In his 1957 collection of essays Mythologies, the French philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes calls chips (the fries), a food from a culture originating in the Americas, “patriotic” and “the food sign of Frenchness”.
Despite its origins in the Andes, it is an incredibly successful global food
A century earlier, a potato disease caused a famine that cut the Irish population in half in a few years, producing a cascading effect from decades of social and economic unrest. And by reading these lines, the main world producers of potatoes today are China, India, Russia and Ukraine, respectively.
Despite these nations’ intimate and complicated relationships with potatoes and the way their societies and economies are closely linked with them, no one can really call them indigenous. The humble potato was domesticated in the Andes of South America about 8,000 years ago and was not imported into Europe until the mid-1500s, from where it spread to the rest of the world. ‘west and north, to the Americas and beyond.
“Despite its origins in the Andes, it is an incredibly successful global food,” said food historian Rebecca Earle, who traces the world journey of the potato in a forthcoming book called Feeding the People: potato policy. “It is grown practically all over the world and practically everywhere, people regard it as one of” our food “.”
For the rest of the world beyond the Andes, the potato may not be indigenous, but it seems local. Earle calls him “the most successful immigrant in the world” because his origin has become unrecognizable to producers and consumers around the world. Idaho farmers in the United States and Italian gnocchi lovers will claim the potato as much as any Peruvian, because its history is not only that of a country or region, but a account of how humans have reconfigured their relationship to the land and food within a few generations.
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The potato is the fourth most important crop in the world after rice, wheat and corn, and the first among non-cereals. How could an Andean tuber persuade the world, in just a few centuries, to adopt it so completely? What made the potato so irresistible was its unsurpassed nutritional value, its relative ease of cultivation compared to certain main grains, its ability to navigate wars and tax censuses easily due to its talent for hiding collectors underground, and in particular his camaraderie with men and women working in the fields.
A good place to understand its origins is the International Potato Center (IPC), a development research center that researches and promotes everything related to the potato. It is located in an arid suburb of the Peruvian capital, Lima, and is home to a collection of thousands of potato samples from across the continent. “The greatest genetic diversity is in the Andes, but you can find potatoes from Chile in the United States,” said René Gómez, chief curator at the IPC gene bank.
He explained that the potatoes were domesticated high in the Andes, near Lake Titicaca, nearly 1,000 km southeast of Lima. After domestication, these early potatoes spread across the cordillera and became a crucial food supply for indigenous communities, including the Incas, especially as a staple called chuño, a freeze-dried potato product that can last for years or even decades.
Outside the Americas
In 1532, the Spanish invasion put an end to the Incas but not to the cultivation of the potato. The invaders took tubers (the underground parts of the plant we call potatoes) across the Atlantic, as they did with other crops such as tomatoes, avocados and corn, in this that historians call the Great Columbian Exchange. For the first time in history, the potato has ventured beyond the Americas.
These early Andean varieties struggled to adapt to Spain and other parts of continental Europe. The length of the day is very constant throughout the year in the equatorial region where the potatoes were first domesticated, so that the potato plant was used to regular days with 12 hours of sunshine said evolutionary geneticist Hernan A Burbano Roa.
The long European summer days confused the potato and the tubers did not grow during the favorable warm months; instead, they did it in the fall, too close to the freezing days of early winter to survive. The first decades of planting in the Old Continent were unsuccessful.
But then the potatoes found better conditions in Ireland, where a fresh but frost-free drop gave the harvest enough time to mature after it was introduced to Spain in the 1580s. A century of farmer selection has produced a variety that gave tubers earlier in the summer, and the potato took on the mantle it would wear for centuries: the staple crop of the peasants.
The humble tuber
Villagers appreciated the potatoes because they provided an unparalleled nutritional yield per hectare. In Ireland in particular, the tenants rented the land they tilled, so that the lords increased their fees, they were forced to produce as much food as possible in the smallest possible area. “No crop produced more food per acre, required less crop, and was as easily stored as a potato,” wrote sociologist James Lang in his book Notes of a Potato Watcher.
Potatoes contain almost all of the important vitamins and nutrients, except vitamins A and D, which makes their vital properties unmatched by any other crop. Keep their skin on and add dairy products, which provide the two missing vitamins, and you have a healthy human staple. You even have 2 g of protein per 100 g of potato; eat 5.5 pounds per adult per day, if you believe some estimates of consumption in the mid-1600s in Ireland, and you have a good supply.
