All this is of course at striking variance with what was said earlier about the poverty of the average person’s diet in the nineteenth century. The fact is, there is such a confusion of evidence that it is impossible to know how well or not people ate.
If average consumption is any guide, then people ate quite a lot of healthy food: almost 8 pounds of pears per person in 1851, compared with just 3 pounds now; almost 9 pounds of grapes and other soft fruits, roughly double the amount eaten now; and just under 18 pounds of dried fruit, as against 3.5 pounds today. For vegetables the figures are even more striking. The average Londoner in 1851 ate 31.8 pounds of onions, as against 13.2 pounds today; consumed over 40 pounds of turnips and rutabagas, compared with 2.3 pounds today; and packed away almost 70 pounds of cabbages per year, as against 21 pounds now. Sugar consumption was about 30 pounds a head—less than a third the amount consumed today. So on the whole it seems that people ate pretty healthily.
Yet most anecdotal accounts, written then and subsequently, indicate the very opposite. Henry Mayhew, in his classic London Labour and the London Poor, published in the year our rectory was built, suggested that a piece of bread and an onion constituted a typical dinner for a laborer, while a much more recent (and deservedly much praised) history, Consuming Passions by Judith Flanders, states that “the staple diet of the working classes and much of the lower middle classes in the mid-nineteenth century consisted of bread or potatoes, a little bit of butter, cheese or bacon, tea with sugar.”
What is certainly true is that people who had no control over their diets often ate very poorly indeed. A magistrate’s report of conditions at a factory in northern England in 1810 revealed that apprentices were kept at their machines from 5:50 in the morning to 9:10 or 9:15 at night, with a single short break for dinner. “They have Water Porridge for Breakfast and Supper”—taken at their machines—“and generally Oatcake and Treacle, or Oatcake and poor Broth, for Dinner,” he wrote. That was, almost certainly, pretty typical fare for anyone stuck in a factory, a prison, an orphanage, or some other powerless situation.
It is also true that diets were remarkably unvaried for many poorer people. In Scotland, farm laborers in the early 1800s received an average ration of 17.5 pounds of oatmeal a week, plus a little milk, and almost nothing else, though they generally considered themselves lucky because at least they didn’t have to eat potatoes. These were widely disdained for the first 150 years or so after their introduction to Europe. Many people considered the potato an unwholesome vegetable because its edible parts grew belowground rather than reaching nobly for the sun. Clergymen sometimes preached against the potato on the grounds that it nowhere appears in the Bible.
Only the Irish couldn’t afford to be so particular. For them, the potato was a godsend because of its very high yields. A single acre of stony soil could support a family of six if they were prepared to eat a lot of potatoes, and the Irish, of necessity, were. By 1780, 90 percent of people in Ireland were dependent for their survival exclusively or almost exclusively on potatoes. Unfortunately, the potato is also one of the most vulnerable of vegetables, susceptible to more than 260 types of blight or infestation. From the moment of the potato’s introduction to Europe, failed harvests became regular. In the 120 years leading up to the great famine, the potato crop failed no fewer than twenty-four times. Three hundred thousand people died in a single failure in 1739. But that appalling total was made to seem insignificant by the scale of death and suffering in 1845–46.
It happened very quickly. The crops looked fine until August 1845, and then suddenly they drooped and shriveled. The tubers when dug up were spongy and already putrefying. That year half the Irish crop was lost. The following year virtually all of it was wiped out. The culprit was a fungus called Phytophthora infestans, but people didn’t know that. Instead they blamed almost anything else they could think of—steam from steam trains, the electricity from telegraph signals, the new guano fertilizers that were just becoming popular. It wasn’t just in Ireland that the crop failed—in fact, it failed across Europe—but the Irish were especially dependent on the potato.
Relief was infamously slow to come. Months after the starving had started, Sir Robert Peel, the British prime minister, was still urging caution. “There is such a tendency to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting on them is always desirable,” he wrote. In the worst year of the potato famine, London’s fish market, Billingsgate, sold 500 million oysters, 1 billion fresh herrings, almost 100 million soles, 498 million shrimps, 304 million periwinkles, 33 million plaice, 23 million mackerel, and other similarly massive amounts—and not one morsel of any of it made its way to Ireland to relieve the starving people there.
The greatest part of the tragedy is that Ireland actually had plenty of food. The country produced great quantities of eggs, cereals, and meats of every type, and brought in large hauls of food from the sea, but almost all went for export. So 1.5 million people needlessly starved. It was the greatest loss of life anywhere in Europe since the Black Death.
