Potatoes – All Eyes on Me: The World’s Dream Starch
Boiled, roasted, fried or mashed, there are many ways to enjoy potatoes.
IT’S COMPLETE DARKNESS, through day and night, where I am. In the silence of the cool, loosely packed earth, I’m reproducing. My eyes shoot forth stems, millimetre by millimetre, into the dirt around me. Above ground, my green leaves bask in the sunlight, photosynthesising sugars, which ease downwards to nourish nodes along my stems. The nodes then swell with flesh – new potatoes in the making, each a perfect clone of me.
Cloning myself in the dark isn’t the only way I reproduce. My second means of reproduction is fertilisation of my flowers by another potato plant, and any variety will do. This insurance policy has given me maximum flexibility as a multiplier over the ages. Today, 8000 years since humans began cultivating my ilk near Lake Titicaca in the Peruvian Andes, taxonomists have no idea how many cultivated and wild versions of me exist.
I am the Solanum tuberosum, a member of the nightshade family and a close cousin of tomatoes, eggplant, peppers and tobacco. Don’t let our shared moniker fool you: I am no relation to the sweet potato. She’s correctly described as a root vegetable, whereas my edible part is the stem, swollen into a starchy, filling snack.
Thousands of years ago, I was but a knobby knot in the ground, hardly
edible, at times even poisonous. In the dirt-caked hands of generations of farmers, I’ve been bred so that my bitter glycoalkaloids – the compounds that to this day make me go green after one too many days on your windowsill – are at safeto-eat levels, and my edible insides have expanded to accommodate the human appetite.
As a result of this happy coexistence with my cultivators, I’ve hitched my way all over the world and adapted to life on continents outside my home turf in South
America. I can live at 3500 metres in the dry, chilly mountains and at sea level in the tropics.
My appearance is as varied as the places I live. I can be white, yellow, red, purple, pink or blue; speckled, spotted, coiled or mottled; knobby, smooth, thin or stumpy; covered in skin that’s thick and leathery or as thin as tissue paper.
I can be very starchy and thus good for baked potatoes and fries; or moist and waxy and great for producing a silky mash. When young and new, I am delightful when boiled. And if you are planning a potato salad, select a thin-skinned, waxy variety.
Around the world, I take many more forms, from soft purées to shatteringly crisp potato chips. I’m rolled into cloud-like dumplings called gnocchi in Italy, bulk up Guinness stews in Ireland and grace the tables of France’s haute temples of gastronomy, usually laden with butter and cream.
Yet I didn’t become the fifthmost-abundant crop across the globe in 2016 as an indulgence. I am a true staple, highly storable, surprisingly nutritious. Civilisations have depended on me. The Incan Empire grew on my back, its soldiers subsisting on me as they marched through harsh mountain terrain. Europeans relied on me through lean times, sometimes too heavily. My nemesis, the fungus that produces late blight, attacked me in the mid-1800s in western Europe and nearly collapsed Ireland, where about one million people died.
More recently, I’ve been identified by NASA as a food seemingly made for astronauts on missions, as I offer all nine essential amino acids, the building blocks of proteins necessary for humans to maintain themselves. (That subplot of The Martian in which the Matt Damon character lives on potatoes alone may not be too off base.) Even the whitest and blandest of my brethren contain potassium, fibre and an
I AM A TRUE STAPLE, HIGHLY STORABLE, SURPRISINGLY NUTRITIOUS
array of potentially cancer- and heart disease–fighting polyphenols in their flesh and skin. My most abundant polyphenol, chlorogenic acid, which is associated with lowering blood sugar, is important for diabetics.
Today, scientists on Earth are breeding biofortified versions of me with double the normal iron content to feed parts of the world where anaemia is pervasive. They are using genetic modification to develop a potato fully resistant to the fastmoving late blight, which is still the most aggressive threat to me. There is also a significant effort to develop varieties of me that tolerate the stresses of drought, soil salinity and heat as climate change presses in on staple crops like me. Dare I say, that’s progress for a tuber that got its start underfoot, in the silent darkness.
Kate Lowenstein is the editor-in-chief of Vice’s health website, Tonic; Daniel Gritzer is the culinary director of the cooking site Serious Eats.
I CONTAIN AN ARRAY OF POTENTIALLY CANCER- AND HEART DISEASE– FIGHTING POLYPHENOLS