Excited to see Susanne Wengle's new book Black Earth, White Bread out. She charts the main shifts in the "agro-technopolitics" of Russian food regimes over the last century. Timely context as disrupted 🇷🇺 and 🇺🇦 harvests stoke fears of an imminent world food crisis The Soviet high-modernist drive for collectivization was disastrous. But Wengle shows, despite state hostility, subsistence household farming (& foraging e.g. for berries, mushrooms) continued to provide crucial supplies. Fully ½ the Soviet population tended private plots in 1983

So far our #10plagues have included lifestock pestilence & swarms of 🦟. In Exodus, the third plague brings the humble louse—bearer of typhus, a mostly forgotten disease. But "war fever" haunted the (early) modern military state, from armies + jails to borders + refugee camps. 1/ Typhus (not to be confused with typhoid) is the work of Rickettsia bacteria, named for a scientist they killed. Its epidemic form travels in 💩 of the body louse, which eats only human blood. Meaning "hazy", typhus brings spots, fingertip gangrene +a delirious "besotted" look. 2/

Our second plague is an #envhist classic: yellow fever. The great disease of the transatlantic slave trade, it was a key symptom of our entry into a new, environmentally ruinous era of commodification and homogenization—what some have called the “Plantationocene" #10plagues (1/n) Yellow fever is a mosquito-borne virus native to tropical West Africa. Many get a mild case. But a minority become jaundiced and develop haemorrhagic fever—giving the disease one of its charming 150+ nicknames, vómito negro. 50% of C19th victims died, screaming in agony (2/n)

New lockdown hobby: perusing the #envhist of pandemics. In honour of Passover, first up is Rinderpest—likely one of the 10 biblical plagues. This nasty little pathogen killed huge numbers of cattle, buffalo, and other cloven-hoofers across Asia, Africa and Europe #10plagues (1/n) Rinderpest also likely gave us the measles virus, which became endemic around C11th as human-cattle interactions intensified. Between 1855–2005, measles would kill c. 200 million people worldwide. As late as 2018, 140,000+ died thanks to plateauing vaccination levels (2/n)