Publications /  The Potato, Treasure of the Andes
From Agriculture to Culture

The potato has rightly been called, "the vegetable that changed history." From its origins in the Andes to its place at the vanguard of the fast food revolution, it has provided both the spark and the fuel for centuries of social change. In conquering the world, the humble spud has been banned and then lauded, cursed and then praised, feared and then loved. Wherever it goes, the potato patiently does its job until humanity welcomes it into its home and its heart.

Researchers at the International Potato Center - where I worked from 1979 to 1991 - have never taken the potato for granted. Dedicated to improving the crop for poor farmers around the world, they understand the potato’s potential as a subsistence crop, a cash-earning vegetable, a vitamin-rich food and a powerful tool for scientific discovery.

One of my assignments at the Center was to trace the potato’s epic journey in a project called The World Geography of the Potato. As a kind of potato detective, I was to find out when the potato first arrived in each country, how it got there, where and how it grows today, who grows it and eats it - basically to learn all I could about the potato’s global movements and report my findings back to headquarters. I logged thousands of miles across six continents following in the footsteps of the globetrotting tuber.

It was not always easy to keep up with the potato. It is grown in a staggering 148 countries, more than any other crop except maize. Since the 1960s, it has been the fastest growing major food crop in the developing world. In some places - such as Vietnam’s Red River valley - potatoes burst on the scene virtually overnight. But thanks to an extensive network of CIP researchers and dedicated potato diehards on every arable continent, I was able to create a compendium that contains a wide array of facts and figures about the potato.

RELUCTANT EUROPEANS

When Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Americas nearly five centuries ago, finding a new food crop was the last thing on their minds. El Dorado, the mythical city of gold, was their obsession. As Francisco Pizarro marched over the barren Andean slopes on his way to capture the Inca Atahualpa, he hardly took notice of the plant under his feet that the inhabitants called papa.

By accident or design, a few tubers made their way onto galleons bound for Spain, most likely in the 1560s. Physical evidence of those voyages can be found today in the form of a dozen relic varieties of ancient potatoes that are still grown in the Canary Islands, off the African coast. By 1580, the potato was well established in Europe, not as a food crop, but as a curiosity in the continent’s botanical gardens.

For two centuries after its European debut, the potato remained a shunned plant - at best food for hogs and country bumpkins. At one time or another, it was blamed for everything from war and lust to tuberculosis, rickets, syphilis and obesity. Often it fell victim to its pedigree as a member of the deadly nightshade family. Many nightshades contain atropine, a substance used to make ointments thought to give witches the power to fly. The potato was found guilty by association.

Scottish clergymen banned their flocks from planting potatoes, saying that the tubers were unworthy of human consumption because they were not mentioned in the Bible. It is possible that the word "spud" (a common nickname for the potato in English-speaking countries) is an acronym for the Society for the Prevention of an Unwholesome Diet, a nineteenth-century activist group dedicated to keeping the potato out of Britain. The first edition (1768-71) of the Encyclopedia Britannica referred to the potato as a "demoralizing esculent." Esculent is an ostentatious word for food. At least the scholars gave the potato that much credit.

The potato’s struggle for acceptance in Europe took place at every level of society, from kings’ kitchens to slum street corners, from the hallowed halls of parliaments to the battlefields of the Seven Years’ War. Resistance to eating potatoes was so strong in parts of the continent that rulers who wished to overcome anti-potato sentiments literally had to force potatoes down their subjects’ throats. In 1651, Frederick William of Prussia issued an edict threatening to cut off the nose and ears of anyone who refused to plant potatoes. Frederick the Great, still facing resistance more than a century later, sent a wagonload of tubers to peasants in a famine-stricken area, only to receive a petulant reply: "The things have neither smell nor taste, not even the dogs will eat them, so what use are they to us?" (Salaman, 1985). In frustration, the great leader held an open-air banquet in which he served potatoes - to prove not just that they were edible, but also that they were fit for royalty. Similarly, French potato enthusiast Antoine Auguste Parmentier had to trick peasants into stealing tubers from Louis XVI’s Royal Gardens in order to convince them of the potatoes’ virtues.

