A mural on Whiterock Road in Belfast commemorating the Irish famine. Source: Public domain

Somewhere back in school I learned about the 19th-century Irish Potato Famine: More than a million people starved to death when blight hit Ireland’s main crop, the potato. The famine meant tremendous human suffering and triggered a mass migration, largely to the United States. All this is true. But it is also incomplete and misses key facts that link past and present global hunger.

Beginning in 1845, blight did begin to hit Ireland’s potato crop, which was the staple food of the Irish poor. But all other crops were unaffected. And during the worst famine years, British-ruled Ireland continued to export vast amounts of food. . . In approaching the potato famine in my global studies class, I wanted students to see that hunger is less a natural phenomenon than it is a political and economic phenomenon.

“The Ejectment,” The Illustrated London News, Dec. 16, 1848. See more images at the Views of the Famine website.

In 19th-century Ireland, food was a commodity, distributed largely to those who had the means to pay for it. Like today, the capitalist market ruled, and commerce trumped need. According to the Institute for Food and Development Policy/Food First, “Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide: two and a half pounds of grain, beans, and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk, and eggs.” And yet, according to the organization Bread for the World, 852 million people in the world are hungry, and every day 16,000 children die of hunger-related causes. The main issue was and continues to be: Who controls the land and for what purposes?

This lesson was published by Rethinking Schools in the “Feeding the Children” (Summer 2006) issue.

For more lessons like “Hunger on Trial: An Activity on the Irish Potato Famine and Its Meaning for Today,” order the Rethinking Schools book, A People’s Curriculum for the Earth.

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Praised for being accessible, honest, humorous, fascinating, and alarming, Chew On This was also repeatedly referred to as a must-read for kids who regularly eat fast food. Having all the facts about fast food helps young people make healthy decisions about what they eat. Chew On This shows them that they can change the world by changing what they eat.

The book also includes action steps, a discussion guide, and a new afterword by the authors.

ISBN: 9780618710317 | Houghton Mifflin

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When the Hunger Was Upon Us

We owned less than fourteen per cent
of our own land.
We were not allowed to:
vote;
teach;
bear arms;
own a horse worth five pounds;
buy land or farms.

The English
prohibited the export of our woollen goods:
destroyed our industry to protect their trade.
Rents were sent to absentee landlords
and spent in London.
Our country bled,
while English gluttons grew florid,
as port, the colour of blood, flowed freely
in the big town mansions
and the manor houses on country estates.

Bumper crops of wheat, oats and barley,
vegetables, butter and bacon,
were taken by the landlord for rent.
We survived on potatoes –
until the blight.
Stalks stayed green,
but leaves turned as black as sin.
Our crop was a stinking and slimy
black mass of corruption.

When the hunger was upon us
clergy and gentry ate their fill
while we scavenged for berries and roots,
cabbage leaves and kelp,
nettles and weeds,
till our land was as barren
as if a plague of locusts
had passed this way.

Our scarecrow children,
lay like sacks of sticks
scattered on a sprinkling of straw
and let go of life without a murmur;
or died at the roadside,
their mouths stained green
from chewing grass,
their bodies, no more than parchment-covered bones,
half eaten by rats and starving dogs.
Though they were leaf-light,
we were too weak to bury them
beneath even a handful of stones.

Landlords sent hired men
to fire the thatch above our heads
and tumble our walls with crowbars.
We clutched at coats and cooking pots,
clung to door posts
from which we were torn
like lice plucked from the groin.
Our little ones
clawed our breasts and brains
with cries of hunger, fear and pain.
Dragoons drove us from the ruins of our holdings,
from land we had reclaimed from bog
with hand and spade.
They tore up our foundations
to make way for sheep and cattle
which brought a better profit.

For resisting,
our backs were flayed
into raw red meat,
or we were hung in rows,
like carcasses on a butcher’s rail.

We scraped holes in hillsides.
The tools of our new trades:
fingers to form begging bowls;
fingernails for rooting,
like hogs, in the clay.

And in the peat bog,
we trailed across the
unmarked graves of soldiers,
who marched into no one else’s land,
who tried to take nothing
but what belonged to them,
whose names are not recorded.

To politician, priest and landlord,
famine was the will of God.
A natural calamity.
Social structure would collapse,
they said,
if they gave free food.
So soldiers patrolled the cornfields,
and warships escorted wheat ships
from our ports.

When our country
became too ragged for even
a beggar’s coat,
we emigrated
– or were emigrated:
flung onto a foreign land
and left to crawl on bellies
through mud and stones,
and died like starfish
spreadeagled on the sand.

We died of scurvy –
with toothless gums as soft as dung.
We died of dysentery –
passing blood instead of shit.
We died of relapsing fever –
dwindling deathward turning yellow.
We died of cholera –
retching out the lining of long-empty stomachs.
We died of famine dropsy –
our bodies swelling like over-ripe fruit until we burst.
We died of typhus –
delirious and vomiting,
stinking like rotten sheep,
our faces turning as black
as our blighted crop.
We died of hunger –
chewing rags until we were too weak
to work our jaws,
or cry,
or even whisper,
Goodbye, my love,
goodbye.

We died –
in sod huts,
sharing a bed of straw
with the already dead;
in ditches,
into which we crawled
like famished dogs;
in workhouses,
or outside them when
the gates were shut against us;
on public works,
when we had not the strength
to lift a spade or take another step;
on emigrant boats,
in airless holds,
wailing for water through blistered lips;
and going down into the cathedral of the sea
in the close dark berths of coffin ships.

We died
of malnutrition and fever
while the granaries overflowed.
We fled from our homes
where death
sat at our tables
and slept in our beds.

We asked for
no export of cattle and grain –
rejected under the banner of
Free Trade.
We asked for
state finance for new industry and railways –
rejected under the banner of
Private Enterprise.
We asked for
food,
and England sent
an army of occupation.
For wine
they gave us our loved ones’ blood.
For bread
they gave us steel
and lead.

About the Author

Nigel Gray is an Irish-born, Australian, multi-award-winning author of more the eighty books, mostly for children. His latest publications are Strangers, a novel for adults, A Baker’s Dozen, a collection of 13 stories for upper primary age children, and the picture book, A Country Far Away.

Posted on the Zinn Education Project website with permission. (c) Nigel Gray.

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In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.

Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them.

The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called human’s first feat of genetic engineering.

Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. [Publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9781416949008 | Atheneum Books for Young Readers

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With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat—and how we farm.

The website includes information on the Farm Bill, FoodCorps, other projects by the filmmakers, and ways to take action. [Website description.]

By Mosaic Films.

Trailer

Image by David McLimans.

Related Resource

King Corn: Teaching the food crisis. A description of how two teachers use the film King Corn to teach their 9th-grade global studies students about the international food crisis and how much choice we have over what we eat. (Rethinking Schools, Summer 2012)

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Here is a description of Gilmore’s work by Premilla Nadasen from Beacon:

Gilmore founded the Club from Nowhere, an organization of maids, service workers, and cooks seeking to aid the boycott. The name was an attempt to shield members from the consequences of openly supporting the boycott.

“Some colored folks or Negroes could afford to stick out their necks more than others because they had independent incomes,” Gilmore explained, “but some just couldn’t afford to be called ‘ring leaders’ and have the white folks fire them.

“So when we made our financial reports to the MIA officers we had them record us as the money coming from nowhere. ‘The Club from Nowhere.’” Only Gilmore knew who made and bought the food and who donated money.

The underground network of cooks went door-to-door selling sandwiches, pies, and cakes, and collecting donations. The proceeds were then turned over to boycott leaders. Donations came from whites as well as blacks. That “was very nice of the people because so many of the people who didn’t attend the mass meetings would give the donation to help keep the carpool going.” Continue reading.

