Armchair Speculation

For many of us, the potato blends in with the background in grocery stores and on restaurant menus. Recently, however, I have begun to see it in a new light. As philosopher Bertrand Russell describes how his “useless knowledge” about the apricot’s history enriched his appreciation of the fruit, my understanding of the potato’s curious history has similarly enriched my appreciation for this humble root vegetable. With this knowledge, the mundane familiar potato seems novel and mysterious.

Breeding Out the Poison

Though it stands as one of the most important global crops today, the potato began as a wild plant in the Andes Mountains of South America. Despite being poisonous, potatoes became a staple food of locals. Initially, to cope with the poison, these locals emulated the practices of local wildlife who ate potatoes.

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. Cooking often breaks down such chemical defenses, but solanine and tomatine are unaffected by heat. In the mountains, guanaco and vicuña (wild relatives of the llama) lick clay before eating poisonous plants. The toxins stick—more technically, “adsorb”—to the fine clay particles in the animals’ stomachs, passing through the digestive system without affecting it. Mimicking this process, mountain peoples apparently learned to dunk wild potatoes in a “gravy” made of clay and water. Eventually they bred less-toxic potatoes, though some of the old, poisonous varieties remain, favored for their resistance to frost. Clay dust is still sold in Peruvian and Bolivian markets to accompany them.

“How the Potato Changed the World”, Smithsonian Magazine, 2011

Faced with the alternative of a slow, painful death by starvation, “potatoes with clay au jus” doesn’t sound half bad!

Despite the solanine being largely bred out of potatoes, we can still get poisoned by it if we leave potatoes alone for too long. The telltale sign? When a potato turns green.

Though the green color that forms on the skin of a potato is actually chlorophyll, which isn’t toxic at all (it’s the plant’s response to light exposure), the presence of chlorophyll indicates concentrations of solanine. The nerve toxin is produced in the green part of the potato (the leaves, the stem, and any green spots on the skin). The reason it exists? It’s a part of the plant’s defense against insects, disease and other predators.

If you eat enough of the green stuff, it can cause vomiting, diarrhea, headaches, paralysis of the central nervous system (as evidenced by the incident above) but in some rare cases the poisoning can cause coma—even death.

“Horrific Tales of Potatoes That Caused Mass Sickness and Even Death”, Smithsonian Magazine, 2013

Old World Population Boom with New World Roots

When Spanish explorers arrived in the New World in the 1500’s, they brought back many now-common vegetables with them, including tomatoes, hot peppers, corn, and … the potato.

In the case of the potato, the Spaniards discovered the locals eating many unknown root vegetables. By the mid-1500’s, the Spaniards began exporting potatoes to Europe. Because of their lack of familiarity with root vegetables, European farmers viewed the them with suspicion.

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. News of the new food spread rapidly. Within three decades, Spanish farmers as far away as the Canary Islands were exporting potatoes to France and the Netherlands (which were then part of the Spanish empire). The first scientific description of the potato appeared in 1596, when the Swiss naturalist Gaspard Bauhin awarded it the name Solanum tuberosum esculentum (later simplified to Solanum tuberosum).

Unlike any previous European crop, potatoes are grown not from seed but from little chunks of tuber—the misnamed “seed potatoes.” Continental farmers regarded this alien food with fascinated suspicion; some believed it an aphrodisiac, others a cause of fever or leprosy.

“How the Potato Changed the World”, Smithsonian Magazine, 2011

In addition to this suspicion, Europeans found them tasteless, eating them only out of necessity.

The philosopher-critic Denis Diderot took a middle stance in his Encyclopedia (1751-65), Europe’s first general compendium of Enlightenment thought. “No matter how you prepare it, the root is tasteless and starchy,” he wrote. “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.) Still, he gave it the thumbs up. “What is windiness,” he asked, “to the strong bodies of peasants and laborers?”

“How the Potato Changed the World”, Smithsonian Magazine, 2011

Despite this suspicion and distaste, the potato plant’s greater productivity eventually made it an essential part of Europe’s food supply.

“Compared with grains, tubers are inherently more productive. If the head of a wheat or rice plant grows too big, the plant will fall over, with fatal results. Growing underground, tubers are not limited by the rest of the plant. In 2008 a Lebanese farmer dug up a potato that weighed nearly 25 pounds. It was bigger than his head.”

“How the Potato Changed the World”, Smithsonian Magazine, 2011

In the 1700’s, the potato began its spread across Europe as a dietary staple. In times when famine still ravaged populations, food security reigned as a priority above taste. Avoiding starvation, it turns out, is a great motivator. To do so, people will even turn to “tasteless and starchy” foods. But, to get people to adopt the potato, with its benefits to food security, the people needed some help.

