Raw materials and art – 23. Potato and Millet

2023-05-01 06:21:04

Switzerland is a hub for commodity trading. Did you know that this activity represents 4% of Swiss GDP, and even 22% of tax revenue for the canton of Geneva. This week, focus on the potato. We evoke the history of the potato until its discovery. We highlight Parmentier’s role in democratizing the potato.

This gives us the opportunity to admire the painting The potato harvest which is a painting by Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875) painted in 1855 and preserved in Walters Art Museum the Baltimore.

The potato is a food now considered quite normal in the diet of Western populations, but this was not always the case. We explain why.

A brief history of the potato

The potato is native to Peru, Bolivia and Mexico where it has been cultivated since the time of the Aztec and Inca civilizations. It was discovered by the Spaniard Pizarro, on the Andes Cordillera, in the middle of the XVI^th century. It was totally unknown to the European population, until the discovery on the South American continent.

His discovery aroused enormous skepticism. Brought back to the Old Continent in the early 1500s, the mere idea of being able to eat it met with strong criticism.

There were those who considered the tuber a food of the devil, since it was not mentioned in the Bible.

Others were disgusted by it, due to its crumpled and inelegant appearance.

Still others were afraid of it, convinced that the potato carried diseases, especially leprosy, because the hands of lepers resembled the surface of a potato. Opposition to the potato was so strong that even the many famines failed to convince people to eat potatoes.

Potatoes finally came to be eaten because of a terrible famine in Ireland in 1663.

The first Europeans who tasted it described its taste as, reminiscent of chestnut. The Polish nobleman Georg Mniszek (1742-1806), who lived in Switzerland for a few years, underlines the mealiness of potatoes at the time: “The potato tubers have a thin, smooth and tender skin; they are mealy and their taste is close to that of chestnut”.

Parmentier’s ingenuity

It was the French pharmacist and agronomist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier who, while incarcerated in Germany, appreciated its flavor and noted its ease of cultivation in relatively poor soils. Back home, a few years later, Parmentier offered the “potato” to fight against famine.

Food aroused great interest and so after the terrible famine of 1785, Louis XVI ordered the nobles to force their peasants to grow potatoes.

The results are not those hoped for, so on the advice of Parmentier, the sovereign decides to follow up on a stratagem.

He began by growing potatoes on the Champ de Mars, in land guarded by the royal soldiers, to then spread the rumor that a preciousness reserved for the king was being produced there. Greed took its course, many turned into petty thieves just to grab the forbidden fruits, and during the revolution of 1789 the potato was already a popular food.

Harvesting Millet Potatoes

Millet is a French painter who specialized in scenes of daily life, and in particular peasant work. He painted many rural scenes, often poetic from 1849, when he moved to Barbizon. These paintings are of realistic influence, and glorify the aesthetics of the peasantry The Potato harvestdated of 1855 and preserved in Walters Art Museum of Baltimore belongs to this period and shows how the potato was implanted in French society at that time.

In the same series, “Raw materials and art”: