Yet this whole edifice of contingency rested at bottom upon a plant—or, more precisely, upon the relationship between a plant and a people. For it was not the potato so much as potato monoculture that sowed the seeds of Ireland’s disaster. Indeed, Ireland’s was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly. Not only did the agriculture and diet of the Irish come to depend utterly on the potato, but they depended almost completely on one kind of potato: the Lumper. Potatoes, like apples, are clones, which means that every Lumper
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