[silveroriole]

And if the calorie count upthread is right, that’s 4550 calories per day purely from potato, not counting any added butter, milk, beans, meat etc! I know people did more manual labour back then, but something seems wrong with that figure.

[vram22]

They may not have had access to much of (barely) higher end foods. I read somewhere that the English, who had conquered them, took away a lot of that sell / use in England, including beef.

Update: Found where I read it - Wikipedia:

[ The Celtic grazing lands of ... Ireland had been used to pasture cows for centuries. The British colonised ... the Irish, transforming much of their countryside into an extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry consumer market at home ... The British taste for beef had a devastating impact on the impoverished and disenfranchised people of ... Ireland ... pushed off the best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of marginal land, the Irish turned to the potato, a crop that could be grown abundantly in less favorable soil. Eventually, cows took over much of Ireland, leaving the native population virtually dependent on the potato for survival.[41] ]

That quote is from the section:

Potato dependency

in:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

[vkou]

Pre-industrial agricultural labour is incredibly calory-intensive. 4000-6000 calories sounds about right for a day of agricultural work.

[peterwoerner]

I used to eat about that much a day when I was running twice a day (and I was losing weight while doing so). Michael Phelps was known for eating 10,000 calories a day.