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MAN LOVES POTATOES
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I find myself throwing the following query into conversation, waiting to pounce on my victim’s response. It is the Irish Inquisition after all...
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What’s your favourite carb?
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Ancient Grains?! Who even are you? Aren’t they a bit foosty anyway?
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Of course the answer I was looking for was Potatoes, Spuds, Pertas, Prátaí, Taytos...
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I could go on. And indeed I did go on. I wrote a whole Zine all about it. Why? And well you might ask.
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The reason is this: I’ve only recently come to realise how political potatoes are. Just have a look at some of their names and you’ll see what I mean. I asked my uncle (an Ulster farmer) which of these varieties he recognised, hoping he’d be tickled by my humorous drawings. With a straight face, he went through them one-by-one telling me whether he had planted/tasted/heard of them. Growing potatoes is a serious business.
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Tubers and Turmoil
When I were a lad - a young gulpin, a wee fella - we ate potatoes pretty much every day. Now that I’m a fully grown Dad with not-so-wee fellas of my own in the Big Smoke (London) I get to eat potatoes roughly once a week.
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Still, one must make sacrifices for one’s family. My family do actually like potatoes - they just don't seem to want to eat them every day. To me this seems somewhat disloyal, but I try not to go on about it (too much…).
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As part of growing up intertwined with the tastiest tuber in Ulster, the Northern end of Ireland, I somehow grew up having absorbed the following myth: that the great potato famine (The Great Hunger - an Gorta Mór) - one of the most cataclysmic events in Ireland - didn't really happen in the North.
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So with the help of the internet, the Public Records Office, and the Irish library in London, I went on a Zine-creating journey to find out...
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SPOILER: The population of Ulster has yet to recover, 175 years later.
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Potato Propaganda
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If 26 pages of full-colour potato propaganda is your sort of thing - or if you have some Ulster/Irish heritage lurking in your ancestry, you might wish to snaffle a copy of this tasty new Zine before they are all gobbled up.
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May your path rise to meet you,
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and your progress never stutter,
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may your taytos always be a home
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to half-melted Irish butter...
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