“It’s hard to imagine a food having a greater impact than the potato,” Qian said. The potato Andeans roasted before contact with Europeans was not the modern spud; they cultivated different varieties at different altitudes. Potatoes came to East Africa in the 19th century, brought by missionaries and European colonialists. Within a decade, two million more had fled Ireland, almost three-quarters of them to the United States. Eventually they bred less-toxic potatoes, though some of the old, poisonous varieties remain, favored for their resistance to frost. When explorers brought potatoes back from the Andes, Europe was able to reverse its population decline and establish greater food security. In the mid-1880s a French researcher discovered that spraying a solution of copper sulfate and lime would kill P. infestans. Because growers planted just a few varieties of a single species, pests like the beetle and the blight had a narrower range of natural defenses to overcome. More specifically, he said blight had arrived on tomato seedlings sold in big-box stores. His right hand rested on the hilt of his sword. The philosopher-critic Denis Diderot took a middle stance in his Encyclopedia (1751-65), Europe’s first general compendium of Enlightenment thought. P. infestans preys on species in the nightshade family, especially potatoes and tomatoes. By 1600, the potato had entered Spain, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Holland, France, Switzerland, England, Germany, Portugal and Ireland. Aside from these remains, the potato is also found in the Peruvian archaeological record as a design influence of ceramic pottery, often in the shape of vessels. Large-scale traffic between Peru and northern Europe began with the guano rush. But some scholars take a more granular view of what Columbus wrought. The result was chaotic diversity. Night winds carry the smell of roasting potatoes for what seems like miles. If the day is warm and wet enough, the zoospores germinate, sending threadlike filaments into the leaf. The attack did not wind down until 1852. Meanwhile, he set up one publicity stunt after another: presenting an all-potato dinner to high-society guests (the story goes that Thomas Jefferson, one of the guests, was so delighted he introduced French fries to America); supposedly persuading the king and queen to wear potato blossoms; and planting 40 acres of potatoes at the edge of Paris, knowing that famished commoners would steal them. Over the next half-century, U.S. merchants claimed 94 islands, cays, coral heads and atolls. News of the new food spread rapidly. (Corn, another American crop, played a similar but smaller role in southern Europe.) As early as 1912 beetles began showing signs of immunity to Paris green. The potato changed all that. Interesting Information: In 1536 the potato was introduced to Spain and soon became popular throughout Europe. The time is also known as the Hungry Forties.While the crisis produced excess mortality and suffering across the affected areas, particularly affected were the Scottish Highlands and even more harshly Ireland.Many people starved due to lack of access to other staple food sources. Over-reliance on potatoes led to some of the worst food crises in the modern history of Europe. Video: Unearthing the History of the Potato. Before Columbus landed on Hispaniola, the European diet was a bland affair. But it did not receive a warm welcome. Its name notwithstanding, this orange-and-black creature is not from Colorado. Over the eons, the separate corners of the earth developed wildly different suites of plants and animals. However, at first, potatoes were regarded as a strange vegetable and they were not commonly grown in Europe until the 18th century. Even as Egyptians built the pyramids, Andeans were erecting their own monumental temples and ceremonial plazas. Adapted with permission from 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann. And when potatoes fell to the attack of another import, the Colorado potato beetle, panicked farmers turned to the first artificial pesticide: a form of arsenic. Despite the important role the potato was later to play in Irish history, we still don’t know how the potato reached our shores. It was a grand shuffling of organisms with results both great and disastrous: Malaria-fighting quinine from the South American cinchona tree aided European colonization throughout the tropics; the ballast dumped in Virginia by ships picking up tobacco introduced earthworms to the Mid-Atlantic. Cooking often breaks down such chemical defenses, but solanine and tomatine are unaffected by heat. Despite its ghastly