Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
This spud’s for you: Thankful for potatoes
How far did potatoes travel to get to your Thanksgiving Day dinner –maybe just a few miles from your local store? Today, potatoes are everywhere: whole and baked, mashed, au-gratined, French-fried, hash-browned, and made into chips. With potatoes and potato products so ubiquitous, it’s hard to imagine anything different, but it wasn’t always this way. From extensive use beginning about 6,000 years ago in the potato’s native region in the Andes Mountains, it was a long journey to overcoming prejudice and myth and becoming mainstream anywhere else in the world.
Today, production of potatoes is over 373 million tons a year, putting the potato fifth on the list of the world’s major crops, behind sugar cane, wheat, rice, and corn.
In Rebecca Rupp’s intriguing book “Blue Corn and Square Tomatoes,” I learned that the ancient potatoes were small – plum or even peanut-sized – and prepared in a rather unappetizing way by modern standards: repeatedly frozen, thawed, stamped on “until they were reduced to a blackened desiccated mass.” The result was a dried version that had to be reconstituted with water before eating.
It was Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador, who first brought the potato back to Europe in the early 1500s. It was not favorably received. To the public, “the knobby, deepeyed tubers resembled leprous hands and feet and were doubtless carriers of the disease.” By contrast, the sweet potato that Columbus discovered and sent back to Spain in 1494, was received as a delicacy, “on par with such exotic goodies as oranges and dates.” (Potatoes and sweet potatoes are unrelated despite their similar names.)
It didn’t help that European cooks had no idea how to prepare potatoes. In one instance, in the kitchen of Queen Elizabeth I, cooks threw out the potatoes and served up the boiled stems and leaves instead. It was a near-fatal mistake: the poisonous alkaloids solanine and chaconine are present throughout potato plants, but they are in dangerously high amounts in the stems and leaves. It would be two centuries before that episode was forgotten.
Poison aside, Europeans found other reasons to reject potatoes. As Rupp describes, “Nervous Presbyterian ministers in Scotland forbade it on the grounds that nobody mentioned [the potato] in the Bible. Fears continued late into the 1800s, with the Reverend Richard Sewall preaching that the potato would lead to “wantonness in housewives, since its preparation required little time and effort, thus leaving female hands idle and primed to do the Devil’s work.” In such a climate, potatoes were largely relegated to use as animal feed.
Rejected by people of means, for many years the best use of potatoes was in feeding the poor, who were perennially short of food. In seventeenthcentury England, potatoes became a “famine relief crop.” This brought potatoes to Ireland, where potatoes grew well in the poor soil. Eventually a typical peasant family of six “was said to consume 252 pounds of potatoes a week.”
For upward of two hundred years, the potato kept the Irish people fed. Unfortunately, Ireland’s dependence on the potato led to the devastating Potato Famine of 1846-48 during which upwards of a million people died from starvation and disease and between one and two million more emigrated to America.
A positive outcome from the famine was that it spurred plant geneticists to breed new and blight-resistant potato varieties. Since Rupp’s book was published thirty years ago, the number of potato varieties has exploded (upward of five thousand). Yet, “80 percent of the American crop derives from just six cultivars.” This leaves potatoes still at risk from the dangers of mono-cropping, i.e., it makes them uniformly susceptible to disease.
From the beginnings of its cultivation some 6,000 years ago high in the Andes, to gracing nearly every dinner plate on our major holidays, the humble potato has certainly traveled a long way. However you eat them, enjoy!