Michel wrote:
> (Marie-Antoinette, not Marie, you ignoramus ;-)
Well actually, if she said it at all it was, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche."
Nothing about cake. This may sound silly or irrelevant to the discussion but
it's not. Her husband, Louis XV1, had gone to great lengths to convince French
farmers to grow potatoes, so they wouldn't starve if the wheat crop failed.
Potatoes of one variety or another are very forgiving of the climate they grow
in, and yield far more calories per acre than almost any other crop.
The vast majority of farmers refused and there was a very low yield of wheat
for a couple of years running. That, coupled with debts from financing the
American revolution, precipitated the French revolution. It's far more
complicated than that, but those are the root causes (pun intended).
The message is this. If traditional crops are not supplemented by something
else, real trouble will follow. Using food crops for motor fuel is simply
disastrous.
M.
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