For landless tenants in Ireland in the 17th and 18th centuries, a single acre of land cultivated with potatoes and a dairy cow was nutritionally sufficient to feed a large family of six to eight people. No grain could claim this feat. Thus began the age-old captivation among Irish and British peasants with the potato, rooted in rented land and scarcity.
From the British Isles, the potatoes spread eastward through the peasant fields of Northern Europe, writes Lang: they were found in the Netherlands in 1650, in Germany, in Prussia and in Poland. 1740 and in Russia in 1840. After the selection of farmers filtered the varieties and genes less adapted to local climatic conditions, it flourished.
War-ravaged European plains villagers in conflicts such as the Austrian War of Succession and the Seven Years’ War quickly discovered another benefit of planting potatoes: it was very difficult to tax and to plunder. “If you have a wheat field, it’s really visible. You can’t hide it,” said Earle, who claims that tax collectors can visually measure their size and return in time for harvest. underground potatoes are well hidden, and you can dig them up one at a time, if necessary. “Such a piecemeal harvest hid the harvest from tax collectors and protected the peasant’s food supply in wartime “Lang said in his book.” Marauding soldiers ravaged field crops and raided grain stores. They rarely stopped to dig up an acre of spuds. “
The elites and military strategists of the time noticed this. Prussian King Frederick the Great ordered his government to distribute instructions on how to plant potatoes, hoping that peasants would have food if enemy armies invaded during the Austrian War of Succession in 1740. Other nations followed suit and by the time of the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s, the potato had become Europe’s food supply, according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Association of the United States (FAO ).
In fact, tubers were such a popular crop in wartime that “every military campaign on European soil after about 1560 resulted in an increase in the area of potatoes, up to and including World War II,” writes historian William McNeill in his 1999 essay How the Potato Changed World History.
Nutrition and power
In a few centuries, the potato entered the European and world economies as a staple crop. For decades, food historians (such as those mentioned in this 2008 FAO brochure) have explained this spread as the result of well-intentioned enlightened sages obsessed with the nutritional properties of tubers who have successfully persuaded a population reluctant and conservative to adopt the Potato.
But Earle has doubts. It was the peasants who adapted the potato to Europe, she maintains, so they did not need persuasion. The elites did not discover a new culture, but rather, they had a new idea of what healthy eating is. Instead of placing a “superfood” in the middle of the European diet, they realized that nutrition had to play a more central role and looked for crops that could serve their purpose. The humble tuber was already there.
Informed discussions about “population” and what their health meant for state power changed political calculations during the 18th century, as did the fortune of the potato. If a large and large population was crucial to economic production and military power, the state had to understand and manage the nutritional components of what people ate. Abundant and healthy food has become at the heart of building the Empire, writes Earle in his 2018 article Promoting potatoes in 18th-century Europe. Thus, she argues, the fascination for potatoes does not come from the emergence of a new culture, but from new European ideas on the relationship between food and the state.
In this regard, the potato was unmatched. “The food produced by a potato field is … much more than what is produced by a wheat field,” wrote Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. “No food can provide more decisive proof of its nutritional quality, or of its particular aptitude for the health of the human constitution.” But if Smith was right to emphasize the virtues of the potato, it was the peasants and not the elites who made the potato a staple of European gardens and farms.
A question of measurement arises, admits Earle. How have scholars like Smith and his contemporaries compared nutritional value? In the 18th century, scientists did not agree on a language for vitamins, proteins and minerals, she said. Instead, “what they did was,” Look at the people who eat the potatoes. They are more robust, and they are more robust and more energetic than people who eat something else, “said the researcher, who heads the Department of History at the University of Warwick.
But as she argues, potatoes served this state-building purpose not only because of their nutritional value, but because they were already planted in gardens and fields across the continent. His fans praised his virtues.
Potatoes, by feeding rapidly growing populations, have enabled a handful of European countries to assert their dominance over most countries of the world.
They were not wrong. A widely cited economic article examined information from the military records of French soldiers born after 1700 and found that eating potatoes made people slightly taller. According to the Quarterly Journal of Economics: for villages that were perfectly suited to growing the potato, its introduction increased the average size of adults by about half an inch.
This same document provides a stronger claim: this population in Europe and Asia exploded after the spread of the potato. According to the researchers, the introduction of the tuber represents almost a quarter of the growth of the Old World population and urbanization between 1700 and 1900.
“Potatoes, by feeding rapidly growing populations, allowed a handful of European nations to assert their dominance over most of the world between 1750 and 1950,” wrote McNeill.
