According to most historians, the high plateau in the Andean Mountains of South America is the birthplace of the “Irish” white potato that we eat today. The plateau extends within parts of Peru and Bolivia, and it was here that the region’s Aymara Indians grew more than 200 varieties of the potato as it became the center of the Aymara diet.
Potatoes also made a significant impact on Incan culture. The Incans discovered how to preserve this sturdy veggie by dehydrating and mashing them into a substance called chunu. The Incas could store it for up to 10 years, offering insurance against crop failures.
As further proof, potato-shaped pottery is often uncovered at Incan excavation sites.
From this point, the potato gradually traveled across the South American continent, receiving the most attention in the 1500s when the first Spanish Conquistadors began to explore inland from the South American coasts, particularly after the 1530s, in their hunt for gold in Peru. When these Conquistadors didn’t discover any gold, they hurriedly captured the potato market. Soon, potatoes were a typical supply item of their ships.
Importantly, the Spanish authorities also detected that the sailors who ate papas (potatoes) didn’t experience scurvy, a disease linked with too little vitamin C in the diet. (Potatoes have plenty of vitamin C, easily blocking scurvy.)
The Potato Crosses the Atlantic . . .
The 1600s witnessed the spread of potatoes throughout most of Europe. Reportedly, Sir Waler Raleigh introduced potatoes to Ireland in 1589 and within the next 50 years, potatoes spread to other European nations.
Regrettably, local populations in various European countries believed the potato to be poisonous and, in some cases, downright evil. For years, it was alleged to trigger disorders and diseases and of destroying the soil where it grew.
This line of thinking declined only after large scale efforts of France to get hold of food that would nourish not only their military, but also an entire nation that was suffering from years of continual warfare.
The Growth of Potato Usage . . .
Extensive study of the potato by the famed French botanist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier ultimately paid off when he persuaded Louis XVI to foster development of the potato plant. Parmentier’s award-winning work also persuaded people of the potato’s nutritional significance, and it was asserted to be edible by the Paris Faculty of Medicine in 1772.
A statue honoring Parmentier’s work can be found at his birthplace. Today, he’s memorialized in the naming of the dish, “Pommes Parmentier,” where potatoes are diced and fried in butter with garlic, bacon and herbs.
The French aristocracy believed the way to motivate people to start eating potatoes was to literally begin to wear potato blossoms. When potatoes bloom, they send up the five-lobed flowers that dot fields much like portly purple stars. By some narratives, Marie Antoinette adored the blossoms so much she wore them in her hair. Her husband, Louis XVI, left one in his buttonhole, instigating a brief trend wherein the French aristocracy strutted around wearing potato plants on their clothes!
The flowers were an integral piece of the effort to encourage French farmers to plant and French diners to wolf down this weird and wonderful new species.
The story goes that in Prussia, Frederick the Great directed his people to plant and eat potatoes to prevent famine, a not-uncommon crisis of the period. People’s anxiety about being poisoned by eating potatoes forced him to impose this order by giving notice to cut off the nose and ears of anyone who said “no”. Predictably, this proved successful and by the 1750s, potatoes were central to the Prussian diet.
Despite this and other roadblocks, the potato ultimately took the place of previous crops as a food basic since it was more dependable than wheat which suffered as a food crop when the damp weather conditions of Europe thwarted suitable ripening.
A group of researchers even believe the potato’s arrival in northern Europe had spelled the end to famine there. (Corn performed a comparable but lesser role in southern Europe.) As the historian William McNeill has claimed, the potato also led to empire: “By feeding rapidly growing populations, it permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world from 1750 onward.” For these researchers, potatoes helped fuel the rise of the West!
The Potato Crosses the Atlantic Once Again . . .
The origin of the potato in the United States is comparable to the history of the potato in Europe in that it was not accepted right away. In fact, it was the last major country to embrace the potato in their cuisine.
While it did travel through the northern colonies in reduced amounts, an essential part of potato history is when it obtained the seal of approval from Thomas Jefferson, who dished up potatoes to guests at the White House.
European immigrants were also critical in bringing the potato to America, but again, they were not extensively grown at first. Not until 1719, when Irish immigrants carried the potato to Londonderry, New Hampshire, where potatoes were eventually grown on a mass scale. However, even when they became the second largest food crop in America, they were still consumed chiefly as animal fodder.
It was only after the 1872 labors of famed horticulturist Luther Burbank that the American potato industry began to gain traction. Growing 23 seedlings from an Early Rose parent, Burbank learned that one seedling generated two to three times more plants of greater size than any type he had nurtured to date. After testing this new variation, he promoted the seedling he called the “Burbank” to the west coast states in the late 1800s.
Within a few years, a modification of the Burbank, appearing to be more disease-resistant, was unearthed in Colorado. This mutation had rough skin and was named the Russet Burbank. Today, several varieties of the Russet are among the most prevalent.
The Impact of the Irish Potato Famine . . .
The most dramatic example of the potato’s ability to revise population patterns occurred in Ireland in the 1840s.
For landless tenants in the 17th– and 18th-century Ireland, one acre of land cultivated with potatoes and one milk cow was nutritionally adequate for feeding a family of six to eight. By the 1800s, Irish peasants were consuming an average of 10 potatoes per person per day. Potatoes provided nearly 80 percent of the calories of their food intake.
This Irish potato frenzy continued unabated until the 1840s when a fungus combined with heavy rains decayed the potato crops in the ground. And when the animals died due to an absence of potatoes, meat and eggs were also unavailable. The crop disaster led to the death of one million of eight million Irish residents, the exodus of another million to the United States and the departure of two million more to other various locales. Ireland’s population was cut by nearly one-fourth and the country never recovered to its former numbers.
The Potato’s Legacy
Among the numerous edible crops that appeared at the beginning of human civilization and managed to extend across the globe, not many distinguished themselves by their resilience, storage abilities and nutritional significance.
Centuries after they were brought to Europe and North America, potatoes remain one of the more essential parts of the world’s cuisine and are the fourth largest food crop in the entire world.
Today, after widespread research and hundreds of years of careful breeding, we now enjoy over a thousand various kinds of potatoes that are grown worldwide.