Surprisingly comical record-keeping.
It doesn't seem physically possible for most adult men to consume 13 pounds of potatoes a day. I'm a large man and I think I'd burst or vomit before choking down that much, regardless of how hard I'd been working. Most likely that number is just wrong.
>Potatoes and milk, particularly buttermilk, were a nutritionally complete diet for many Irish peasants before the famine, allowing them to be healthier than some European counterparts who ate a bread-based diet.
As a Bengali man, that's exactly how I felt when I came to USA and first visited japanese restaurants. Part of the reason we consume so much rice is that rice is kind of the main dish (not a side)- it literally takes up central and most of the space in your food plate.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E0%A6%87%E0%A6%B2%E...
* Korean are tall by East Asian standards; 3-4 cm taller than Chinese and Japanese
* Thais don't eat that much, but they will massively over-cater, and there's not really the same taboo as in Europe of food wastage. My father, who like me spent a couple of decades in Thailand (although at different times) reckoned it was because historically they've had very few food shortages compared to other countries
Terr_•3h ago
This is still relevant these days, whenever someone talks about linking a currency (and taxes collected in that currency) to a commodity like gold. The market for the metal becomes distorted, and the overall economy distorted as well, vulnerable to anything that might impacts the the mining or refinement of the metal.
Another historical connection might be how the weird status of silver and gold are linked to European colonization.
erulabs•2h ago
vkou•2h ago
As long as the largest form of economic activity was agriculture, and access to hard currency was limited, people were paying taxes with food (or labour in their landlord's fields).
We pay taxes in money because we have a diversified economy, where 90% of us are not subsistence peasants, and the money supply & availability of banking is large enough that we (or our employers) have cash on hand.
fluoridation•47m ago
It's all a fiction, though. Ultimately wealth can be translated to very raw things, like energy, space, and time. Using rice as currency is not too different from using Joules as currency, as it's ultimately just captured and stored solar radiation. The issue with using food as money is not that the economy is diverse, as it's ultimately for the most part powered by people eating. The issue is that if you spend money to make a km^2 of land usable for factories that produce, say, semiconductors, that's not exactly translatable to tons of rice.
vkou•29m ago
(It also fails to take into account the practical aspects of collecting taxes, which is why food and labour were a common currency for them pre-industrialization, and money is the common currency for them post-industrialization. My post addresses the issue of collecting taxes more than it does the issue of generating wealth.)
Terr_•9m ago
No, there are significant differences: Do you really have no preference between them when there's a famine? Or when someone announces they've just cracked fusion power generation?
Even among commodities that are durable, fungible, divisible, etc., being able to trade them at a spot-rate does not make them equivalent as currency.
> The issue with using food as money is not that the economy is diverse, as it's ultimately for the most part powered by people eating. The issue is that if you spend money to make a km^2 of land usable for factories that produce, say, semiconductors, that's not exactly translatable to tons of rice.
In particular, I am reminded of the subsistence farmer's reasons [0] for not converting everything they have to/from coinage:
> The thing is, as the food supply contracts, the price of food rises and the ability to buy it with money shrinks (often accelerated by food hoarding by the wealthy cities, which are often in a position to back that up with force as the administrative centers of states).
> Consequently, for the [farming] family, money is likely to become useless the moment it is needed most. So while keeping some cash around against an emergency (or simply for market transactions – more on that later) might be a good idea, keeping nearly a year’s worth of expenses to make it through a bad harvest was not practical.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...
dluan•26m ago