Are there any food historians amongst us? I just finished reading [this BBC article about St Brigid’s day](https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230203-recipe-boxty-pancakes-and-bacon-for-st-brigids-day), and it mentions that potatoes arrived in Ireland in 1589. This is something I’d heard before but it got me thinking, what did we eat before the [Columbian Exchange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange)?
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Grass. We were all livestock
Stuff like oats, barley and wheat were the staple foods.
The stomachs of the famed bog bodies have been analysed. Cashel man from 4000 years ago for example. They had meat, oats, porridge, wheat, vegetables, buttermilk and so on.
Oats and cereals. Potatoes became essential only after the Cromwellian scorched earth policies meant they survived after above ground crops had been destroyed.
Edit to add beef would have been a staple too but one estimate I read from Leaky saw the Cromwellian era denude the beef stock down to a fifth of what it had been beforehand, and then of course with the confiscations beef and cereals fall from the native diet and are reserved for the ascendency and export to britain.
During the mass starvation of the 1840s Britain actually sent more troops to Ireland to protect food exports to Britain than they had garrisoned in India. For source materials read The Great Hunger by Woodham Smyth.
Lichen, oats, wheat, seaweed
It’s mad when you think of this stuff. Like nobody in Italy had seen a tomato until the 500s either
Oats, butter, oats
I don’t know the source but from what I have read appartly our diet and recipes were very dairy based.
Makes sense when cattle were a huge part of ancient Irish culture.
Oats, grains and wheat sometimes mixed with cows blood, berries, fresh vegetables meat and dairy, 1000s of years old butter has been found in the bogs of Ireland and it’s actually still eatable even today
I’m guessing rice or pasta.