Potatoes： South America's Gift to the World

I love potatoes. Truly, few other vegetables can match it for its flavor and versatility. It's a terrific tuber that you can cook in so many imaginative ways. You can fry them, you can slice them, you can dice them, you can bake them, you can boil them, you can mash them, you can even stick them in a stew. And that doesn't even touch on the crazy varieties of fries, dumplings, breads, pancakes, chips, pastas, pies, uh, this one weird soda, and who knows what else you can make with them. I mean, heck, just look at this list. Look how many countries are on here. Ugh, I'm getting hungry just talking about this. As wonderful as the potato tastes, I assure you that the story of how the potato was domesticated, cultivated, and exported around the world is just as wonderful. So grab a bag of your favorite potato chips and sit back because today we're talking about taters. What is a potato? The potato you cook and eat is the root of the plant Solanum tuberosum. The Solanum family actually includes tomatoes, eggplants, bell peppers, petunias, tobacco, but ironically, not sweet potatoes. Those come from an entirely different family. The potato, though, is a small wonder to behold. Our mundane interactions with the potato often prevent us from appreciating its finer qualities. First and foremost, the potato is very rugged and hardy. They can thrive in a wide variety of environments, and even environments that are often poorly suited to agriculture. Even at elevations over 4,000 meters, they can grow with no issues. So it shouldn't be surprising that they are grown from Scandinavia, to the Amazon, to the Arabian desert. The potato doesn't care, it just adapts. On top of that, potatoes are very easy to store and can last a long time in storage compared to other vegetables. Second, potatoes are surprisingly nutritious. They're a good source of vitamin C, as well as B-complex vitamins, with some extra calcium, iron, phosphorus, and potassium to boot. Potatoes are also rich in essential amino acids. On top of that, they're rich in carbohydrates, although this is where potatoes get a bad rap for the starchy quality of those carbs. Starches are actually a fine source of energy, but the problem is that we often cook starches in fats and oils, which compromise the otherwise nutritious potato with extra fats and oils that we don't need. That's what makes your french fries so unhealthy and delicious. That said, the potato is an exceptional nutritional bundle. So much so that it's actually possible to survive and stay healthy on a diet of just potatoes and little else. Which shouldn't be news for anyone who saw The Martian or read the book. That guy conquered Mars with some ingenuity, elbow grease, and a sack of potatoes. But seriously, studies have actually borne this out, so if you ever feel like prepping for the apocalypse, maybe invest in a bunch of taters. Now that we can appreciate what a potato is, let's take a look at the origins of the potato. The potato has over 150 species of wild relatives, so tracking down the exact ancestor of the potato on your plate is no easy thing. These wild relatives can actually be found all over the Americas, from the American Southwest to Central America, but their greatest concentration is found in South America. Thanks to their tenacious adaptability, these wild species have colonized the rainforests, the arid Pacific coast, the Andean highlands, and the southern plains. These wild varieties were known about and consumed by people long before anyone ever gave farming a thought. The best example of this comes from the archaeological site of Monteverde in Chile. Those who have watched my now outdated video on the first Americans should be familiar with this site because of the role that it played in overturning the Clovis first theory. What I didn't mention in that video is that the archaeological site is actually located in an anaerobic wetland. While that detail may sound inconsequential, it's important because anaerobic environments lack the oxygen that would normally allow microbes to consume organic material, which means that they can preserve material that would otherwise be lost to the elements. Now, we don't have time to detail all that was found at the site, but if you're interested, it's pretty easy to look up. What I want to highlight is that among the many plant remains at the site were wild potatoes that were almost certainly being eaten by the inhabitants. Monteverde securely dates to over 12,000 years ago, so humans and potatoes have a very old relationship. Such wild potatoes have a few key differences from the potatoes that we eat today. Most visible is that they're smaller, but more important is their bitter flavor, which comes from the glycoalkaloids that are produced by the plant. These toxic compounds can make you pretty sick, and they're actually a defense mechanism designed to discourage humans and animals from eating them. Interestingly, potatoes belong to the same family as nightshade, which are notorious for producing other deadly types of alkaloids as well. High levels of glycoalkaloids can impact your nervous system and digestive system, and can even be lethal. Even today, poisonings can still happen despite the fact that domesticated varieties have been bred to produce negligible amounts of glycoalkaloids. Before all that, though, those toxins would have been way worse with wild potatoes. This actually presents an interesting paradox. Potatoes would have been an unpredictable and potentially dangerous source of food. People using these wild varieties would have had to have carefully weeded out bitter varieties to avoid getting poisoned. At best, it would have been a secondary resource. And yet, those ancient foragers were familiar enough with it that it did eventually get domesticated. Although it's possible that combing through all those wild varieties to get non-bitter varieties may have given them a head start. Who knows? To see this domestication in action, we need to go to the highlands of southern Peru, where the ancestor of the