Potato by Rebecca Earle

Author:Rebecca Earle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: History
ISBN: 9781501344312
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2019-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

s artwork

odes connecting

opriated for the

d Art Museums/

. Grippo’

., 2010.3, and Imaging

íctor Grippo made a number

e just society

ent: a mass of potatoes generates

power of individuals. Perhaps the

ce of liberation. Harvar

ofit, or so argued political economists such

eate a mor

dinary people can be appr

the collective

d College.

oduces pr

reflect

ers pr

, 1970–71. The Argentine artist V

ed to as ‘potatoes with cabling’. The small electr

eferr

Analogía I

oduce a measurable electrical curr

pr

s installations also

d Norton Memorial Fund and gift of Leslie Cheek, Jr

esident and Fellows of Harvar

Analogía I

Grippo’

íctor Grippo, V

ovided by the lowly potato can be used to cr

. A mass of potato-eating labour

of others, as well as how it can become a sour

ovokes us to consider how the collective power of or

FIGURE 10

these assemblages, which he r

the potatoes in

energy

as Adam Smith.

energy pr

pr

benefit

Fogg Museum, Richar

Department, © Pr

PLEASURE AND RESPONSIBILITY 67

Potato.indb 67

24-10-2018 21:15:53

Potatoes would render useful citizens from the gristle of the useless poor. The Argentine artist Víctor Grippo’s Analogía I reflects rather precisely Rumford’s vision of the potato’s transformative power. In Grippo’s instal ation rows of smal , vulnerable potatoes have been pierced with electrical sensors, to provide energy for some larger purpose. The image may

be taken to symbolize ‘the people whose collective power is

controlled by the authoritarian state’.5 A great deal of potato translates into a more powerful state.

Rumford calculated the cost of preparing his soup in

great detail, but he made clear that simple economy was

not his sole focus. The food also needed to be tasty. Citing

Hippocrates, he insisted that ‘whatever pleases the palate

nourishes’. This was why his soup demanded croutons.

Croutons, he explained, required extended chewing, which

‘prolongs the duration of the enjoyment of eating, a matter

of very great importance indeed, and which has not hitherto

been sufficiently attended to’. Seizing the moral high ground, Rumford insisted that most people dismissed the notion

that the poor were entitled to happiness, but he did not. ‘The enjoyments which fall to the lot of the bulk of mankind are

not so numerous as to render an attempt to increase them

superfluous’, he observed piously.6 His potato soup, with its chewy croutons, would cheer up even the most miserable of

Munich’s beggars. It’s unlikely that Grippo’s little potatoes will themselves benefit from the electrical matrix in which

they are imprisoned, but Rumford was certain that Munich’s

poor would themselves gain enormously from his soup.

68 POTATO

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24-10-2018 21:15:53

It’s pretty clear that the croutons were a way of eking out a small amount of soup, and it’s anyone’s guess how much

Munich’s beggars truly enjoyed Rumford’s concoction; the

responses were mixed when I tried some out of a group of

friends. But Rumford’s insistence on pleasure was absolutely

typical of soup enthusiasts. The hungry years of the 1790s,

as war raged across Europe, saw the creation of Rumford-

inspired soup kitchens in many European cities. Rumford

himself set one up at the London Foundling Hospital in

1796; by 1800 there were nearly fifty such establishments

in the British capital alone.7 More were formed elsewhere

in Germany, and in Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, Spain and

France. All this soup was intended to pre-empt political

activism and revolt inspired by the French Revolution, and

to assuage the

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