More Spud Stuff:

The World Geography of Potatoes. From culture to agriculture, all you wanted to know about this 'remarkable vegetable.'

Views of the Famine documents the Irish potato famine with newspaper articles and pictures from the time.

Chow down! Recipes Containing Potato will inspire you to don your apron.

The people of Seville, Spain came to stare at the foreigner uprooted from her South American homeland. To cross the tumultuous Atlantic waters in those days was an extraordinary adventure, and the treasures conquistadors brought back to Europe were often regarded with curiosity and wonder. Among these strange artifacts--gold, precious stones, silver, ornaments, intricate weavings, tools and costumes--there was one rather neglected looking thing. A bit round about the middle, a bit stooped in stature, and covered with a rough layer of dimpled skin. We're talking spuds.

The potato. It took this homely, round root vegetable four transatlantic voyages before it took its place in the American kitchen. The story of how it came to be on our plates today entails a little dash of everything that builds a juicy plot to earn its snug spot in history: discovery, deception, adventure, tragedy, celebration, and even passion. Whether we know it or not, the little tuber has contributed to our mortal existence in more ways than one.

It is thought that potatoes originated in Peru, and as the Incans and pre-Incans began cultivation, new varieties also developed and spread to Mexico and northern Panama. As a result, Spanish explorers in the 1530s discovered tubers not only in Peru, but also in the Caribbean and other South American regions. Raymond Solkolov, Natural History Magazine columnist and author of Why We Eat What We Eat, notes that modern genetic studies coupled with studies of ship routes in the sixteenth century confirm the hypothesis that potatoes have their origins in Peru. According to researchers of Andean potato agriculture Stephen Brush of the College of William and Mary, Heath Carney, and Z—simo Huam‡n of the International Potato Center, archeological evidence suggests that the potato may have been cultivated as early as 5,800 B.P., or possibly even earlier, 8,000-10,000 years ago.

If the etymology for the English word 'potato' had followed a linear path, it would have derived from the original Incan name for the white potato: papa. Somewhere in a Spanish journey, the true Incan name was lost in translation, for 'potato' traces to an Arowak or possibly native Caribbean word for sweet potato: batata. Although the sweet and white potatoes are both similarly lumpy in physique and starchy in texture, their differences in evolutionary origin are certain. While the sweet potato is a member of the Convulvulaceae, or morning-glory family, the potato is a member of the Solanaceae. This family is known for the potent alkaloids and narcotic properties present in members such as tobacco, deadly nightshade, and mandrake. Therefore, Europeans traditionally feared plants which resembled theseŃsuch as the potato.

Contrary to the popular belief that the English (namely Sir Francis Drake, Sir John Hawkins, or Sir Walter Raleigh) first brought the potatoes to Europe, J.G. Hawkes of the University of Birmingham and J. Francisco-Ortega of the Jardin Botanico de La Orotava, who researched authenticated records of the potato's appearance in Europe, assert that potatoes were first introduced to Europe when the Spanish brought them to Seville between 1565 and 1572. A. Hyatt Verrill notes in Foods America Gave the World that it was later, from Spain, that potatoes crossed the shores again to an aspiring Floridian colony, the 'Land of the Flowers.' 'Land of the Tubers' is more like it, for this was where Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins, in part of the fervent competition for New World exploration, finally seized some for their return voyage to England. A valuable new food had been introduced yet again, or so it was hoped. Sir Walter Raleigh presented the tubers to the Queen around 1590 and first planted them near Cork, UK. After he experienced narcotic effects from eating their poisonous berries, the English established firm apprehensions about this Solanaceae member. The potato was used for cattle fodder instead.

Eventually, after potatoes were introduced to Europe via different oceanic voyages, knowledge of the supposedly toxic tuber spread through the rest of the continent. In 1588, Spanish sovereigns sent some tubers away from the Iberian Peninsula to the Italian Pope, who employed the botanist Clusius to make their botanical plates and give them a Latin name, taratufli, little truffle. The Castilians furthered the potato's spread to Westphalia and Saxony during the Thirty Year's War (1618-1648) when they carried potatoes as provisions for their horses (and, as a last resort, for themselves). Historian Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, who traced this potato diaspora, writes in History of Food that the armies often gave out potatoes to the desperately hungry peasants, who themselves often stole potatoes from these mercenaries. Peeling of potatoes was not practiced widely, however, and the peasants, who knew little about this foreign vegetable, ate them raw. The common result was indigestion, which was usually mistaken for the plague.