Back in the Andes
The potato frenzy continued unstoppably until a burn opened the way for the Great Famine of 1845-1849 in Ireland. The failed harvest, compounded by the utterly inadequate response by the British government to London (which decided not to relieve and bet on market forces), resulted in the death of one million people, the emigration of one million people to the United States and the United States. regular departure of two million people elsewhere. The Irish population has been halved in a few decades.
The famine drew attention to the fact that the potato had provided 80% of the calorie intake in the country with only a handful of crop varieties available. Such a homogeneous food block makes the potato susceptible to disease, because its genetic diversity has been eliminated from domestication.
To be fair, a certain mix of varieties had already taken place in Europe around the 1750s. Burbano was part of a team that looked at the genetics of the European potato to study their ancestry and concluded that the older Andean varieties mixed with tubers later brought from the lowlands of south-central Chile, such as the island of Chiloé, were naturally domesticated for long days in the southern hemisphere.
This first blend provides only a few practical traits, but not enough genetic depth, so breeding programs over the years have looked for ways to improve food security for potato growers. “One of the ways that breeders incorporated resistance was to examine wild potatoes,” said Burbano, speaking of cousins of inedible potatoes who still survive in the Andes and the rest of their range. natural distribution. There are 151 known species, and these are the ancestors of today’s potatoes, which have lost genetic diversity after centuries of serving humans.
In the first decades of the 20th century, scientists began to combine the genes of traditional potatoes, in the hope of retaining their domestic characteristics, with wild potatoes, in the hope of obtaining resistance to disease. . Most of the tubers grown today are the result of these tests.
These wild species could also provide an answer to another urgent problem: the evolution of temperatures and rain conditions due to the climate crisis. A recent study concluded that increasing emissions could reduce reductions in global tuber yields by up to 26% by 2085. The genetic resources of these species could provide desirable characteristics, such as tolerance to frost, dryness or increased temperature.
Breeders in Europe and the United States, and more recently in Asia, have been developing these more resistant varieties for years, paving the way for potatoes to become a truly global crop in the 20th century. Of the top 20 tubers in the world, only three (the United States, Peru and Brazil) are part of its historic range, but each country creates its own connection with it.
In China, the government is aggressively promoting the potato to its people, hoping it can become a new national staple crop and a staple food. Its leaders followed tactics similar to those of eighteenth-century Europe, peddling it with public media, personalities, and popular science books. And in India, potatoes are prepared in hundreds of different ways and you would have a hard time convincing farmers that they are not local.
In half the world, the potato has rekindled longstanding rivalries between Peru and Chile over who can claim the tuber, while the best chefs in Lima and the Andes – like Virgilio Martinez who opened Mil en 2019 – turn their eyes again to potatoes and showcasing them in their creations.
While Peruvians insist that potatoes were domesticated on what is now their territory (and pieces of neighboring Bolivia), a Chilean minister replied in 2008 that a large majority of the tubers in the world come of a variety introduced from Chile. But the debate is not necessarily about a history lesson, but also about national pride. “The silly part is that the history of the potato began millennia before the concept of nation states existed,” said Charles Crissman, researcher at the International Potato Center, in an article in the New York Times published in 2008. “But, yes, the first potatoes came from what is now Peru.”
These allegations classified Peruvians as they occurred during the International Year of the Potato in 2008, a celebration that even the FAO conceded “from the government of Peru”. The country established the International Potato Center in 1971 and worked with indigenous communities in the mountain peaks to protect the genetic heritage of the potato.
A small agricultural park located in the Peruvian Andes, the Potato Park in Cusco houses a living museum of the humble tuber, in their natural environment, reminiscent of or the potato comes, but also a road map where it could go: the genetic material of less domesticated potatoes can chart a path for cultivation, as it faces new threats such as climate change and pressures on the agricultural sector.
Two hours drive east of Cusco, a different vision of the present and the future awaits you: it’s Mil, an ambitious vision of the Peruvian culinary tradition perched at 12,000 feet in the clouds of the mountains. Andean. Thanks to its renowned chefs, you can try here a handful of the 5,000 or so species of potatoes from Peru, and you still have room to wonder what lies beyond these mountains: is it a curry Indian? Fish and chips in an East London pub? A baked potato fresh from an Idaho oven?
With the global versatility of potatoes, the possibilities are endless.
Culinary roots is a series of BBC Travel connecting to rare and local foods woven into the heritage of a place.
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