Early Modern Era · 1748
Potato Cultivation
Unfamiliar New World Food; Elite Disdain and Leprosy Fears
Few objects seem less threatening than a potato. Which makes it notable that, in 1748, the Parlement of Paris (a powerful court, not a legislature) is said to have prohibited its cultivation, against a backdrop of persistent elite suspicion that the tuber was unwholesome. François Quesnay, an economist and contributor to Diderot's Encyclopédie, called potatoes a "miserable food, barely capable of sustaining human life" in 1756. Some commentators linked the crop to leprosy, on the grounds that the lumpy skin resembled diseased flesh.
The standard story goes like this. Superstitious French peasants shunned potatoes until Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a French army pharmacist who had survived on potato rations as a Prussian prisoner of war during the Seven Years' War (c. 1757–1763), came home and campaigned to rehabilitate them. The Paris Faculty of Medicine declared potatoes edible in 1772. Parmentier staged publicity stunts: visibly guarded potato plots near Paris (so passers-by would assume the crop was valuable and steal it), and a bouquet of potato flowers for Louis XVI. Recent scholarship complicates the tidy arc. Rebecca Earle, a historian of food at Warwick whose Feeding the People (2020) draws on estate records and kitchen-garden accounts across Europe, has shown that potatoes had been growing in French, English, Spanish and German cottage gardens since the 1600s. Ordinary people were often more familiar with the tuber than the elite "promoters" supposedly enlightening them.
So there are two things going on. A genuine elite panic about an unfamiliar foodstuff. And a top-down narrative of enlightened reform overwriting "peasant superstition" that has hardened, over time, into a myth of its own.
The standard story goes like this. Superstitious French peasants shunned potatoes until Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a French army pharmacist who had survived on potato rations as a Prussian prisoner of war during the Seven Years' War (c. 1757–1763), came home and campaigned to rehabilitate them. The Paris Faculty of Medicine declared potatoes edible in 1772. Parmentier staged publicity stunts: visibly guarded potato plots near Paris (so passers-by would assume the crop was valuable and steal it), and a bouquet of potato flowers for Louis XVI. Recent scholarship complicates the tidy arc. Rebecca Earle, a historian of food at Warwick whose Feeding the People (2020) draws on estate records and kitchen-garden accounts across Europe, has shown that potatoes had been growing in French, English, Spanish and German cottage gardens since the 1600s. Ordinary people were often more familiar with the tuber than the elite "promoters" supposedly enlightening them.
So there are two things going on. A genuine elite panic about an unfamiliar foodstuff. And a top-down narrative of enlightened reform overwriting "peasant superstition" that has hardened, over time, into a myth of its own.
Useful links:
- Rebecca Earle – *Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato* (Cambridge, 2020)
- Earle – "Promoting Potatoes in Eighteenth-Century Europe," *Eighteenth-Century Studies* 51.2 (2018; open PDF)
- William H. McNeill – "How the Potato Changed the World’s History," *Social Research* 66.1 (1999)
- Wikipedia – Antoine-Augustin Parmentier