Once potatoes gained a foothold in Europe, though, they positively transformed society. Peasant farmers could suddenly produce more food, more quickly and on smaller plots than was previously possible. The jump in food production boosted population growth and freed serfs to work in factories and sweatshops. It can be said without exaggeration that the potato enabled - and fed - the Industrial Revolution.

One European who sang the potato’s praises was a young naturalist destined to become the "Father of Evolution." Exploring the South American coast in 1835 aboard the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin wrote in his journal: "It is remarkable that the same plant should be found on sterile mountains of central Chile, where a drop of rain does not fall for more than six months, and within the damp forests of the southern islands" (Darwin, 1909). By the time Darwin had made his observations, Europeans had become dangerously dependent on the crop.

The situation was most acute in Ireland, where the potato had helped fuel the fastest population growth in the world. With 8 million souls (double the present population), Ireland was as densely populated as modern China. The potato allowed a family of six to live on under a hectare of land. Irish adults ate an average of up to 6 kg - as many as 30 medium-sized tubers - every day.

During a rainy, warm August in 1845, an unknown malady struck the Irish potato fields: late blight. Potatoes rotted in the fields, sending an unbearable stench across the countryside. The same scene was repeated all across Europe, not just that year but in 1846, 1847 and 1848. When the famine was finally over, 2.5 million people had died in Europe, and 1 million Irish had sought refuge in North America.

OUT OF EUROPE

Growing up in the United States, I, like most westerners, had a vague sense that the potato had something to do with the Andes, but my primary association was with northern Europe and North America. I knew of "Irish potatoes," "Idaho potatoes," "French fries" and "aquavit." I had heard about the Irish famine, but I couldn’t really connect the potato to South America, let alone to Africa, Asia or the Middle East. Through my potato geography expeditions, however, I quickly learned the truth: the potato knows no regional or cultural boundaries.

The potato’s global voyage began in earnest in the seventeenth century. Stay-at-home Europeans may have had misgivings about the suspicious new crop, but sailors, soldiers, missionaries, colonial officials and explorers quickly figured out that the potato was a good thing to carry to their foreign outposts. A few small tubers can quickly turn into thousands of tons - a fact that the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda stressed years later when he proposed that each man, woman and child on Earth plant one potato to end world hunger once and for all.

Belgian, British, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish sailors carried the potato to trading, whaling and fishing ports in Asia and the South Pacific. From there, expatriates trying to duplicate their home cuisine carted the tubers inland.

Dutch settlers may have taken potatoes to the Penghu Islands in the Taiwan Strait as early as 1603. Belgian and French missionaries introduced them into Taiwan, where in 1650 the Dutchman John Struys mentions seeing the tubers, known as "western taro" or "horse bell taro." Soon the crop had spread throughout China, where it went by such names as "earth bean," "ground nut" and "tuber with many children." One trade route to China passed across Eastern Europe, over the Urals and into the steppes of Asia - the perfect environment, it turned out, for potatoes. Today China is the undisputed world leader in potato production.

In much of Asia, the local name for the potato reflected the nationality of the colonial master. In West Java where the potato was introduced in 1794, it was called the "Dutch potato." In 1897 it landed in Vietnam, where people called it the "French tuber." Potatoes arrived in the Himalayas via the trade routes of the British East India Company. Not surprisingly, Sherpas called them "English potatoes." The Philippines proved to be an exception to this naming rule. The Spaniards introduced the potato there in the late 1700s, and called it papa, the Quechua term.

Around the high monasteries of Bhutan and Nepal, Buddhist monks first cultivated the potato sometime in the 1700s. Just as they had in Europe, the tubers sparked a great population explosion. Yet instead of trooping to factories as the Europeans had done, the Himalayan highlanders signed up in droves to be nuns and monks. Potatoes afforded them the leisure time to create fine sculptures, paintings and monasteries.

