He didn’t just allow the peasants to steal from it, he deliberately hired guards to protect the field, making it seem valuable and ordered them to be lax in their patrols, so the valuable crop seemed like easy pickings, and even ordered them to accept all bribes and let the peasants go should the guards accidentally catch someone in the act of stealing the potatoes.
He want out of his way to make the damn things seem like the most valuable, but easiest thing to get hold of, in the world.
He’s living in 1750 but his thinking is 3035
The REALLY interesting thing about this shit is actually about how cultures will designate things as People Food and Not People Food and then still actually keep to that to the point of risking starvation, and how bizarre that is.
Because this was An Thing among the continental Europeans at the time: they did actually use potatoes (and swedes and turnips and stuff) but they were Low Class, Low Status Foods … predominantly for animals.
Never mind that these roots and so on were much easier and much more reliable to grow than even the rest of the grain crops, let alone the Good Wheat that made Nice Bread: Bread was People Food; Roots were Animal Food.
And this wasn’t JUST people being damn stupid, because at the same time, what you were seen to eat or perceived to eat could have huge social ramifications, as it still does today (think about the horrible stereotypes of The Wrong Kind Of Meat in various low-class foods and potentially even your own visceral reaction to them: there’s not actually much difference between eating a pig and eating a dog and eating a goat and eating a goose, they’re all quite intelligent and interactive animals that have good perception of emotions, but we’re acculturated to thinking of them differently, as just one example) so while cultivating and eating low-status tubers might be a safer bet against a potential drought or blight it might also socially fuck your life over which, actually, could also affect your ability to survive lean times.
Because ew who would help out that family, they eat guinea pigs; they eat turnips.
So yeah in this case Frederick was in fact being pretty brilliant, because among other things, even the people who KNEW BETTER (who could see that he was fucking around with shit, and yeah, there would have been people who could) were still getting the clear signal: our ruler has now DESIGNATED these as High Class Foodstuffs.
This is no longer him trying to force us to eat Animal Food (which is what the first method would have come off as), this is a redefinition of what foods belong in People Food, and now apparently this is in this box.
(People still do this to this day. Why do you think we all fucking eat quinoa now, a food that two hundred years ago was purely for peasants of a particular area? BINGO.)
