Potatoes

The humble potato, born and raised high in the mountains of South America, has grown to be one of the most important vegetables the world.

About 10,000 years ago the early Incas dwelling in the Andes highlands began domesticating what was then a knobby, walnut-sized swollen root. It wasn’t a pretty thing, but the wild potato would grow in the rocky meadows around Lake Titicaca, in what today is Peru and Bolivia, where the primitive farmers could scavenge and then propagate it.

It proved to be the foundation of their entire civilization -- most durable vegetable on Earth -- growing at elevations as high as 14,700 feet.

Over the following decades and then centuries, potatoes became the basis of the Incan diet, sustaining great cities and Incan armies. It was a revered food, as the Incans also used potatoes to treat injuries, predict the weather and even to measure time, defining units of time by the length of the periods it took to cook a potato to different consistencies.

The Incas learned that by dehydrating the potato into a substance called chuño, they could store it for up to 10 or even 15 years without refrigeration, without rotting. This made potatoes an ideal staple in times when crops failed. It was a life-changing discovery – the first “freeze-dried” food -- that helped stave off the famines that had frequently devastated the entire Incan Empire.

When the Spanish Conquistadors arrived in the 1530s and ransacked Peru searching for gold and silver, they also discovered the potato. They were at first reluctant to eat this strange -- and to them bland -- foodstuff. However, they did recognize its nutritional value. After bringing the Incan Empire to its knees, the conquistadors fed the slaves who mined the precious metals their own potatoes, which kept them healthy and strong.

The Spanish recognized, too, the value of a vegetable that was easy to farm in abundance and store for long periods. Packed with vitamin C, the potato relieved scurvy among the Spanish sailors, so they quickly became a staple item on the ships that carried the conquistadors back across the Atlantic. The potatoes left over after the voyages were cut up, planted and a new European crop was born.

Acceptance of this newfangled vegetable was initially slow, however. Farmers distrusted the plant, with some believing it caused fever and even leprosy. A Swiss botanist warned that consuming potatoes “incited Venus” – aroused sexual desire – giving the tuber folklore names like “Eve’s apple” and “earth’s testicles”.

However, the royals and aristocrats realized that the potato was a calorific miracle that could fill the belly of a working peasant and keep his hunger at bay for hours, making him much more productive.

Countries across Europe began to encourage the potato’s cultivation. Even royalty got involved. Frederick the Great of Russia appreciated the potato’s value and ordered its planting on a vast scale. In France, where the potato invasion was slower, the potato flower, at least, became a fashion item among nobility keen to see its popularity grow. Queen Marie Antoinette wore a garland of potato flowers in her hair while her husband, King Louis XVI, wore a potato flower in his lapel.

What was good enough for Versailles was good enough for everyone else, and the French finally got aboard the potato bandwagon.

One advantage they found with potatoes – one seldom recognized – was that as a root crop, it could be “hidden” from the invading armies European nations endured during the many wars it suffered. Farmers could leave their crop in the ground, out of sight and undetected, until the intruders departed.

Once the potato got a foothold in Europe, there was no stopping it. Unlike crops such as wheat and barley, the potato was far less prone to rot, for the time being at least faced few blight diseases and was able to survive the vagaries of the continent’s sometimes frigid weather. It was easy to grow because it would grow in marginal, even poor soils. And when a series of failures struck other northern European crops in the late 1700s -- France alone suffered from 40 nationwide famines between 1500 and 1800 -- thousands of farmers switched to potatoes as their main staple.

The shift to potatoes was particularly pronounced in Ireland, which had been especially vulnerable to famine. After the potato arrived in the country – possibly via Basque fishermen who stopped off on the country’s west coast to dry their catches of cod - it quickly became the staple foodstuff of Ireland’s poor, many of them tenant farmers beholden to English landlords.  By the end of the 1700s, 40 percent of the country’s population ate nothing but potatoes.

By the early 1800s, however, the potato had begun to show a tendency toward crop failure. Ireland, along with much of northern Europe, experienced smaller blights in the decades leading up to the Emerald Isle’s 1840s Great Famine. In many countries the effects of these failures were largely ameliorated due to their cultivation of a wide variety of different potatoes. But Ireland was left vulnerable because of its dependence on just one type, the Irish Lumper.

A blight now identified by modern science as HERB-1 wreaked havoc on crops in Mexico and the U.S. and then made its way across the Atlantic sometime in 1844. Its effect in Europe was immediate and devastating and within a year, potato crops across France, Belgium and Holland had been affected. The devastation was much worse in Ireland, and by late 1845 between one-third and one-half of Ireland’s its fields had been wiped out.

The destruction continued the following year, when three-quarters of that year’s harvest was destroyed and the first starvation deaths were reported.

But blights and famines notwithstanding, potato production bounced back with the use of older varieties and the introduction of new varieties such as “Early Rose” and “Russet Burbank”. Europeans had long before taken the tubers to North America, and now the British, French, Belgian, German and Dutch colonists took it to India, southeast Asia, China, New Zealand, Australia and Africa. It was adopted in Russia and to a lesser extent, the Mideast.

Modern plant breeding has continued to produce improved cultivars, with greater disease resistance, higher yields and climate adaptability.

The potato now ranks as the fourth most important crop on Earth, behind wheat, rice and corn. In 2020, China was the largest producer, accounting for 21.8 percent of world production, followed by India at 14.3 percent. Ukraine, Russia and the U.S. followed, in that order, tightly bunched.

And the once-lowly spud had enjoyed a new surge of popularity over the past 75 years as standardized, industrialized food production has spread the use of fries, chips, frozen meals and other processed “convenience” foods. McDonald’s, Pepsico and other international food giants have used the tuber to greatly increase both their reach and their profit around the globe.