"Stupidity is often fatal."
Don't confuse ignorance with stupidity Richard - not the same thing.
The people being fed this stuff were in a desperate condition; some of them living in holes in the ground, others crammed into overcrowded workhouses.
They were reported to have resorted to eating grass from the side of the road because there was nothing else available.
The horrific case I put up earlier bears repeating, to show just how desperate some of them were.   
Jim Carroll

"From the 'Cork Examiner' of March 19th, 1847 reporting on a court case in which a man had been charged with stealing food.
He said he was driven to it by what had happened to his wife. The court was told: The starving woman lay in her hovel next to her dead three year old son, waiting for her husband to return from begging food. When night fell and his failure to return led her to imagine him dead in a ditch, she lay there in the faint fire's dying embers, caressing with her eyes her dead son's face and his tiny fists.
With death searching her and now with her own fists clenched, she made one last effort to remain alive. Crawling as far away from her son's face as she could, as if to preserve his personality or at least her memory of it, she came to his bare feet and proceeded to eat them.
When her husband returned and saw what had happened, he buried the child, went out, and was caught trying to steal food. At his trial the magistrate from his immediate district intervened on his behalf, citing the wife's act as a circumstance deserving special consideration. The baby's body was exhumed, the flesh of both its feet and legs found to have been gnawed to the bone, and the husband released and allowed to return to his wife."