weather--but they fed them to animals and wouldn't eat them themselves.

>>1935125
>relied on as the breadwinner

They were forced to grow em by the perfidious chip loving English.

>>1934965
In case anyone is under any illusion to the contrary: the only reason Cork, Dublin and Belfast seem to have had a "population rise" was due to people migrating there from the rest of the country

Charles Mann says that the additional benefit of the potatoes were that they weren't easily stolen by foreign troops.

>>1935125
Actually the problem wasn't they relied on potatoes, its that they relied on one specific type of potatoe