In the early years of the seventeenth century, Portuguese sailors took the potato to India. Then, the British carried it to their hill stations in the north and to Sri Lanka where it flourished in colonial home gardens. By this time, potatoes were considered necessary to recreate the pukka culture and cuisine of Britain. Today India is the fourth largest producer in the world, and the versatile alu (Hindi for potatoes) has become a vital part of the national cuisine. Fittingly, an Indian who is skilled in many trades is called an alu.

Illustrious pioneers have aided the spread of the potato. In the Near East, the tuber found a champion in Sir John Malcolm, a nineteenth-century diplomat who represented Britain at the Ottoman and Persian courts. Fittingly, the potato is known throughout the region as "Malcolm’s plum."

It is not known exactly when potatoes arrived in the South Pacific, but records show that Captain James Cook successfully introduced them into New Zealand on his second expedition in 1773. Later, sealers, whalers and colonists brought new varieties. The native New Zealand Maori found that potatoes were easier to grow than sweet potatoes, especially in cooler areas. By the early 1800s the Maori cultivated potato fields as large as 40 hectares.

The Maori, however, claim to have had potatoes prior to European contact. Legends tell of ancestor gods bringing potatoes with names like peruperu and parete from their voyages across the Pacific. These early introductions were of the andigena type, the native potato of the Quechua and Aimara peoples of the Andes, and they are still grown in New Zealand today.

The Haida people of Alaska and western Canada tell similar stories of pre-Columbian traffic in potatoes. The Haida grow two ancient varieties, which they have traded for centuries with northwest Pacific islanders and inhabitants on the Russian mainland. Their oral history traces the origin of one of these varieties - producing slender white-fleshed tubers - to "Baylu," thought to be Peru. The Haida trace a second, yellow-fleshed variety, to Hawaii. Thus, the potato is at the center of an ongoing debate over contact among the peoples of the Pacific long before the arrival of European ships.

The potato arrived in Africa relatively late. A few grew in South Africa as early as 1830, but British and German colonists and missionaries did not introduce potatoes into East Africa until about 1880. In North and West Africa, the two world wars were the main stimulus for the crop’s introduction. With supply lines from Europe cut, armies and colonial personnel were forced to grow their own bombiderres. While Africa is not a major producer in terms of volume, more African countries grow potatoes today than on any other continent.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the crop found a home in the arid Middle East, where it established itself as an important commodity in Jordan, Israel and other countries. It is even grown in climate-controlled facilities in the Gulf States. Today it is difficult to travel anywhere without encountering a spud.

POTATOES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Although people no longer believe that potatoes make witches fly, the tuber is still often misunderstood. In 1972, two British scientists suggested (without reliable evidence) that women eating blighted potatoes might give birth to babies with defects. The potato is frequently seen as a fattening food, although it is no more fattening than a pear. Economics students learn that as one’s income rises, one should desire fewer potatoes and more steaks. The spud, the theory goes, is something to fill up on when you can’t afford other foods.

Perhaps the most damaging misconception is that the potato is a cool climate crop unsuited for cultivation in the tropics. This belief has slowed the spread of the potato as a basic food for the world’s undernourished. The fact is, potatoes are extremely well suited to warmer climates. In northern regions, potatoes take at least 150 days to attain maximum yield, whereas in tropical areas, farmers may begin to harvest in as few as 50 days, with yields that rival those of their northern neighbors.

History shows us that the potato will prevail. The more people who farm it, eat it, sell it and process it, the more popular it becomes. Indeed, it is finally experience, not promises or declarations, that has turned global public opinion in the potato’s favor. It is the quintessential "jack of all trades" - ready, willing and able to produce what people want and need. It has adapted to countless cultures, environments and palates. Five centuries after embarking on its remarkable journey, no other crop has greater possibilities.