QUARANTINE BLOG # 306

January 30, 2021

One day a mother potato was startled when her daughter approached and said, “Mom, I know who I am going to marry.”  Her mother said, “You are too young a potato to be talking about marriage.”  She said, “Mom, I know who I am going to marry.  It is David Brinkley.”

Her mother almost fainted.  When she recovered, she said, “You need to talk to your father.”

Father potato was outraged.  He said, “You cannot marry David Brinkley.  You come from a family of famous potatoes.  Your great grandfather was made into vodka by Catherine the Great. Your grandfather was scalloped by the Indians.  Your great uncle was French fried during the French Revolution.  Royal starch flows through your veins.  And David Brinkley is just a commentator.

Origins

With apologies for my favorite potato joke, we begin a look today at one of God’s great food gifts to us. The potato’s history starts in the Andes mountains of South America in pre-Columbian times and continues with its global stardom today. 

There are many reasons for the potato’s success: it thrives in arid where other staple crops, such as wheat, rice and corn can’t grow. It has a fairly short growing season (75 days). And it requires relatively little effort to cultivate and harvest, for which the only tool needed is a spade – for planting, weeding and digging up the potatoes.

Potatoes are also prolific. A single plant produces an average of 4½ pounds of potatoes, but productivity can be much greater. The Guinness Book of World Records records the growing more than 370 pounds of potatoes from a single tuber.

Then there’s the potato’s nutritional content. A medium sized raw potato contains a mere 100 calories and is a good source of vitamins C and B6, iron, potassium and zinc. Just 100 gm of potato provides nearly half the minimum daily requirement of vitamin C. When men were dying of scurvy during the Klondike gold rush, potatoes sold for their weight in gold.

The potato is easily transported, and keeps well for months if stored properly. It is low-cost and adaptable to a tremendous variety of dishes featuring all sorts of tastes, textures and aromas. 

Potatoes can be boiled, baked, fried, roasted, steamed, sauteed, mashed, hashed, souffled and scalloped. They are used in pancakes, dumplings, salads, soups, stews, chowders and savory puddings. Due to this versatility, more potatoes are consumed than any other vegetable.  Kind of like shrimp in Forrest Gump.

As important as the potato is today, hundreds of years were to pass after Europeans first ran into the spud in South America before it was widely adopted in the mid-19th century in Europe. It was not generally consumed in China, today the world’s largest potato producer, until the mid-20th century. The potato’s path to stardom began about 12,000 years ago.

The traditional view of human settlement in the Americas is that indigenous peoples crossed the Bering Straits 16,000 years ago and moved down the west coast of the Americas, reaching southern Chile about 14,000 years ago.

Human muscle power created the thousands of growing areas that are scattered throughout the high Andes – muscle assisted only by the taclla, a spade-like foot plough with a narrow blade and a handle set low on the shaft to ease the job of lifting and turning the heavy soil.

The Inca domesticated an estimated 70 plants – almost as many plants as were domesticated in all of Europe or Asia. Twenty-five were tuber or root crops, the most important being Solanum tuberosum – the common potato. The most important crop in the Inca Empire was potatoes, which the language of the Inca, were called “papas.”

Once harvested, potatoes keep for only a few months before they sprout, and are vulnerable to decay. The Incas developed a method of preserving them so that they could be stored for years.

After harvest, the potatoes were covered to prevent dew from settling on them and left out overnight in freezing temperatures. The following day, the potatoes were exposed to the sun and families trod on the frozen potatoes to squish out their liquid, a process repeated several times during the following days. The resulting freeze-dried potato, called chuno, would keep for years before deteriorating. Chuno was ground into flour and baked into bread, or rehydrated and used for thickening soups and stews. It was the first freeze-dried food.

When Sir Francis Drake visited Chile in 1577, on his  circumnavigation of the world, he received potatoes from the natives. A popular story says Drake carried potatoes across the Pacific and back Northern Europe. This story is only an urban legend – potatoes would have rotted long before the voyage was over.

The Traveling Potato

Potatoes came first to the British Isles – starting around 1575 – in regular trade between England and the Iberian peninsula.

Not all herbalists saw the potato as an important addition to the European food supply. In fact, several were convinced that potatoes were poisonous and caused leprosy, dysentery and other diseases. Their nodules and the bulbous finger-like protuberances were viewed as sinister. In the eyes of the some, potatoes resembled the deformed hands and feet of the leper. 

Some French provincial governments forbade their cultivation. Gardeners in England regarded radishes as a more worthwhile crop than potatoes. Clergymen and priests banned their parishioners from planting and eating the potato, because they were not mentioned in the Bible. An early edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica described the potato as a “demoralizing esculent.”

War and the subsequent famine which followed the conflicts began to change people’s minds. The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) produced one of the worst famines in European history, and the people adopted the potato without hesitation. A subsequent famine in 1740 moved Prussia Frederick the Great to encourage potato cultivation by giving away potato seeds to farmers.

Famine caused Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, to encourage peasants to grow the crop. The potato grew easily in Russia and it could be used as a great substitute for making bread if the wheat crop failed. By 1800 potatoes were cultivated in the western parts of Russia and Ukraine. Potatoes quickly became Russia’s most popular vegetable.

The potatoes eventual rise to prominence in France can be credited in part to Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a pharmacist who fought in the French army during the Seven Years War – the first true world war – fought between 1756 and 1763. It involved every European great power of the time and spanned five continents.  Parmentier spent five years as a prisoner of war in Germany, where he and his fellow prisoners subsisted mainly on potatoes. Parmentier became a great believer in the nutritional properties of the potato; back home in France, he championed them. 

When Marie-Antoinette heard that the peasants had no bread to eat, she is supposed to have declared, “Let them eat cake.” She probably never said that. The queen was accused of all kinds of debauchery by her political opponents in the run-up to the French Revolution in 1789. But ironically, she was someone who cared about the starving poor. Even if Marie-Antoinette never advocated the substitution of cake for bread, she did endorse the potato to the poor.

Although potatoes arrived in North America in the late 1600s, they did not become a field crop until the middle of the following century, when Scotch-Irish immigrants brought potatoes to New England from Ireland. By the mid-19th century, potatoes were an important field crop in Canada and the United States.

From Europe, potatoes spread south and east. They were introduced into Africa, where they became staples in the mountainous areas of east Africa. From Russia potatoes were disseminated to Turkey and to western China. The potato was brought to Japan, Korea and eastern China in the 17th century. The British introduced potatoes into the Australia, New Zealand, and India.

The total value of the potato crop in 2017 was $3.74 billion. China is now the world's top potato producer, followed by India, Russia, and Ukraine. The United States is the fifth largest producer of potatoes in the world. The potato is the single most cultivated and consumed vegetable in the world. 

Next week: from the European potato famine to the success of a Soviet botanist.

👉  Today’s close is from Praying with the Psalms, by Eugene H. Peterson.

“I love the Lord, because he has heard my voice and my supplications” (Psalm 116:1).

It is marvelous that God speaks to us – life-giving, world-creating words.  This marvel is matched by another – that he listens to us.  His listening gives all our words significance and makes all our prayers personal.

Prayer: I have times of desperation, O God, when I suppose that you neither speak nor listen.  When that happens bring me back to this psalm and to Jesus Christ, who also felt despair and now lives to make intercession for me.  Amen.

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