As I said, our centuries old basic prayer is asking to provide for "our common bread". In the 19th century you had just a disruption of the supply of potatoes in Ireland (unlike ours black bread plus groat which is what the lower classes consumed until the 20th) and like half of the population either died or fled to America. Why do you think rice is "still" so important in China, Vietnam, and even the insular Japan?
You know the bread in the prayer is metaphorical right? And the Irish were forced to rely on potatoes because the better food was being exported. When people say low carb or high carb they are talking about total calories not actual food bulk. A large potato has less than 300 calories; that's a lot of potatoes to be high carb, especially the 60% suggested by the US government. Without a refining a lot of these carbs people would be eating would be a lot of bulk and not as much calories, and it's not going to be their main source of calories outside of famine. To get all your calories from potatoes you literally have to eat 6 lbs of potatoes. It's doable; it's just not normal at all and it was something the Irish had force upon them. That's why despite being high carb the "potato diet" works; it's hard just to eat all that bulk.
English peasants ate a ton of mutton. Analysis of cooking pots confirm this. Mutton, veg, cheese and some grains, but mostly mutton and vegetables. Anywhere where there is more marginal land than arable land is going to have a lot of meat eating. Everywhere that's near the ocean is going to have a lot of meat eating. One or both of those fits much of Europe (and much of the world really).
I actually remember how much relative luxery meat was from my own early childhood. We even had "meat-like products" (like vegan shit today) as substitutes. And we were a relative developed country, compared to most of the world.
And our peasants' "better food" was being exported too, you know?
And later, since more or less end of feaudalism (it took longer here), workers would strike and rebel demanding bread (in literal bread riots), and this wasn't because they were so bored of meat, but because (dark) bread and some kind of thin soup was all what they were eating in order to not starve. And this was the case of pre-20th-century England too, where since industrialization and capitalism (and potatoes) have arrived much earlier.
This isn't actually true. e: https://www.medievalists.net/2020/11/medieval-europeans-meat-consumption/ It's a modern idea that people in the past ate mostly bread. For obvious reasons it's true for ancient Egyptians and that's why there are literally mummies with heart disease.
As I said, our centuries old basic prayer is asking to provide for "our common bread". In the 19th century you had just a disruption of the supply of potatoes in Ireland (unlike ours black bread plus groat which is what the lower classes consumed until the 20th) and like half of the population either died or fled to America. Why do you think rice is "still" so important in China, Vietnam, and even the insular Japan?
You know the bread in the prayer is metaphorical right? And the Irish were forced to rely on potatoes because the better food was being exported. When people say low carb or high carb they are talking about total calories not actual food bulk. A large potato has less than 300 calories; that's a lot of potatoes to be high carb, especially the 60% suggested by the US government. Without a refining a lot of these carbs people would be eating would be a lot of bulk and not as much calories, and it's not going to be their main source of calories outside of famine. To get all your calories from potatoes you literally have to eat 6 lbs of potatoes. It's doable; it's just not normal at all and it was something the Irish had force upon them. That's why despite being high carb the "potato diet" works; it's hard just to eat all that bulk.
English peasants ate a ton of mutton. Analysis of cooking pots confirm this. Mutton, veg, cheese and some grains, but mostly mutton and vegetables. Anywhere where there is more marginal land than arable land is going to have a lot of meat eating. Everywhere that's near the ocean is going to have a lot of meat eating. One or both of those fits much of Europe (and much of the world really).
And at the same time of the Potato Famine, but in America: https://fords.org/civil-war-150-bread-bread-the-confederate-bread-riots/
I actually remember how much relative luxery meat was from my own early childhood. We even had "meat-like products" (like vegan shit today) as substitutes. And we were a relative developed country, compared to most of the world.
And our peasants' "better food" was being exported too, you know?
And later, since more or less end of feaudalism (it took longer here), workers would strike and rebel demanding bread (in literal bread riots), and this wasn't because they were so bored of meat, but because (dark) bread and some kind of thin soup was all what they were eating in order to not starve. And this was the case of pre-20th-century England too, where since industrialization and capitalism (and potatoes) have arrived much earlier.