outcome, P. infestans may be less important in the long run than another imported species: Leptinotarsa decemlineata, the Colorado potato beetle. From today’s perspective, the outrage—threats of legal action, whispers of war, editorials on the Guano Question—is hard to understand. They were initially popular in Spain because they provided cheap sustenance for the poor. The original potato, though, bore little resemblance to today’s enormous, oblong, white-fleshed tuber. “We don’t need them to survive,” Qian said. It portrayed the English explorer staring into the horizon in familiar visionary fashion. The celebration lasted about seven years. The flowers were part of an attempt to persuade French farmers to plant and French diners to eat this strange new species. The potato, though a simple food, was actually a harbinger of peace to Europe. Quickly realizing the usefulness of these animals, Indians stole as many as they could, sending them north for their families to ride and eat. Developed in the late 18th century, it was common in paints, fabrics and wallpaper. The author William Coles wrote in London in 1657 about “the potatoes which we call Spanish because they were first brought up to us out of Spain, grew originally in the Indies…” Even as far back as 1727, there was clearly a view that the potato came from Spain (and indeed there was people willing to reject that argument). No good substitute has yet appeared. The Columbus Day holiday is under attack, and so are statues honoring the famed explorer, “What happened after Columbus,” writes science journalist Charles Mann in “1493,” his book on the topic, “was nothing less than the forming of a single new world from the collision of two old worlds — three, if one counts Africa as separate from Eurasia.”. The potatoes, tomatoes, corn, peppers, cassava and other plants native to the Americas did more than enliven the cook pots of Europe, Africa and Asia. “No matter how you prepare it, the root is tasteless and starchy,” he wrote. To maximize crop yields, farmers plant ever-larger fields with a single crop—industrial monoculture, as it is called. Read the passage and answer the questions:Potato ChipsPeru's Inca Indians first grew potatoes in the Andes in about 200 BC. It destroyed the few tomatoes in my New England garden that hadn’t been drowned by rain. Prosperity that could be bought in a store! All of Europe’s potatoes descended from a few tubers sent across the ocean by curious Spaniards. |, (Dagli Orti / Musée du Château de Versailles / Art Archive), (Mary Evans Picture Library / Everett Collection), (The Granger Collection, New York / The Granger Collection). After Louis XVI was crowned in 1775, he lifted price controls on grain. The potato is … Some American foods became staples abroad, from the tomato in Italy and cassava in Africa to the peppers that became the paprika of Hungary and the curries of India. Farmers bought DDT and exulted as insects vanished from their fields. Wild potatoes are laced with solanine and tomatine, toxic compounds believed to defend the plants against attacks from dangerous organisms like fungi, bacteria and human beings. Cormac O Grada, an economist and blight historian at University College, Dublin, has estimated that Irish farmers planted about 2.1 million acres of potatoes that year. It … “When [Sir Walter] Raleigh brought potatoes to the Elizabethan court, they tried to smoke the leaves,” Qian said. Potatoes dating to about 2000 BC have been found at Huaynuma, in the Casma Valley of Peru, and early potatoes dating to 800-500 BC were also uncovered at the Altiplano site of Chiripa on the east side of Lake Titicaca. But potatoes were also boiled, peeled, chopped and dried to make papas secas; fermented in stagnant water to create sticky, odoriferous toqosh; and ground to pulp, soaked in a jug and filtered to produce almidón de papa (potato starch). The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning. If Paris green worked, why not try other chemicals for other agricultural problems? The potato, from the perennial Solanum tuberosum, is the world’s fourth largest food crop, following rice, wheat, and maize.. In 1536 Spanish Conquistadors conquered Peru, discovered the flavors of the potato, and carried them to Europe. In China, some scholars credit the sweet potato with reducing the frequent uprisings against emperors, whom peasants tended to blame when floods destroyed their rice crops. The potato is grown mainly in highland areas in the country's southern and central regions, the most suitable areas being at altitudes of between 1 000 and 2 000 m and with more than 750 mm o… For millennia the potato beetle had made do with the buffalo bur scattered through the Mexican hills. On the other side of the Atlantic, fewer cataclysmic shifts occurred when new species arrived. Hunger was a familiar presence in 17th- and 18th-century Europe. From Spain, potatoes slowly spread to Italy and other European countries during the late 1500s. In 1536 Spanish Conquistadors conquered Peru, discovered the flavors of the potato, and carried them to Europe. Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Magazine Spanish conquistadors brought potatoes to Europe, and colonists brought them to America. In the 1940s and 1950s, improved crops, high-intensity fertilizers and chemical pesticides created the Green Revolution, the explosion of agricultural productivity that transformed farms from Illinois to Indonesia—and set off a political argument about the food supply that grows more intense by the day. The British Farmer’s Magazine laid out the problem in 1854: “We do not get anything like the quantity we require; we want a great deal more; but at the same time, we want it at a lower price.” If Peru insisted on getting a lot of money for a valuable product, the only solution was invasion. The answer is: 1536. Biologists believe that buffalo bur was confined to Mexico until Spaniards, agents of the Columbian Exchange, carried horses and cows to the Americas. Sir Walter Raleigh introduced potatoes to Ireland in 1589 on the 40,000 acres of land near Cork. If the head of a wheat or rice plant grows too big, the plant will fall over, with fatal results. Originating from the highlands of the Andes, South America, potatoes were introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century. None had more impact than the potato, Qian said. Parmentier’s timing was good. “When [Sir Walter] Raleigh brought potatoes to the Elizabethan court, they tried to smoke the leaves,” Qian said. European consumers were reluctant to adopt the potato. Mimicking this process, mountain peoples apparently learned to dunk wild potatoes in a “gravy” made of clay and water. Sophisticated farmers, many of them big landowners, raced to buy the stuff. The Chinchas are a clutch of three dry, granitic islands 13 miles off the southern coast of Peru. Probably taken to Antwerp, P. infestans first broke out in early summer 1845, in the West Flanders town of Kortrijk, six miles from the French border. Instead, they were round, smaller than a golf ball, and dark blue in color. Spanish conquistadors brought the potato from Central and South America back to Europe in the mid 16th century. Cassava, which remains the foundation of many African diets, had a similar nutritional impact as it spread from the Americas. Walter Raleigh brought them from the Americas. When were potatoes brought to Europe from South America? As late as the 1960s, Ireland’s population was half what it had been in 1840. Growing underground, tubers are not limited by the rest of the plant. The potato first arrived in Sweden in 1658, relatively late in the process of its spread across Europe… Edible clay by no means exhausted the region’s culinary creativity. Cookie Policy Conquering Europe. Clay dust is still sold in Peruvian and Bolivian markets to accompany them. Fun Facts About Potatoes Potato Facts: Origins of the Potato. Cooked into a spicy Andean stew, they resemble gnocchi, the potato-flour dumplings in central Italy. Potatoes are fourth on the list of the world's food staples - after wheat, corn and rice. The original potato, though, bore little resemblance to today’s enormous, oblong, white-fleshed tuber. This appalling figure is an underestimate, he wrote, “because it omits the hundreds and hundreds of local famines.” France was not exceptional; England had 17 national and big regional famines between 1523 and 1623. Today, 17th Annual Photo Contest Finalists Announced. Still, he gave it the thumbs up. In the first century-and-a-half after Columbus, smallpox, measles, whooping cough, typhus and other infectious diseases killed up to 80 percent of native people, according to demographer Noble David Cook. In 2008 a Lebanese farmer dug up a potato that weighed nearly 25 pounds. Active volcanoes scattered along its length are linked by geologic faults, which push against one another and trigger earthquakes, floods and landslides. Nunn and Qian (2010) claim it is the crop with the largest impact on the Old World. The effects of this transformation were so striking that any general history of Europe without an entry in its index for S. tuberosum should be ignored. By signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The Potato was introduced into Europe early in the