modern potato was chilling on the Andean Altiplano. The Altiplano is a pretty inhospitable environment to most flora, but the wild potatoes that inhabit the region are perfectly adapted to it. Their starchy roots allow them to survive long dry periods that would doom most other plants. To the perspective of ancient hunter-gatherers, these wild potatoes would have constituted a welcome source of ripe, easy-to-harvest food in an otherwise rough landscape. Even more appealing would have been the fact that these could have been harvested and stored for long periods of time. This is in stark contrast to other tubers that Andean peoples were foraging, which will wither and rot much sooner after they've been removed from the ground. They just don't store as well as a potato. In using the potato, early foragers also learned how to deal with those unpleasant glycoalkaloids. Still practiced among some Aymara communities to this day, glycoalkaloids can be neutralized by mixing a special clay with the bitter potatoes. These clays have elements that will bind to the glycoalkaloids and prevent them from being digested. If anyone's curious about how they figure that out, Geophagy, as the practice is known, is sometimes practiced by animals, and perhaps people learned it from observing them. Smart move, even if it's a far cry from ketchup or sour cream. Another practice that they developed was to leave a tuber in the ground for every few that were removed. This practice would ensure that the plant would survive, regrow, and produce more potatoes. This basically would have made them farmers of a sort. Well, cultivators is probably the more fitting term. These cultivators began to select and replant potatoes with shorter stolons, larger tubers of different colors and shapes, and most importantly, reduced levels of those bitter glycoalkaloids. Now, which species or specieses they cultivated and eventually domesticated has had its fair share of controversy due to the number of wild potato species. There was a lot of speculation about whether the modern potato was produced from a single species or multiple crossbred species. However, in the past 20 years, genetics have helped scientists determine that the potato only had one wild ancestor. That honor goes to the Solanum bukasovii, which is a part of the larger Solanum brebuccoli complex. That species and its relatives still exist and thrive in South America, and it's not uncommon for them to grow as weeds in South American potato farms and plots. It's worth pointing out that the potato was not the only tuber or root crop that the people of the Andes domesticated. Other root vegetables like aracacha, yacon, oca, and moshua, and many others got this treatment as well. Once complete, the people of the Andes were left with a hardy root vegetable that was delicious, nutritious, and could be stored for long periods of time, and they ran with it. Actually, I shouldn't say that the process was completed. It never stopped, and it continues to the present day. Today, there are over 5,000 types of potatoes in every size and color imaginable. That's what I call success. Unfortunately, that success has had its drawbacks. In successfully domesticating the potato, we've unfortunately disarmed it of many of its natural defenses, which leaves it particularly vulnerable to diseases and pests. Modern farmers take great care to protect their crops and usually spray them several times in one season. In fact, over $2 billion gets annually spent on protecting potato crops, and that price tag is only going up. In fact, without the care of humans, the domesticated potato would probably die out. Domestication has made both the potato and people mutually dependent on each other. Potatoes need us just as much as we need them. The earliest evidence that we have for the domestic potato comes from the Chilca district in Peru. In a canyon, potato remains were discovered that were claimed to be 10,000 years old, but that date is a bit suspect because it was based on their position in the deposit rather than on carbon dating, so it's a very fragile date, and it could very easily be incorrect. Much more secure dates have been documented at the site of Hiscarumulco near Lake Titicaca, where potato starch was recovered from tools that date back as far as 3400 BCE. By 2000 BCE, we have actual dried-out potatoes in archaeological context appearing not in the highlands, but all the way in the Cosmo Valley down on the Peruvian coast. What's very interesting about this is that these potatoes were most likely acquired from people in the highlands because without irrigation, there's no way that these potatoes could have been grown on the coast, and currently, no irrigation has been discovered at the site. And that makes sense. The potato was much more vital to life in the highlands than on the coast. Of the people in the highlands, no one was enjoying the potato quite as much as the people at Lake Titicaca. This is where the Tiwanaku culture flourished in the first millennium CE. During the heyday of Tiwanaku, people were taking the potato's capabilities for long-term storage and pushing it to its utmost limits in an ingenious way. Allow me to introduce you to chuño. For stateside viewers who have never heard of this potato-y delight, it's freeze-dried potatoes. This is created when potatoes are left out in the intense summer sun of the Altiplano to dry out, and then allowed to freeze overnight in cold temperatures. This is done over many days, which allows the potatoes to dry out before they're taken and stamped underfoot by whole communities to get any remaining moisture out of the potato before finally removing the peels. The potatoes may be cleaned to make white chuño or left as they are to make black chuño. Regardless, the chuño that's left is almost completely free of toxins and can last for months or even years with minimal storage effort. In fact, chuño remains have been found at Tiwanaku that date back over 2,000 years ago. No clue on how appetizing it still was after all that time, but that's pretty impressive. Chuño can also