In his 1957 essay, which was part of Mythology, French philosopher and literary critic Roland Bart called potato chips (la frite) a "patriotic" product and a "hallmark of Frenchness."
Of great importance was the potato in the history of Ireland. “Potato hunger” in the middle of the XIX century over the course of several years reduced the country's population by half.
Today, the world's leading potato producers are China, India, Russia and Ukraine. This culture is important for each of these countries, but none of them can call it truly native.
The modest potato was domesticated in the South American Andes about 8000 years ago and was brought to Europe only in the middle of the 16th century, from where it spread to the West and North, back to America and beyond.
“Despite the fact that potatoes appeared in the Andes, this is an incredibly successful global food,” says nutrition history specialist Professor Rebecca Earle. Professor Earle traces the path of potatoes around the planet in his book, Nutrition of People: The Potato Policy. They wrote: “Potato grows almost everywhere in the world, and almost everywhere people consider it one of“ their own “food products.”
Rebecca Earle calls potatoes "the most successful immigrant in the world." Idaho farmers and gnocchi-loving Italians will claim potatoes just like any Peruvian, because the history of this culture is not only the history of a country or region, but also the story of how people changed their relationship with land and food over several generations .
Potatoes are the fourth most important crop in the world after rice, wheat and corn and the first among non-cereal crops. How could Andean tuber conquer the world in just a few centuries?
What made potatoes so attractive to different nations? First of all, its unsurpassed nutritional value. The relative ease of cultivation (in comparison with some crops) and the features of cultivation (potatoes skillfully “hid” underground from collectors of taxes and enemy armies) also mattered.
An ideal place to start in studying the history of culture is the International Potato Center (IPC), a research center that studies and promotes everything related to potatoes. It is located in the arid suburb of the Peruvian capital of Lima and stores a collection of thousands of potato samples from all over the continent.
Rene Gomez, senior curator of the IPC Genbank, says potatoes were domesticated high in the Andes, near Lake Titicaca, almost 1000 km southeast of Lima. After domestication, early potatoes spread throughout the Cordillera and became a vital food source for indigenous communities, including the Incas, especially as a staple food called chuno, a freeze-dried potato product that can last for years or even decades.
From the Americas
In 1532, the Spanish invasion put an end to the Incas, but not to the cultivation of potatoes. The invaders transported tubers across the Atlantic, and they also did other crops such as tomatoes, avocados, and corn. Historians have called it the Great Colombian Exchange. For the first time in history, potatoes ventured beyond America.
Early Andean varieties hardly adapted to the conditions of Spain and other countries of mainland Europe. In the equatorial region, where potatoes were first domesticated, the duration of the day is constant throughout the year.
As evolutionary geneticist Hernan a Burbano Roa notes, the European long summer days were confusing for the potato plants, and the tubers did not grow in the favorable warm months; instead, they grew in the fall, and frost prevented them from surviving. The first decades of landing on the Old Continent remained unsuccessful.
But then (in the 80s of the 16th century) potatoes found the best conditions in Ireland, where a cool but frost-free autumn provided an opportunity for the harvest to ripen. For a hundred years of work, farmers have created their own variety, which showed good results.
Modest tuber
The villagers appreciated the potato because it yielded unsurpassed productivity per hectare. In Ireland, in particular, farmers, as a rule, were tenants of the land they cultivated, and the cost of rent was constantly growing. Thus, they were forced to produce as much food as possible on the smallest area. “No culture produced more food per acre, required less cultivation, and was not stored as easily as potatoes,” wrote sociologist James Lang in his book, Notes on the Potato Observer.
Potato contains almost all important vitamins and nutrients, except vitamins A and D, which makes its life-supporting properties unsurpassed. It’s worth adding some dairy products that provide the two missing vitamins, and you get a healthy human diet.
For landless tenants in Ireland in the XNUMXth-XNUMXth centuries, one acre of land reserved for potatoes and one dairy cow was enough to feed a large family of six to eight people. Not a single grain could claim such a feat. Thus began the centuries-old captivity of the Irish and English peasants by potatoes.
From the British Isles, potatoes spread to Northern Europe. According to Lang, by 1650 the culture was grown in lowland countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg), by 1740 in Germany, Prussia and Poland, and by 1840 in Russia. After farmer selection filtered out varieties less adapted to local climatic conditions, the potato flourished.
Residents of the European plains devastated by the wars quickly discovered another advantage of growing potatoes: it is really difficult to tax and impossible to pick up during a quick raid. “If you have a wheat field, you can't hide it,” Earl explains. - Tax collectors can visually assess the size of the plot and return at harvest time. But the tubers are well hidden underground and you can dig them out one by one, as needed. ”
“Such a partial harvest hid the harvest from tax collectors and protected the peasants' food supplies in wartime,” Lang writes in his book. “Marauder soldiers emptied crops and plundered grain depots.” They rarely stopped to dig up an acre of potatoes. ”
The authorities of that time noticed this fact. King of Prussia Frederick the Great ordered his government to distribute instructions on how to plant potatoes, hoping that peasants would have food if enemy armies invaded the country during the Austrian legacy war in 1740. Other powers followed suit, and by the time of the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s, potatoes had become Europe’s food reserve, according to a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Association (FAO).
In fact, tubers were such a valuable culture during the war that “every military campaign on European soil after about 1560 led to an increase in the cultivated area of potatoes, up to and including World War II,” wrote historian William McNeil in his essay “Like Potatoes changed world history ”(1999).
Nutrition and Nutrition
Over the course of several centuries, potatoes have entered the European and world economies as the main crop. For decades, nutritional history experts have explained this triumphant spread as a result of the actions of well-meaning, enlightened sages who managed to convince a conservative population to accept potatoes. But Rebecca Earle has doubts. It was the peasants who adapted the potatoes to European conditions, she argues, so they did not need to be convinced. The authorities did not discover a new culture: rather, they had a new understanding of what healthy food is. Instead of putting the “superfood” in the middle of the European diet, they realized that nutrition should play a more important role, and looked around in search of those crops that could serve their purpose. A humble tuber was already there.