On a different note, articles about hunger fascinate me. In a short time, Europe and the U.S. have gone from worrying about having enough to eat to worrying about being overweight. We are living in wonderful times.

My high school history passed over the Irish Potato Famine with about the same depth as this article’s sentence, “So reliable was [the potato] that in Ireland […] a simple potato fungus in 1845 was able to cause […] “total and utter catastrophe killing over a million people and depopulating the island by a quarter through death and emigration.””

I know the Irish Potato Famine was bad, but I’ve recently seen some mentions that there was plenty of other food available in Ireland at the time, but in the form of crops and animals primarily grown for export. The Irish poor could not match the market prices for the export items, so that food was all sent away.

While the simplistic perspective provides a good lesson about the risks of monocultural crops, I wonder if there might be a “Damn Interesting” story to be found in a wider lense/deeper dive look at the Irish Potato Famine.

eleys said:

Perhaps I might have better expressed it as ‘little known outside of France’ rather than ‘outside of French history textbooks’, which I hoped would get that point across. I was forgetting that history isn’t necessarily taught any longer and that it therefore couldn’t be assumed that everyone in France would have heard that.

As for the hâchis, however, I can only hang my head in shame. This is what comes of mostly using Italian cookbooks.

Sophie said: “Parmentier is not remembered in the name of the potato, but a delicious gratin dish is named “hachis parmentier”. It’s a layer of seasoned minced meat (often leftovers) covered with a layer of mashed potatoes, a little bit of grated cheese, and put to grill in an oven.”

You are right and the end of the post is completely false… Which feels really strange because It was an awesome read. I loved it, right to the point where “french people don t know parmentier”. The hachis parmentier is an extremely popular dish and everyone here knows where the name came from.
This was the only part of the text that I can fact check, and it’s erroneous… Too bad, because now I feel like I shoud doubt the rest of the text as well.