The Potato

A feral plant is domesticated

Historical records show that the potato was domesticated 7 to 10000 years ago in the region of South America we know today as Chile, Peru and Bolivia.

Potential material for an April Fool

Just think of how the potato was domesticated. Did Aztecs, Incas and Quechua stand at the edge of their clearings trying to entice wild potatoes to come in from their feral conditions and settle in their cultivated vegetable plots?

Honestly, that is not what happened. Mind you, someone had made a spoof along these lines it would have been as good as if not than the BBC's April Fools mockumentary in 1957 about the spaghetti harvest in the Italian Alps.

The potato starts its globalization

In the late 16th Century the by now well established or perhaps one should say "well grounded" domesticated potato started to become international. It was taken on a forced migration from its homeland by the Spanish to Europe. From there it migrated even further afield so that today it can be found being cultivated across the continents of the world, apart from Antarctica. From its humble beginnings in vegetable plots in South America all those millennia ago it has become a staple part of our diets and is the fourth largest food crop in the world today.

The perennial problem of being a migrant

Being a migrant isn’t always easy and so it was for the potato. Like any new arrival in a different place in the world there was resistance to its arrival and subsequent ubiquity.

In 1748 the French banned the potato on the suspicions that it caused leprosy and syphilis. Oh how this vegetable from another part of the world, a migrant at that, carried with it the baggage of unfounded prejudice. An 18th century example of fake news, an issue with have to live with today.

In Ireland it highlighted a religious division. The Protestants concentrated in the north at first refused to cultivate it but the Catholics in the south grew it with unbounded enthusiasm.

In the mid-19th century a society was formed here in Britain called “The Society for the Prevention of Unwholesome Diet” with the sole purpose of eradicating the potato from the British diet. I wonder if they used the misplaced belief that the potato caused the passions to inflame and flatulence, not concurrently I hope, in their literature? This society’s full name was reduced to the acronym “SPUD” which allegedly is one of the sources of the potato’s colloquial name.

Quite obviously those potato resistance fighters did not hold back the overwhelming tide of necessity and acceptance. Potatoes were easier to farm than wheat which was always subject to the vagaries of the weather causing feast to famine cycles. So, here we are some 170 years later eating roast, mashed, chipped and jacketed potatoes almost daily. Not a bad achievement for a food product that the great gourmand Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) described as "a protection against famine" and "Except for that I know of nothing more tasteless".

With the potato came the blight & misery

Without the potato migrating to Europe there would not have been a potato famine in the 19th century. Not only did that blight affect Ireland but it affected Norway and Northern Europe. In Ireland it was only the Catholics who suffered as the Protestants refused to plant them. Many of those people of those regions affected by the blight who were only just surviving took the opportunity forced upon them by circumstances to migrate to places such as Canada and America. They traveled on board what were called “coffin ships” that plied their trade in the cargo of human misery, disease and desperation across the merciless waters of the North Atlantic. Away from hunger and often into the inescapable clutches of lifelong penury and indentures to pay for their crossing.

An Irony of history

What I find ironic is that the blight that caused the famine originated in North America. The very region that benefited the most from the influx of migrants to their shores. Migrants that were so badly needed to populate the vast region, to work the farms and work in what were the beginnings of North America’s own industrial revolution.

And all because of the potato being domesticated 7 to 10000 years ago in a region of South America we know today as Chile, Peru and Bolivia.