Population Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Europe
In late seventeenth-century Europe, what had been evolution in population followed by stabilization changed to population revolution. Increasing contacts with the Americas brought more sophisticated knowledge of the advantages of new foods, particularly the potato. Originally a cool-weather mountain crop in the Americas, potatoes did well in the Pyrenees, Alps, and Scottish Highlands. They also grew well in the long, damp springtime of the northwest European plain. Whatever hesitancy peasants may have felt about eating potatoes quickly passed when famine threatened; after all, people who in famines desperately consumed grass, weeds, and the bark of trees hardly would have hesitated to eat a potato. By the later eighteenth and the nineteenth century, American foods had become the principal foodstuffs of many rural folk. Various agricultural publicists promoted adoption of these foods, and peasants found that potatoes could allow subsistence on smaller plots of land. Fried potatoes soon began to be sold on the streets of Paris in the 1680s, the original French fries. Governments, eager to promote population growth as a source of military and economic strength, also backed the potato.
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