The little tuber set to make a big noise
Although the potato was introduced to China nearly 500 years ago, it is still mainly used as a side dish, rather than as a staple food. For many farmers, raising the level of potato cultivation is an easy task — the bigger challenge is getting people to eat them.
“In Western countries, potatoes can be cooked as french fries, roasted, boiled, baked or mashed. To make more people love potatoes, both the method of cooking and the taste can be improved to suit people daily needs,” said Wang Pei, a researcher at the Joint Academy of Potato Science at Yunnan Normal University in Southwest China’s Yunnan province.
Many Chinese cities developed potato-based snacks several decades ago. Starting in the 1980s, a large number of food companies in Yunnan exploited the business opportunities offered by the tuber and began making popular snacks, such as potato chips and french fries, from locally grown potatoes.
Just two potatoes are needed to produce a 150-gram pack of potato chips, which retails at least five times the production cost. However, few of the once-famous Yunnan snack brands, such as Angel and Zidi, have survived. In addition to the threat posed by foreign competitors, the companies lacked ways of utilizing the “redundant” parts of the potato, which resulted in rising production costs.
“Potatoes need to be cut to a particular size for the automatic processing line to make them into chips and fries. The parts that don’t fit are dumped,” said Yang Guangfu, a retired manager of a snack company in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan.
He added that the number of processed foods that could be made from potatoes was limited 20 years ago, so the parts that could not be used in the production process were sold as animal feed at rock bottom prices .
According to Wang, the researcher, the academy is working to develop new strains, with different starch and sugar contents, to meet the needs of processing companies.
“In future, potatoes with special microelements may also be available on the market. Scientific study has made the tuber magical, and will definitely be a strong driving force of the national strategy of promoting the potato as a staple food in China,” he said.