I have spent the last couple of days trying (in some senses forlornly) to banish species and biodiversity from my thoughts (if not forever then at least for the next fortnight) and replace those thoughts with plants and how we exploit them. It’s not that I’m not interested in plants as anyone here will know only too well. My problem is with our exploitation of them. This in itself may seem odd given my adult-life-long commitment to the vegetarian cause but my problem revolves around the ruthless, brutal exploitation of the kind that causes starvation and slavery.

One of the recommended coursework books for this module is Henry Hobhouse’s “Seeds of Change” which documents the exploitation of five plants by people. The chapter on the potato was the most horrific, harrowing read – made more harrowing because it was not fiction. It was real.

I thought I knew the story of the Irish potato famine in 1845/6 and the subsequent loss of a million lives and another million people displaced. I now know that I only had the sketchiest of understandings of this issue that goes back a lot further and has oppressive, sinister roots. The 1845 blight infested potato crop is something I can at least understand in that my own potato crop was totally wiped out last year from blight – in previous years I have got blight in the crop but managed to save a good proportion of the crop for eating despite this. Last year was different. Within the blink of an eye, the potato bed went from being beautifully healthy to stinking sludge. For me, it meant that my lovingly tended crop was lost but I could still feed myself and my family by buying potatoes, albeit at grossly inflated prices – the potatoes in our local farm shop doubled in price between 2011 and 2012. Of course I am also lucky enough to have a diet that extends way beyond the humble potato.

In 1845 Ireland the situation was quite different. Because of the abject poverty of the people, whole swathes of the community lived entirely on potatoes, milk and butter with literally nothing else - no bread, no meat or fish, no other vegetables. This is nutritionally very possible and some would say quite healthy. The problem was the economy, such as it was, worked more or less without money so people who lost their potatoes had no money to buy other food. The biggest tragedy of the whole thing was that a similar famine had occurred 100 years earlier, before newspapers and news travelling around the world, not from blight but from another potato disease. Understanding of the impact of that, coupled with a range of other measures, including teaching farmers good practices such as crop rotation, the value of variation and how to keep seed stock free from disease, might, just might, have lessened the seriousness of the situation.

The political build-up to the 1845 famine was a truly shameful part of British history and its repercussions go on today. The humble potato was a catalyst in changing the face of the world’s population and changing the global political landscape. Hobhouse suggests that such extraordinary events as the abolition of slavery happened not due to the enlightenment of the American people but to the deep hatred that the immigrant Irish population held for the British colonialist plantation owners. He says that the Irish voted to abolish slavery basically to get revenge on plantation owners. He also suggests that WW1 and WW2 would have been resolved more quickly if the Americans had got involved at the outset but they didn’t because of the Irish vote. Whether he’s right or not is a topic that I just don’t have enough information to consider but boy, if he’s right then the British probably got their come-uppance for treating the Irish with such unspeakable cruelty.

I bought the book second-hand on ebay and would certainly recommend it to anyone interested in how we exploit food crops. I’m not sure if I have managed to banish biodiversity from my mind, or if we will ever banish potato blight but I have a new perspective on the world tonight.