sixteenth century, being brought to Spain from Peru, and was first brought into England in 1586 from North America, the colonists sent out by Sir Walter Raleigh bringing it back with them from Virginia. Governments panicked. At long last, the continent could produce its own dinner. In 1845–52 a potato blight caused by an airborne fungus swept across northern Europe with especially costly consequences in Ireland, western Scotland, and the Low Countries. Accurately or not, one of my farming neighbors blamed the attack on the Columbian Exchange. Competition to produce ever-more-potent arsenic blends launched the modern pesticide industry. Most famous today are the Inca, who seized much of the Andes in a violent flash, built great highways and cities splendid with gold, then fell to Spanish disease and Spanish soldiers. The beetle followed. Nonetheless, the pests keep coming back. Potato growers demanded new chemicals. Industrial monoculture allowed billions of people—in Europe first, and then in much of the rest of the world—to escape poverty. Guano mania took hold. More than that, as the historian William H. McNeill has argued, the potato led to empire: “By feeding rapidly growing populations, [it] permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950.” The potato, in other words, fueled the rise of the West. The potato flower in Louis XVI’s buttonhole, a species that had crossed the Atlantic from Peru, was both an emblem of the Columbian Exchange and one of its most important aspects. Farmers didn’t notice, though, because the pesticide industry kept coming up with new arsenic compounds that kept killing potato beetles. The potato is … Get the best of Smithsonian magazine by email. Guano set the template for modern agriculture. The potato carried on its journey to wider European countries through the hands of sailors who brought the spud to different ports. By urging potato cultivation on a massive scale, Parmentier was unknowingly promoting the notion of planting huge areas with clones—a true monoculture. In Europe, they used the same variety of potato everywhere creating fields of potato clones (Mann, 2011). The Inca were already cultivating sweet potatoes 800 year after Christ. And even if he had, most of the credit for the potato surely belongs to the Andean peoples who domesticated it. They were more virulent—and more resistant to metalaxyl, the chief current anti-blight treatment. Frederick the Great ordered Prussian farmers to grow them, and the potato moved to the center of European cultures from Gibraltar to Kiev. Their yields doubled, even tripled. From this unpromising terrain sprang one of the world’s great cultural traditions. In England, 18th-century farmers denounced S. tuberosum as an advance scout for hated Roman Catholicism. Driven by an unusually wet summer, it turned gardens into slime. Pumpkins are native to Central America. Bread prices shot up, sparking what became known as the Flour War: more than 300 civil disturbances in 82 towns. Sweet Potato from John Gerard’s Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597) Columbus brought sweet potatoes back to Spain, introducing them to the taste buds and gardens of Europe. So he shot the waiter. By some accounts, Marie Antoinette liked the blossoms so much that she put them in her hair. After World War II an entirely new type of pesticide came into wide use: DDT. disseminator of the potato in Europe in the Year of Our Lord 1586. The name Phytophthora infestans means, more or less, “vexing plant destroyer.” P. infestans is an oomycete, one of 700 or so species sometimes known as water molds. Alas, soil bacteria constantly digest these substances, so they are always in lesser supply than farmers would like. The first Spaniards in the region—the band led by Francisco Pizarro, who landed in 1532—noticed Indians eating these strange, round objects and emulated them, often reluctantly. Potatoes are also highly nutritious, containing vitamin C and B vitamins, potassium, besides carbohydrates and fiber. But agriculture was then “the central economic activity of every nation,” as the environmental historian Shawn William Miller has pointed out. British colonialists then brought the potato to … Today the nation has the melancholy distinction of being the only country in Europe, and perhaps the world, to have fewer people within the same boundaries than it did more than 150 years ago. Throughout Europe, potatoes were regarded with suspicion, distaste and fear. The blight hopscotched to Paris by that August. Desperate farmers tried everything they could to rid themselves of the invaders. But the crop did not become important