St. Patrick's Day and the Irish Potato

“Pray for peace and grace and spiritual food, For wisdom and guidance, for all these are good, but don't forget the potatoes.” John Tyler Pettee, 'Prayer and Potatoes'

 
On this St. Patrick's Day I am thinking about potatoes because of the huge impact they have had on the soul of Ireland. This impact is demonstrated by many Irish sayings such as
 
 "It is easy to halve the potato where there is love."
"If beef's the king of meat, potato's the queen of the garden world.


"Only two things in this world are too serious to be jested on, potatoes and matrimony."  
It is thought that Sir Walter Raleigh first brought the potato to Ireland from the Americas around 1589. There is a legend that he presented Queen Elizabeth I a potato plant, and her cooks prepared a dish of the boiled stems and leaves for a royal banquet. The tubers were discarded. Since the stems and leaves contain poisons, everyone who attended the banquet became ill and potatoes were banned from court. I'm not sure if this legend is true, but the Irish discovered that the tubers could provide enough food for a family of 10 for 1 year if grown on the small land parcels the general population could use.
  Many Irish families subsisted on milk and potatoes alone and fortunately these two foods provide all essential nutrients. According to History Magazine the population of Ireland doubled between 1780 and 1841 corresponding to widespread cultivation of potatoes. Potatoes allowed even the most impoverished people to produce enough healthy food. People were healthier and infant mortality decreased as the Irish became increasingly dependent on potatoes. 
This culminated in the Great Famine that resulted when potato blight, a fungus called Phytophthora Infestans, caused the potatoes to rot in the fields.About one million people starved to death and many more moved away from Ireland during those difficult times. There was no cure for the blight at the time, but now is cured by spraying the crops with a solution of copper sulphate before the fungus appears.  
A Priest in Galway wrote of the famine "As to the potatoes they are all gone - clean gone. If travelling by night, you would know when a potato field was near by the smell. The fields present a space of withered black stalks."