Post #2401950

Someone on the BBC World Service is asking if potatoes can actually be a complete food. Let me tell you, before the Famine, when people in large parts of Ireland were raised on a diet of mainly potatoes and buttermilk, with occasional additions of cabbage, fish and wild foods, they were big, healthy people. When the potatoes failed, terrible diseases came in; TB became endemic; during the Famine, cholera, typhus, typhoid, and malnutrition took its terrible toll