to Malawians until the 1960s, when production reached around 60 000 tonnes a year. With such halfhearted endorsements, the potato spread slowly. The industry provided dieldrin. Spraying potatoes with Paris green, then copper sulfate would take care of both the beetle and the blight. The next year was worse, as was the year after that. By 1600, the potato had entered Spain, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Holland, France, Switzerland, England, Germany, Portugal and Ireland. By the time Spanish explorers brought the first potatoes to Europe from South America in the 16th century, they had been bred into a fully edible plant. A hungry congressman didn’t get the breakfast he ordered. Columbus’ voyages reknit the seams of Pangaea, to borrow a phrase from Alfred W. Crosby, the historian who first described this process. Farmers diluted it with flour and dusted it on their potatoes or mixed it with water and sprayed. The introduction of potatoes to Europe happened at two independant instances: around 1570 in Spain, and around 1590 in England. “Sir Francis Drake,” the base proclaimed. In what critics call the “toxic treadmill,” potato farmers now treat their crops a dozen or more times a season with an ever-changing cavalcade of deadly substances. The producers of old potatoes have joined in the Papa Bonita Growers Association. Geological forces broke Pangaea apart, creating the continents and hemispheres familiar today. "Let the sky rain potatoes,” Shakespeare wrote in "The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Their portability made them ideal to transport into the growing cities, feeding the swelling population that would be needed for a factory labor force. In 1497, another expedition left the Iberian Peninsula, looking for the sea route to India. “It cannot be regarded as an enjoyable food, but it provides abundant, reasonably healthy food for men who want nothing but sustenance.” Diderot viewed the potato as “windy.” (It caused gas.) This is known because in November 1567 three barrels containing potatoes, oranges and green lemons were shipped from Gran Canaria to Antwerp, and in 1574 two barrels of potatoes were shipped from Tenerife via Gran Canaria to Rouen. In 1995, a Peruvian-American research team found that families in one mountain valley in central Peru grew an average of 10.6 traditional varieties—landraces, as they are called, each with its own name. However, the large-scale cultivation of the crop began only in the beginning of the 19th century. Terms of Use During his multiple prison stints he ate little but potatoes, a diet that kept him in good health. The European Potato Failure was a food crisis caused by potato blight that struck Northern Europe in the mid-1840s. Slavery’s bitter roots: In 1619, ‘20 and odd Negroes’ arrived in Virginia. Trained as a pharmacist, Parmentier served in the army during the Seven Years’ War and was captured by the Prussians—five times. In 40 years, Peru exported about 13 million tons of it, the great majority dug under ghastly working conditions by slaves from China. In South America, the Andean natives bred different potato varieties, which vary in size and color (Mann, 2011). The modern pesticide industry had begun. It was the food that sustained Inca armies. On its way from South America to Spain, the potato made a stopover on the (Spanish) Canary Islands. Initially, the crop was used as a medicinal plant and grown by … A million starved, and two million emigrated—mostly Irish. Most people in a village planted a few basic types, but most everyone also planted others to have a variety of tastes. Immediately after pulling potatoes from the ground, families in the fields pile soil into earthen, igloo-shaped ovens 18 inches tall. Roughly 40 percent of the Irish ate no solid food other than potatoes; the figure was between 10 percent and 30 percent in the Netherlands, Belgium, Prussia and perhaps Poland. Eva Ekblad: The woman who brought potatoes, flour and alcohol to the people. Sweet potatoes, too, proved hardy in flood-prone fields. When Prussia was hit by famine in 1744, King Frederick the Great, a potato enthusiast, had to order the peasantry to eat the tubers. Some of the most notable additions to global cuisine are nutritionally neutral: chocolate (made from cacao beans); vanilla (which was first processed to improve the flavor of chocolate); and the tomato, a native of the Andes that had been transported to Mexico. Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Francis Drake and John Hawkins, have all been credited with introducing the potato into Europe. 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