When the chips are down, potatoes save the day

HOW do you like your potatoes – baked, boiled, chipped, fried, mashed, roasted or scalloped? Added to soups or stews? As croquettes or pancakes? There are dozens of delicious ways of cooking this nutritious and versatile vegetable.

Potatoes are South Africa’s major fresh vegetable crop. The 2016 yield totalled 214 million 10kg bags, harvested by about 600 commercial growers. Our average annual consumption is said to be 30kg a person a year.

However, potatoes are not indigenous to Africa, and no one seems to know when the first tubers arrived here on their long journey from Peru in South America. The Incas are believed to have been the first to cultivate the plant known as Solanum tuberosum, and tubers were carried back to Spain by the Conquistadors in the 1530s.

Explorers were always on the look-out for useful crops which could be exploited in their home countries, where food production was erratic, leading to misery and famine. However, European peasants and farmers were initially alarmed and baffled by potatoes. They had never seen anything like them and fed early crops to their livestock.

Prejudice began to wane when new varieties were developed by Spanish planters on the Canary Islands which proved easier to grow and more productive than staples such as wheat and oats.

As the decades passed, potatoes helped peasant families to survive during grain shortages and periods of social and political upheaval. They fuelled a population increase and were a staple crop throughout Europe by the end of the 1700s.

There is no consensus about when they arrived in South Africa. Most internet sites suggest that Dutch seafarers heading for Asia probably introduced the potato in the 1600s, but they were certainly not introduced by Van Riebeeck.

His detailed journals record the cultivation of numerous non-native vegetables and fruits, but fail to mention a single potato. His “pattattissen” are batatas or sweet potatoes, still firm favourites today.

It’s probably safe to say that Solanum tubers were introduced to the Company gardens as a vegetable in the late 17th century and gained acceptance as a staple food during the next 150 years.

Captain Cook is said to have taken Cape potatoes to New Zealand and planted them in Queen Charlotte Sound in 1773 as a gift to the Maoris. Local tubers were also sent to Australia on settler ships from 1788. This shows they were grown near Cape Town, although precise historical references are elusive.

Potatoes became a political weapon in 1959 when a successful apartheid-era consumer boycott took place to publicise child abuse and inhuman working conditions on potato farms in the Bethel district in Mpumalanga.

Last but not least – the humble potato is a healthy vegetable that most children will eat without complaint.