Nutrition History (from Parts Unknown)

In episode 5 of Nutrition History from Parts Unknown, we are picking up where we left off in Episode 4, tracing the persistence of bread eating amidst a series of grain crises and famines which struck Europe in the heart of the premodern period which inevitably toppled bread’s status as the unanimous champion staple-food of Europe. Europe did all it could to hold onto its bread throughout the turmoil of the 16thand 17thcenturies, but eventually had to surrender to the reality that other staple foods would be needed if regular famine was to be made a historical vestige. And so Europe’s diet expanded to include novel foodstuffds, albeit it did so reluctantly. Among the most important of these new foods, was the potato, the last famine hero, and this description is apt because it was, perhaps more than any other food, that which buffered food precarity in premodern Europe.