Potatoes: Friend or Foe?

This installation of The 19th Century is Fucking Hilarious was intended as a brief ancedote.

It has since turned into an all-consuming obsession.

Fruitlands was a utopian community established in 1844 by Bronson Alcott(Lousia May’s daddy, a noted Transcendentalist and educator). It unsurprisingly and immediately foundered after seven months, for reasons best described as nasty intersections of impracticality and bad luck. This agrarian “utopia” was popularly suspected of all sorts of things, but most notably deviant sexuality- a good read (though not about Fruitlands, but another similar antebellum social experiment) is Hawthorne’s “Blithedale Romance”, which plays on popular conceptions of utopian communities as hot pan-sexual free-for-alls. The inhabitants of Fruitlands ate no animal products, refused artificial lighting, and did not use animal labor(obviously, this made farming difficult…oops).

In any case, the most fucking hilarious of all dietary restrictions: a ban on root vegetables. One commentator: “He made also a distinction between vegetables which ‘aspired’ or grew into the air, as wheat apples, and other fruits, and the base products which grew downwards into the eart, such as potatoes, beets, radishes, and the like. The latter he would not allow to be used.”

In short, potatoes grow towards hell. Avoid them at all costs!

~ by genghiskuhn on June 30, 2008.