In France as well, people were vastly anti-tuber, and would have remained indefinitely so were it not for the endeavors of pharmacist Antoine Parmentier, a P.O.W. of the Germans during the Seven Year's War. Toussaint-Samat writes that the Germans fed Parmentier kartoffel, tuber, in the popular version of animal slop. Europeans widely believed that potatoes caused leprosy, making them a perfect dish for a prisoner. Parmentier's survival, however, brought him to an epiphany that potatoes are very edible and should not be denounced. He devoted a large part of his career to the tuber and published promotional pamphlets in 1767 and 1772, drawing the curiosities of his royal highness Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

The King soon realized the value of the potato and showed his support by wearing nosegays of potato flowers and encouraging tradesmen to make fabrics and ceramics with their designs. In addition, the royal couple ordered experimental cultivation of the potato at Les Sablons in Neuilly, where the plants were guarded by armed soldiers. News of this oddity filtered through the land, attracting many spectators (and even thieves!), who contributed to advertising the nobility of the spud.

Despite this small fame and the insistence by scientists that it was a viable and economic food, not until the onset of famine in 1789 during the French Revolution did the potato break down barriers of gastronomic snobbery. In the decree of 21 Vent™se of Year III of the Republic, the Paris Commune ordered the royal Tuileries garden of roses turned into potato beds. The potato became a symbol of subsistence. Stardom and acceptance by way of subsistence had taken the tartufoli two and a half centuries.

Not only did people empower the potato in France, but in Ireland as well. Gone were the days of Raleigh's mishap in Cork. By the 1770s, the Irish had firmly established the easy-to-grow potatoes in their diets, and when they finally became popular in England, the English took them 'back' to the New World colonies in the potato's fourth ocean voyage and called them 'Irish potatoes.' Dependence on a single genetic strain of potato, however, led to the 1845 Irish crop failure caused by the fungal plant pathogen Phytophthora infestans. Better known as the Irish Potato Famine, the failure lasted through the 1840s and contributed not only to starvation, rationing, and riots, but also to a mass Irish emigration movement to the United States.

Emigration had its own consequences. The Cork Examiner printed the following extract of a private letter from New York, which describes further, indirect social pressures the potato's failure had brought to the Irish and now to the Americans:
JUNE 1ST, 1847Ń'Ship fever is now very prevalent here. It is, properly speaking, a most malignant kind of yellow fever. In almost every vessel that arrives several persons are afflicted with it, in consequence of which all the hospitals are full. The Board of Health are fitting up temporary places for the reception of patients. From the numbers that have been attacked, it is feared, that the fever will spread through the City as soon as the warm weather sets in.'

The 100-day voyages to the US and Canada took their toll on the travelers, who, subject to lenient Liverpool quarantine regulations and poor ship conditions, could not wholly escape the distresses of failed crop.

Since the nineteenth century, much has been learned about the potato regarding genetic diversity and cultivation. Now, scientists widely believe that the severity of the famine could have been reduced if different genetic variations of potato, such as more vigorous and disease-resistant hybrids, had been used in Irish crops. This realization has illustrated the importance of not relying on monocultures of one type of potato in agriculture. Studies of genetic information by Brush et al. reveal that the largest gene pool of potatoes, comprising 2,000-3,000 varieties, exists in the Andes. Their cytogenetic information additionally suggests that the progenitors of potato varieties we are familiar with today may have evolved in Chile.

The researchers also found that the recent replacement of subsistence-oriented agriculture by commercial agriculture, which heavily relies on hybrid varieties, has led to the erosion of native types' genetic make-ups. In a further analysis, scientists Timothy Johns of U.C. Berkeley and Susan L. Keen of U.C. Davis studied the sexual reproduction of Andean potatoes to learn that the tubers continue to evolve via pollinator-induced hybridization of cultivated and wild species. With such hybridizations occuring, human activities and preferences regarding the potato, such as taste and frost-resistance, are influencing the native varieties found in the Andes.

Despite numerous scientific discoveries, the potato's gastronomic achievements are equally grand. The first French fries were sold on the streets of Paris in 1870, and in 1878 one of the earliest recipes for potato chips, or 'Saratoga potatoes,' appeared in an American cookbook by Mary F. Henderson. By the early 20th century, Europe produced nine-tenths of the world's potatoes, and the annual crop of over six billion bushels composed a value surpassing that of the world's annual production of gold and silver. According to the International Potato Center, the modern potato is one among a circle of major food crops, following wheat, rice, and maize, and its cultivation in developing countries has increased more in the past decades than for the other major crops.

Unforgettable as well is the potato's staunch leadership in the junk food industry. Americans alone consume three billion dollars' worth of chips a year, in which the company Frito-Lay dominates. The thickly cut Parisian fry has evolved into stringy, mass-produced, greasy fries which now span the globe in fine eateries and burger joints such as McDonald's and Burger King. The white potato indeed has quietly succeeded in shaping our human ways: the representation of culture in our cookbooks and artworks, the course of history in the royal courts and the passions of revolt, and, perhaps most noticeably of all, the expansion of our girths. Who knew the batata (or shall we now say papa?), shuttled back and forth across the ocean, would be so influential? Long live the tuber!

Find out what California wine has to do with potatoes!