1845-1852, Ireland. The Great Famine kills over one million people. This is taught as unavoidable crop failure

1845-1852, Ireland. The Great Famine kills over one million people. This is taught as unavoidable crop failure. Except: During the famine, Ireland was a net exporter of food.

While Irish peasants died eating rotten potatoes, Irish farms shipped cattle, pigs, butter, and eggs to England. Massive quantities. Enough to feed everyone in Ireland twice over. Ships left Irish ports loaded with livestock while people starved within sight of those ports.

Why? English landlords owned the land. Irish tenant farmers worked it and paid rent in produce. The landlords sold that produce in England. The peasants were left with whatever they'd grown on personal plots: almost exclusively potatoes because potatoes could feed a family on minimal land.

When potatoes failed, peasants had nothing. But the livestock belonged to absentee English landlords who continued exporting because that was their property. The British government could have stopped this. They chose not to.

The stated reason was free market economics. The actual reason: the English ruling class considered the Irish overpopulated. The famine was viewed as natural population control. 

Charles Trevelyan, who administered famine relief, wrote that the famine was "a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence" that would teach the Irish better agriculture. He opposed effective relief because he believed suffering was educational.

Irish peasants had been perfectly capable of diverse agriculture before English colonisation. Ireland had raised cattle for millennia. But English land policies pushed Irish Catholics onto marginal land. On one or two acres, you can't raise cattle. You grow potatoes. When potatoes failed, they had no fallback because they'd been systematically denied access to animal agriculture.

Protestant Irish farmers and English landlords continued raising cattle and exporting beef. Armed soldiers guarded these exports. There are documented cases of starving peasants being shot for trying to steal food being exported during a famine.

Your Irish ancestors weren't allowed to eat the cattle they raised because those cattle belonged to English landlords. You're told beef is environmentally destructive and you should eat sustainable plant proteins. The cattle still get raised. They just go to people who can afford them.