https://archive.org/details/cambridgeworldhi0001unse/page/360/mode/2up?q=chestnut

… Chestnuts were mostly the food of rural peasants in mountainous regions that stretched in a belt from Portugal to Turkey. But they were a well-appreciated food by many accounts, such as those of regionalist connoisseurs who praised the “sweet mucilage” (Roques 1837) and the following 1763 text published in Calendriers …du Limousin:

All the goods nature and art lavish on the table of the rich do not offer him anything which leaves him as content as our villagers, when they find their helping of chestnuts after attending their rustic occupations. As soon as they set eyes on them, joy breaks out in their cottages. Only mindful of the pleasure they then taste, they are forgetful of the fatigues they endured: they are no more envious of those of the towns, of their abundance and sumptuousness (Calendriers … du Limousin 1763, reprinted in Bruneton-Governatori 1984: 462).

… But this was the time of the Physiocrats, who thought the soil was the only source of wealth and aimed at improving the productivity of farming by questioning all traditional rural economic processes. That chestnuts suffered at their hands is undisputable. In a query sent to provincial learned societies, François Quesnay and Victor Riqueti Mirabeau, both initiators of the Physiocratic school, asked the following questions: “Are there acorns or chestnuts used as foodstuff for pigs? Do chestnuts give a good income? Or are said chestnuts used as food for the peasants, inducing them to laziness?” (Quesnay 1888: 276). And in an agricultural text of a few decades later, the question of laziness was pursued: “To my knowledge, inhabitants of chestnut countries are nowhere friendly with work” (Bosc and Baudrillard 1821: 272). It went on to suggest that they refused to replace their trees with more productive plants because of their fear of taxation and concluded that they were not worthy citizens of the modern state…