When Prussia was hit by famine in 1744, King Frederick the Great, a potato enthusiast, had to order the peasantry to eat the tubers. In England, 18th-century farmers denounced S. tuberosum as an advance scout for hated Roman Catholicism. “No Potatoes, No Popery!” was an election slogan in 1765. France was especially slow to adopt the spud. Into the fray stepped Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the potato’s Johnny Appleseed.

Trained as a pharmacist, Parmentier served in the army during the Seven Years’ War and was captured by the Prussians—five times. During his multiple prison stints he ate little but potatoes, a diet that kept him in good health. His surprise at this outcome led Parmentier to become a pioneering nutritional chemist after the war ended, in 1763; he devoted the rest of his life to promulgating S. tuberosum.

Parmentier’s timing was good. After Louis XVI was crowned in 1775, he lifted price controls on grain. Bread prices shot up, sparking what became known as the Flour War: more than 300 civil disturbances in 82 towns. Parmentier tirelessly proclaimed that France would stop fighting over bread if only her citizens would eat potatoes. 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.

“How the Potato Changed the World”, Smithsonian Magazine, 2011

Even with starvation at hand, the French people still needed some convincing via skillful public relations campaigns before they came around to eating potatoes. Eventually, though, Europeans began adopting potatoes to greater extents.

Irish Dependence: A Food Security Disaster

Upon becoming palatable to Europeans, the potato became a staple crop, providing a caloric boon to Europe. “Because potatoes were so productive, the effective result, in terms of calories, was to double Europe’s food supply …” As is often the case, a solution to existing problems creates new problems. This caloric boon soon resulted in an over-reliance on potatoes; many regions began practicing monoculture, making the potato their only crop. Such a reliance creates tremendous risk to food security, which remained invisible … until it wasn’t.

For the first time in the history of western Europe, a definitive solution had been found to the food problem,” the Belgian historian Christian Vandenbroeke concluded in the 1970s. By the end of the 18th century, potatoes had become in much of Europe what they were in the Andes—a staple. 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. Routine famine almost disappeared in potato country, a 2,000-mile band that stretched from Ireland in the west to Russia’s Ural Mountains in the east. At long last, the continent could produce its own dinner.

In exalting the potato, Parmentier unwittingly changed it. All of Europe’s potatoes descended from a few tubers sent across the ocean by curious Spaniards. When farmers plant pieces of tuber, rather than seeds, the resultant sprouts are clones. By urging potato cultivation on a massive scale, Parmentier was unknowingly promoting the notion of planting huge areas with clones—a true monoculture.

The blight hopscotched to Paris by that August. Weeks later, it was destroying potatoes in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and England. Governments panicked. It was reported in Ireland on September 13, 1845. 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. In two months P. infestans wiped out the equivalent of one-half to three-quarters of a million acres. The next year was worse, as was the year after that. The attack did not wind down until 1852. A million or more Irish people died—one of the deadliest famines in history, in the percentage of population lost.

Within a decade, two million more had fled Ireland, almost three-quarters of them to the United States. Many more would follow. As late as the 1960s, Ireland’s population was half what it had been in 1840. 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.

“How the Potato Changed the World”, Smithsonian Magazine, 2011

While such famines seem a distant threat, impossible for today, keep in mind that the Irish Potato Famine occurred right before the US Civil War. Even today, we shouldn’t forget how precarious our food security is. We can easily become complacent to risks that don’t manifest themselves for a time. This complacency can happen in any realm. People often complain that they’re wasting money on health insurance, since they don’t get ill. Experienced financial investors often joke that, while financial crises generally happen every 10 years, investors’ memories only last 5.

Likewise, a catastrophic food shortage that decimated Ireland may be a more real possibility than we think. Grocery stores, suggests my friend Ed, have little more than a week’s worth of food for the local population at any given time. Interruptions to the food supply chain for longer than a week can cause major food security problems for an area.