This children’s book does an excellent job of describing Gilmore’s work and the day-to day-challenges faced by the organizers of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

ISBN: 9781499807202 | Little Bee Books

Learn More

Eyes on the Prize interview transcript with Georgia Gilmore (February 17, 1986)

The Club From Nowhere: Cooking for Civil Rights. NPR series: Hidden Kitchens: The Kitchen Sisters (March, 2005)

Georgia Gilmore, Overlooked Activist of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. By Premilla Nadasen, Beacon Broadside, March 18, 2016

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When I designed this unit, I was teaching at a K–8 independent school in Winchester, Massachusetts, that serves a gifted and “twice-exceptional” (gifted students who also have special needs) student body. Because of the structure of the school, each year I’m able to invent a theme-based curriculum from scratch. For the 2016–17 school year, I chose climate change: I felt the urgency of educating students about this topic and I was excited by the mosaic of subjects that fall under the larger climate change umbrella.

I entered the year believing I would spend much of my instructional time helping students investigate the basic science and social factors behind climate change. With a firm understanding of human influence on natural systems, I reasoned, my students could move on to thinking about solutions. I designed mini-labs surrounding the science of heat and light, and students worked in groups to create artistic representations of fragile balances that were being thrown off, such as melting glaciers and disruptions in El Niño and La Niña. However, by the end of October I began to realize a shift was necessary.

Two major problems arose. First, while some students identified with the subject they had researched for the artistic modeling project, others had not been emotionally engaged. The abstract concepts of oceanic currents and sheet ice were not the easiest to identify with. While students could intellectually process that climate change was “bad,” they didn’t feel an emotional stake in the issue. Also, these lessons had not left students feeling empowered.

During one of our early discussions about the greenhouse effect, Sophie exclaimed, “Why are we even learning about this if there’s nothing we can do about it?”

Disengaged and depressed was not what I was aiming for.

I thought that my students needed a more concrete angle to understand the effects of climate change and the possibilities for climate justice. I decided we should focus on biodiversity, with hopes that thinking about the interaction of plants and animals with climate change could leverage my students’ strong empathy for the natural world. In addition, biodiversity and ecosystems inherently lend themselves to systems thinking.

This lesson originally appeared in the Fall 2018 issue of Rethinking Schools.

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Haitian farmers protest. Source: Canadian Biotechnology Action Network. Click image for more photos.

On June 4, 2010, approximately 10,000 Haitian farmers marched in protest and did something unexpected: they burned piles of seeds.

Why? Because the seeds they were setting on fire were hybrids donated by Monsanto.

These hybrid seeds were approved for donation by the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture; they are cross bred between two different species. Peasant farmers saw this donation as a detriment to local seed stocks and food sovereignty. If  the farmers planted these hybrids, the crops grown would not produce seeds that could be saved and used for the following year’s crop. Additionally, some of the seeds were treated with dangerous fungicides called Maxim XO thiram, which make the treated seeds dangerous to handle without protective clothing.

This “gift” from Monsanto came on the heels of the massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, killing 320,000 and displacing millions. Attempting to take advantage of the desperate situation of farmers in the country, Monsanto announced that they would donate 475 tons of hybrid corn and vegetable seeds. Peasant leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste called the donation “a new earthquake” because of the threat these seeds posed to small-scale agriculture and biodiversity and the dependence on Monsanto that would be created by this donation. 

In order to express their opposition to this so-called “gift,” farmers from around the country marched with banners and straw hats with the statement “ABA MONSANTO” (Down with Monsanto).  

This act of resistance to Monsanto’s influence is described in the role for Haiti’s Group of Four and the Dessalines Brigade, in the lesson Food, Farming, and Justice: A Role Play on La Via Campesina. La Via Campesina is the largest social movement in the world, made up of over 200 million small farmers in 81 countries.

Whether it’s burning seeds that pose a threat to traditional agriculture in Haiti or occupying wealthy landowners’ land in Brazil, La Via Campesina is on the front lines of combating big agribusiness and climate change through food sovereignty. You won’t hear much about La Via Campesina in mainstream news or textbooks. Learn more and teach using the lesson, Food, Farming, and Justice: A Role Play on La Via Campesina, one of more than 80 lessons and articles in A People’s Curriculum for the Earth: Teaching Climate Change and the Environmental Crisis.

