barley vs. rye as famine foods
 

This is one for Alf Chrisophersen if he's still around.

I've just read Jon Steingrimsson's "Fires of the Earth", a chronicle of
the Laki eruption in Iceland in 1783-4. He was the minister for the
parish in the middle of the lava flows. A quarter of the population of
Iceland died, but none from blast or fi the dust and gas killed most
of the vegetation and poisoned the enviroment with fluorine, as well as
chilling northern Europe's climate for a couple of years. The people
in Jon Steingrimsson's parish were trapped between two rivers of lava
and left to their own devices. They survived on wild plants, boiled
leather, occasional seals and the proceeds of a lucky shipwreck, with
only tiny amounts of relief food, sent far too late and at ridiculous
prices. They didn't realize what they'd be up against until too late,
so by the time they killed their livestock there was almost no meat or
fat left on them and what there was was toxically loaded with fluorine.

Steingrimsson was a remarkable natural scientific observer, and not
just of the geological phenomena. He described symptoms in animals
and people which are unmistakably acute fluorosis and scurvy, and goes
into a couple of pages of detail about which famine foods worked and
which didn't (including an estimate of the nutritional value of boiled
hide which seems to be pretty accurate). Some of his observations are
explained by variations in vitamin C content, but one I just don't get.
He says that barley was, if anything, worse than useless for people with
the combination of malnutrition and poisoning that developed during
1784, but rye worked fine when they could get it. The difference was
not at all subtle, he couldn't have been imagining it. Why should the
two grains have been so different?

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