Could one live, like so many of my ancestors allegedly did, on a diet consisting of mostly potatoes? Cecil Adams says, well, nearly.
The good news: A spuds and milk diet definitely has possibilities — the Irish, to cite the best-known example, got by mainly on potatoes until the infamous blight of 1845 wiped out their main course. The bad news: (1) Considering the quantities you’re going to have to eat, you’d better really like potatoes. (2) If you’re literally going to eat nothing but potatoes and milk, you risk — brace yourself — serious molybdenum deficiency.
Years ago I tackled the question of whether you could live by bread alone. (See The Straight Dope: Can man live by bread alone?) Answer: Yeah, for about six months, but then you’d die of scurvy. Things won’t be anywhere near that bad on milk and potatoes. Before the Great Famine, the traditional Irish peasant meal consisted mainly of potatoes, milk, oats, beans, barley, and bread. Potatoes were the mainstay. As the years grew leaner, dairy products largely disappeared from the Irish diet, since poverty forced many farmers to sell their milk to pay rent. By the time the famine hit, the peasants were eating pretty much just potatoes, supplemented with some salt fish and oatmeal. I’ve seen it said that a third of the population lived on potatoes and nothing else, although that seems doubtful, as we’ll see. Edward Wakefield, an English land agent and amateur social scientist who traveled Ireland from 1809 to 1811, calculated each Irish peasant family member consumed 5.5 pounds of potatoes per day. An 1846 source claims a working man needed at least 8 pounds of potatoes a day to survive if nothing else were available; a typical family of six would need 26 pounds.
How did the Irish do on this diet? We can’t be certain — nobody was conducting nutrition studies in those days. But there’s reason to believe they were healthier than you might guess. In the century before the famine, Ireland had the highest birthrate in western Europe. Some credit potatoes, saying the availability of easy-to-grow, easy-to-cook spuds made it practical to raise large families. Telling evidence on this score, one historian writes, “is that the Irish in general and Irish women in particular were widely described as healthy and good-looking.” I don’t know about you, Josh, but any diet that gets results like that is good enough for me.
[Click to continue reading The Straight Dope: Could I survive on nothing but potatoes and milk?]
I knew I loved potatoes…
and if one supplemented one’s diet with the occasional bowl of oatmeal, and even some salad, you’d be well enough to down pints of Guinness Stout.
