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And you're jumping to conclusions based on presentism. None of what I'm telling you here about food surplus is controversial, it's a well documented fact that the people of the country side seldom interacted using money, being paid and paying for things in kind for most of their institutional interactions.
So are we ever going to talk about the middle ages at any point or are you just going to keep focusing on the worst part of the early modern period so you can take a documented non-central example and make your point that people must have been starving by only looking at a famine?
I too can focus on Mao to say the Communist Chinese were tremendously unsuccessful, but it doesn't really seem very reasonable.
As I've explained before, there is heavy debate on this particular issue and that estimate is on the upper side of scholarly works. You can find estimates between 150 and 300.
Consider this excerpt from Shor for the view from the other side. I tend to think it's on the lower end, though not as low as Shor believes.
Sure, here's one, in 965 English King Edgar had to decree that there only be one alehouse per village because pubs were so extremely popular. You'd think a perpetually starving people wouldn't exactly have enough ressources and time to spare on drink and leisure to fund so many establishments that it actually becomes a problem.
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