Some countries face the threat of food security daily, such as Saudi Arabia. Though the Saudis have developed some level of agriculture in their desert country, this development is unsustainable, draining their scarce ground water resources. Foreign policy academic Thomas W. Lippman writes, “[Agriculture] is big business in Saudi Arabia … made possible mostly by decades of government subsidies and irrigation with water pumped out of caverns deep underground.” During the 2007 Global Financial Crisis, the Saudis experienced their first major food shock, when they found themselves unable to import enough rice. “… India, their main supplier of rice, temporarily banned exports because of its own shortage, and the prices of corn and other grains spiked upward.” Resulting from this lesson, the Saudis have taken a more realistic approach. “The government has abandoned its aggressive campaign for self-sufficiency … In January 2009, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz proclaimed a “food security initiative,” backed by an investment fund of 3 billion Saudi riyals (about $800 million), to support investment by private sector Saudi companies in agricultural projects abroad.” Though this program is not without its critics. “This program and similar efforts by other cash-rich, land-poor countries have stirred fears of a “land grab” reminiscent of the colonial era, when European countries took over tropical lands to grow sugar and rubber.” In short, Saudi Arabia’s food security strategy requires a delicate balance to manage well.

The potatoes, when introduced into an urbanized Europe, unexpectedly provided new opportunities and created new problems.

Looking even earlier into history, historians have theorized that the opportunities and problems created by various staple crops went far beyond simply allowing people to feed themselves, shaping how civilizations develop.

Grains: The Seeds (Not the Roots) of Complex Civilizations

Examining how historical societies’ staple crops shaped them, economists in the UK and Israel recently theorized that some staple crops helped push societies to develop complex organizations, while other crops did not. The difference lay in the staple crops’ ability to be stored.

The most advanced civilizations all tended to cultivate grain crops, like wheat and barley and corn. Less advanced societies tended to rely on root crops like potatoes, taro and manioc … The argument depends on the differences between how grains and tubers are grown. Crops like wheat are harvested once or twice a year, yielding piles of small, dry grains. These can be stored for long periods of time and are easily transported — or stolen. Root crops, on the other hand, don’t store well at all. They’re heavy, full of water, and rot quickly once taken out of the ground. Yuca, for instance, grows year-round and in ancient times, people only dug it up right before it was eaten.

“The sinister, secret history of a food that everybody loves”, Washington Post, 2016

The differences in these crops’ shelf-life and their ease of transport creates unique problems. Historians believe that complex societies arise to solve problems that require mass cooperation. These problems include public works, such as building irrigation systems and dams, and providing security against raiders. In China, for instance, one historian argues that one of the earliest complex civilizations arose to create public works projects to tame the Yangtze River, with its ever-changing banks, and to protect themselves against various Mongolian raiders. In this particular case, societies with grain crops had to solve two major problems: building and maintaining food storage facilities, and security against theft of that stored food.

[These root crops] provided some protection against theft in ancient times. It’s hard for bandits to make off with your harvest when most of it is in the ground, instead of stockpiled in a granary somewhere. But the fact that grains posed a security risk may have been a blessing in disguise. The economists believe that societies cultivating crops like wheat and barley may have experienced extra pressure to protect their harvests, galvanizing the creation of warrior classes and the development of complex hierarchies and taxation schemes.

“The sinister, secret history of a food that everybody loves”, Washington Post, 2016

In comparison, societies with root crops did not have to solve the problems of food storage (their crops rotted quickly) and security against theft (they left their crops in the ground until they got hungry).

Continuing with the unexpected circumstances resulting from the unique characteristics of various crops, we turn to the Maori people.

The Potatoes of War

Although the Maori already had their staple root vegetable, the sweet potato, the introduction of the South American potato by European traders changed Maori society. In particular, the fierce Maori warriors took advantage of the greater shelf-life of potatoes, compared with their native sweet potatoes that rotted more quickly.

A … short-term increase in fighting as a result of European contact [with isolated tribes] is provided by New Zealand’s original Polynesian inhabitants, the Maori … From about 1818 to 1835 two products introduced by Europeans triggered … the Musket Wars One factor was of course the introduction of muskets … The other factor may initially surprise you: potatoes … But it turns out that the duration and size of Maori expeditions to attack other Maori groups had been limited by the amount of food that could be brought along to feed the warriors. The original Maori staple food was sweet potatoes. Potatoes introduced by Europeans (although originating in South America) are more productive in New Zealand than are sweet potatoes, yield bigger food surpluses, and permitted sending out bigger raiding expeditions for longer times [before having to return home to tend the farm] than had been possible for traditional Maori depending upon sweet potatoes. After potatoes’ arrival, Maori canoe-borne expeditions to enslave or kill other Maori broke all previous distance records by covering distances of as much as a thousand miles.

The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond

Throughout history, logistics has been a primary challenge in military operations. Maintaining supply chains to campaigning armies proved a limitation to every society. Every army invading Russia throughout modern history has found their supply lines overstretched, particularly as the Russian military used scorched earth tactics while luring the invaders further from home, waiting until the brutal Russian winter (nicknamed “General Winter” by the Russian military) severely weakened them. Many armies attempted to solve these problems with better operational know-how (today, many supply chain professionals in business began their careers with training in military logistics), as well as technology (such as U.S. canned foods). In the case of the Maoris, potatoes provided acted as a pseudo-technology that improved their supply chain capabilities.