Credit and Sources

This post was prepared by Hannah Russell-Hunter during her Teaching for Change summer internship, drawing on the sources listed below.

“Haitian Farmers Commit to Burning Monsanto Hybrid Seeds.” Beverly Bell, Huffington Post. May 17, 2010 and related articles by Bell in Yes! Magazine on May 21, 2010 and June 15, 2010.

Haiti Grassroots Watch

“Haitian peasants march against Monsanto Company for food and seed sovereignty” La Via Campesina. June 16, 2010.

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MST March. Photo by Sebastião Salgado.

Brazil’s constitution deems it legal “to expropriate on account of social interest, for purposes of agrarian reform, rural property which is not performing its social function.” Through land occupations like the one of the Pará ranch, the MST could bring legal challenges against major landowners, who would then lose their unused land to laborers intent on farming it. These legal suits can take years to settle, but the Movement has won peasants millions of acres of land in the past three decades.

On April 17, 1996, several thousand MST members marched down a highway in southern Pará toward the city of Belém. The Pará government ordered Brazil’s military police to stop the march. On that day, 150 armed police assembled to block the road to Belém and opened fire on the protesters. The police killed nineteen protesters on the spot. Dozens more were injured, some severely wounded. The 19 murders came to be known as the “Eldorado do Carajás” massacre.

Monument with 19 burned trees in the shape of Brazil. Source: Reprodução.

One week after the massacre, the Brazilian government created the Ministry of Agrarian Reform. The land that MST members were occupying was ultimately expropriated and is now called “April 17.” A monument was built on the road where the tragedy occurred to honor the victims.

La Via Campesina — the Peasants’ Movement — recognizes April 17 as the International Day of Peasant Struggles. La Via Campesina is a global peasant movement with over 200 million members in 81 countries, including the members of Brazil’s MST.

Throughout the world, La Via Campesina is on the front lines in the fights against corporate farming, corporations like Monsanto, and environmental injustice. It works to restore and protect the food sovereignty of all humans, but you won’t hear much about its work on U.S. news or textbooks.

Learn more about La Via Campesina and teach about it using the lesson, Food, Farming, and Justice: A Role Play on La Via Campesina.

This post was prepared by Hannah Russell-Hunter, 2019 Teaching for Change intern.

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Aftermath of the fire at Imperial Foods processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina. Credit: Tom MacCallum / Smithsonian

On September 3, 1991, 25 workers died in a fire at the Hamlet, North Carolina, Imperial Food Products chicken processing plant, due to poor working conditions and lax worker safety precautions. An article published in Scalawag Magazine describes the preventable tragedy:

. . . hydraulic fluid sprayed out of a disconnected hose in the town’s Imperial Foods chicken processing plant, and fire erupted. Some of the doors were locked from the outside, the loading dock was occupied by a truck, and, with no pre-planned exit strategy, workers in the back rooms never stood a chance.

Apathetic leadership at the local level and a corporation’s desire to capitalize, literally, on American consumers’ hunger for cheap food were what set the stage for this fire and other workplace “accidents.”

A Smithsonian article summarizes and reviews the arguments put forth by professor Bryant Simon in his 2017 book, The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives:

Simon examines how systems at work — both at Imperial and in the wider food production industry — like deregulation (either by law or lack of enforcement), a growing demand for cheap labor, a culture of silence and intimidation among workers and management, and changes to the meat industry itself, with its shift in the 1980s to highly processed, mass-produced chicken products made at the plant, were integral to the conflagration. And all of these elements, Simon argues, fit into a larger pattern of American society depreciating workers’ lives while elevating and prioritizing the notion of “cheap” in the consumer marketplace. . . .

Just as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory employed mostly vulnerable, financially insecure immigrant women and girls, the Hamlet fire’s victims were the underprivileged. Simon doesn’t shy away from the intrinsic role that race, class and gender played in the tragedy. Those who made decisions about Imperial’s safety protocols — the city, state and federal officials — were removed from the experiences of the workers impacted by them. Of the 25 who died in the fire, 12 were African-American and 18 were women, many of whom were single mothers.

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