ทั้งหมดนี้เป็นหลักสูตรที่โดดเด่นต่างกับที่พูดก่อนหน้านี้เกี่ยวกับความยากจนของบุคคลเฉลี่ยอาหารในศตวรรษ ความจริงได้ มีความสับสนกันเช่นหลักฐานที่ทำให้รู้วิธีการที่ดี หรือคนไม่กิน ปริมาณการใช้เฉลี่ยเป็นคู่มือใด ๆ ถ้าคนกินค่อนข้างมากของอาหารเพื่อสุขภาพ: แพร์ต่อบุคคลใน 1851 เกือบ 8 ปอนด์ เทียบกับเพียง 3 ปอนด์ เดี๋ยวนี้ องุ่นและผลไม้อื่น ๆ นุ่ม เกือบ 9 ปอนด์ ประมาณคู่ยอดกินเดี๋ยวนี้ และผลไม้อบแห้ง เดียวกับ 3.5 ปอนด์ วันนี้เพียงภายใต้ 18 ปอนด์ สำหรับผัก ตัวเลขโดดเด่นมากยิ่งขึ้น ค่าเฉลี่ยชาวกรุงลอนดอนใน 1851 กินปอนด์ 31.8 ของหัวหอม เดียวกับ 13.2 ปอนด์ วันนี้ ใช้ 40 ปอนด์ ผลิตและ rutabagas เทียบกับ 2.3 ปอนด์ วันนี้ และบรรจุไปเกือบ 70 ปอนด์ ของกาดต่อปี เดียวกับ 21 ปอนด์ ตอนนี้ การบริโภคน้ำตาลมีราคาประมาณ 30 ปอนด์ ต่อหัวซึ่งน้อยกว่าที่สามยอดใช้วันนี้ อื่น ๆ ทั้งหมดเหมือนที่คนกินสวยยองใยนั้น Yet most anecdotal accounts, written then and subsequently, indicate the very opposite. Henry Mayhew, in his classic London Labour and the London Poor, published in the year our rectory was built, suggested that a piece of bread and an onion constituted a typical dinner for a laborer, while a much more recent (and deservedly much praised) history, Consuming Passions by Judith Flanders, states that “the staple diet of the working classes and much of the lower middle classes in the mid-nineteenth century consisted of bread or potatoes, a little bit of butter, cheese or bacon, tea with sugar.” What is certainly true is that people who had no control over their diets often ate very poorly indeed. A magistrate’s report of conditions at a factory in northern England in 1810 revealed that apprentices were kept at their machines from 5:50 in the morning to 9:10 or 9:15 at night, with a single short break for dinner. “They have Water Porridge for Breakfast and Supper”—taken at their machines—“and generally Oatcake and Treacle, or Oatcake and poor Broth, for Dinner,” he wrote. That was, almost certainly, pretty typical fare for anyone stuck in a factory, a prison, an orphanage, or some other powerless situation. มันเป็นความจริงว่า อาหารถูก unvaried ไข้แต่สำหรับหลาย ๆ คนย่อม ในสกอตแลนด์ แรงของการบุกเบิกฟาร์มในเพราะต้นได้รับการอาหารเฉลี่ยของ 17.5 ปอนด์ ข้าวโอ๊ตสัปดาห์ บวกเล็กน้อย และเกือบไม่มีอะไรอื่น แม้ว่าพวกเขาโดยทั่วไปถือว่าตัวเองโชคดี เพราะน้อย ก็ไม่ต้องกินมันฝรั่ง เหล่านี้กันอย่างแพร่หลายถูกดูถูก 150 ปีแรกหรือหลังจากนำของยุโรป หลายคนถือว่ามันฝรั่งมีผัก unwholesome เนื่องจากกินส่วนโต belowground แทนที่จะเข้าถึง nobly สำหรับดวงอาทิตย์ Clergymen บางครั้งประกาศกับมันฝรั่งใน grounds ว่าไม่มีที่ไหนเหมือนในพระคัมภีร์ ไอร์แลนด์เท่านั้นไม่สามารถจะให้เฉพาะ สำหรับพวกเขา มันฝรั่งได้จากการเนื่องจากอัตราผลตอบแทนสูงมาก เอเคอร์ดินชาดเดียวสามารถสนับสนุนครอบครัวของหก ถ้าพวกเขาเตรียมพร้อมที่จะกินของมันฝรั่ง ไอริช จำเป็น มี โดยค.ศ. 1780, 90 เปอร์เซ็นต์ของผู้คนในไอร์แลนด์มีขึ้นเพื่อความอยู่รอดของพวกเขาโดยเฉพาะ หรือเกือบเฉพาะในมันฝรั่ง อับ มันฝรั่งเที่ยวยังมีความเสี่ยงมากที่สุดของผัก ไวต่อการมากกว่า 260 ชนิดของโรคหรือทำลาย จากช่วงเวลาที่แนะนำมันฝรั่งที่ไปยุโรป harvests ล้มเหลวเป็นประจำ ใน 120 ปีนำไปสู่ทุพภิกขภัย มันฝรั่งพืชผลล้มเหลวไม่น้อยกว่ายี่สิบ - สี่ครั้ง สามแสนคนเสียชีวิตในความล้มเหลวเดียวใน 1739 แต่ที่รวมไฮจะดูเหมือนไม่สำคัญ โดยขนาดของความตายและทุกข์ในค.ศ. 1845 – 46 It happened very quickly. The crops looked fine until August 1845, and then suddenly they drooped and shriveled. The tubers when dug up were spongy and already putrefying. That year half the Irish crop was lost. The following year virtually all of it was wiped out. The culprit was a fungus called Phytophthora infestans, but people didn’t know that. Instead they blamed almost anything else they could think of—steam from steam trains, the electricity from telegraph signals, the new guano fertilizers that were just becoming popular. It wasn’t just in Ireland that the crop failed—in fact, it failed across Europe—but the Irish were especially dependent on the potato. Relief was infamously slow to come. Months after the starving had started, Sir Robert Peel, the British prime minister, was still urging caution. “There is such a tendency to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting on them is always desirable,” he wrote. In the worst year of the potato famine, London’s fish market, Billingsgate, sold 500 million oysters, 1 billion fresh herrings, almost 100 million soles, 498 million shrimps, 304 million periwinkles, 33 million plaice, 23 million mackerel, and other similarly massive amounts—and not one morsel of any of it made its way to Ireland to relieve the starving people there. The greatest part of the tragedy is that Ireland actually had plenty of food. The country produced great quantities of eggs, cereals, and meats of every type, and brought in large hauls of food from the sea, but almost all went for export. So 1.5 million people needlessly starved. It was the greatest loss of life anywhere in Europe since the Black Death.
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