Moving across the spectrum from potatoes as a weapons of war to luxuries of the palate, we turn our attention to the seemingly humble French Fry.

Bourgeois Fries

Though commonplace in the U.S. today, the French fry wasn’t always so ubiquitous. Many changes in marketing, food technology, and economics took place before, “Would like fries with that?” became a cliche.

The French Fry’s birthplace has been debated, being claimed by both the French and Belgians.

Some claim that fries originated in Belgium, where villagers along the River Meuse traditionally ate fried fish. In winter, when the river froze, the fish-deprived villagers fried potatoes instead. It’s said that this dish was discovered by American soldiers in Belgium during World War I and, since the dominant language of southern Belgium is French, they dubbed the tasty potatoes “French” fries … Alternatively, French fries really were French, first sold by street vendors on Paris’s Pont Neuf in the 1780s. Or they may even be Spanish, since the Spaniards, after all, were the first Europeans to encounter the South American potato.

“Are French Fries Truly French?”, National Geographic, 2015

Others contend, however, that the name “French Fries” began with Thomas Jefferson. The Foodie-in-Chief introduced French Fries to the U.S. during an 1802 White House dinner, where he served “potatoes served in the French manner.” Eventually, the term “french fried” referred to various deep-fried foods, such as onion rings.

But even with presidential endorsement, Americans took a while to warm up to French Fries.

Despite Jeffersonian backing, French fries don’t seem to have caught on with the general public until the 1870s and only became truly popular in the 1900s. According to linguist Stuart Berg Flexner, they were known formally as French fried potatoes until the late 1920s. The name was subsequently shortened, first to French frieds, then French fries, and finally, in the 60s, just plain fries, as in the famous fast-food query, “You want fries with that?”

“Are French Fries Truly French?”, National Geographic, 2015

Before French fries could become so popular in their modern form, cooking oils had to become much cheaper. Though providing a different view of the history of French fries, food historian Rachel Lauden comments on how being able to afford cooking large quantities of fats for cooking was out of reach for many people.

Well, basically, fat is very expensive for most people. So French fries, until the 1960s, 1970s, well they weren’t invented until the middle of the 19th century, late 19th century. But until the invention of frozen French fries in the 1960s and 1970s, French fries were for the elite. Only the richest people could afford the potatoes that were cooked in that much fat. And double-cooked in that fat–which is what you have to do for French fries. What you find in the 19th century, as fats become more available for a large bulk of the population is that potatoes become more acceptable. Because you can put butter on your boiled potatoes; you can layer potatoes with milk and cheese and make a gratin; you can bake them and add butter. And that fat makes them much, much more palatable.

Econtalk, Interview with Rachel Lauden, Food Historian

Later in the same interview, Lauden comments on how McDonald’s ability to make a quality cheeseburger with French fries available at such a cheap price to all Americans was a major innovation in food economics. While we often take for-granted that we can eat meat for 3 meals per day, only 150 years ago, immigrants to American felt amazed that they could afford to eat meat once a day. Technological innovations – in agriculture, railroads, and refrigeration – made so much meat so affordable also contributed to lowering the price of cooking oils, and enabled McDonald’s business model.

The fast food meals we take for granted today in the U.S. came from a long series of innovations in food technology and logistics.

Conclusion

By understanding the impact of the humble potato throughout history, we can better understand how our world came to be as it is today. Our short jaunt across the potato’s history provides illumination on myriad topics: plant domestication, trade, culinary tastes, agricultural practices, wartime supply chains, and food economics. From learning various facets of its impact throughout history – from the risks of monoculture to increasing the Maoris’ war capacity – we may more clearly anticipate the potential unexpected consequences of various changes and innovations we come across in our lives.

With its story in mind, I hope that you, too, see the potato differently. And, more broadly, that you begin to have a greater wonderment for the fascinating possibilities hidden in everyday things.

Post-Script: Excerpt from Bertrand Russell’s essay, “‘Useless’ Knowledge”

Curious learning not only makes unpleasant things less unpleasant, but also makes pleasant things more pleasant. I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of the Han dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kaniska introduced them to India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word ‘apricot’ is derived from the same Latin source as the word ‘precocious’, because the apricot ripens early; and that the A at the beginning was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter.

Published on May 9, 2019