be ground into a flour that can be used to thicken soups and stews. To this day, chuño still features prominently in a lot of Peruvian and Bolivian dishes. Fun fact, that same process can also be done on llama or alpaca meat, which produces a dried-out meat called charqui, which is where we get our word for jerky. While researching this episode, I remembered that there's a Peruvian restaurant in my city, so I figured, hey, let's grab some lunch, sample some chuño, and call it research. So I did. And chuño what? It's delicious. Highly recommend giving it a try. Tiwanaku made great use of the potato, and if you've watched my previous two episodes on Tiwanaku, you'll be familiar with their use of raised field agriculture to grow large amounts of crops very successfully. With such agricultural surpluses, they could move potatoes and chuño across their territory and abroad, making it a terrific export. Other highland civilizations, such as the Wari and even the Muisca way up in Colombia, also employed the potato as a staple crop. However, highland cultures were not alone in making use of the potato. Coastal cultures had an appetite for it as well. As one example, the Moche were huge fans of the potato, and it even features in their ceramics. Of particular note are these unsettling potato-human hybrids. Like much of Moche art, the significance of these works is not fully understood, though there's a lot of speculation out there. Until recently, it was assumed that the potato was not grown on the arid coast, but instead imported from the highlands. However, recent research has shown that it was a common part of the diet, so it was either being grown locally with the aid of irrigation or being imported in huge numbers. However, to see the potato realize its full potential as a crop, let's move back up to the highlands and take a look at the later Inca. They get a lot of credit for conquest, monumental architecture, and that dizzying system of roads, but an often overlooked achievement is what they achieved in food security. Food production was something that the Inca took very seriously, and they devoted vast resources to building up agricultural infrastructure to produce as much food as possible. We could devote much more time to this, but today we're just going to focus on one part of this infrastructure. This is a colca, an Inca storehouse. These were built up and down the empire and were important depots for storing supplies, commodities, and most importantly, food. You can see in this picture that it's built on the slope of a hill, and that's by design. The hillsides allow the colca to be well-ventilated and cooled by winds. Many of these were also built with gravel subfloors and drainage channels that kept the structures as dry and cool as possible, making it an ideal place for food storage. In fairness, the Inca were not the first people to construct such buildings. Archeology has demonstrated that the Wari also produced similar storehouses, but how exactly were these used, and what have they got to do with potatoes? Records from contact indicate that lots of maize and charkey were stored in the colcas, but excavations have revealed that potatoes were stored there in huge numbers. Honestly, it's a match made in heaven. Under these conditions, untreated food could last for a few years, but in the case of dried-out foods like chuño, they could last double that time, sometimes even a decade. In such a setting, the Inca always had a huge food reserve that they could depend on to supply armies on the march, use for local festivals and feasts, and feed common people in times of famine. Food security on this level was an achievement, and for whole generations, starvation was a thing of the past. In one sense, the system was almost too successful and would actually come back to bite the Inca, because when Pizarro began his conquest, locals who decided to side with the Spanish could open the doors of their colcas to him and his men. The colcas were so successful that they even survived the conquest for decades. In 1547, a Spanish force of over 2,000 men were able to consume over 800 cubic meters of supplies, and their leaders commented how their appetites and needs barely made a dent in the storage. The potato also played a part in Andean myths and beliefs. The Spanish noted that among people in the highlands, unusual double potatoes were seen as good omens and were kept in homes, much to the disapproval of the local church. Potatoes often featured in harvest and planting rituals, some of which even persist to this day. In Ayacucho, potatoes are buried with coca leaves, chicha, and llama meat to pachacama, so that she'll grant a bountiful harvest. Perhaps the best-known potato myth is that of Huat Yacuri, whose name means the potato eater. In this Huarochiri myth, the unkempt and dirty-looking potato eater hears of a chief who is sick and cannot be healed, and is offered the hand of his beautiful sister in marriage to anyone who can heal him. Huat Yacuri sets off from his mountain home and journeys to the village of the chief. The chief, Camachic, and the rest of the town are thoroughly unimpressed by Huat Yacuri's appearance. But the chief's sister, Chaopinyaka, is the only one who can see Huat Yacuri for the noble figure that he truly is, despite his appearance. Throughout the myth, Huat Yacuri must not only heal Camachic, but must also pass a series of trials. In doing so, he confounds everyone's expectations and first impressions, and amazes the townspeople by his talents and skills, and passes every trial, heals the chief, and eventually marries Chaopinyaka. Like the potato, Huat Yacuri is dirty and lowly at first glance, but he's full of surprising vigor and talent. He perfectly embodies the power of the humble potato. Now, we can't just end the story of the potato here, because as the title of the episode says, the potato got exported after the conquest, and to say that it had a world impact is a gross understatement. In the decades after the conquest, potatoes slowly made their way across the Atlantic. Interestingly, our word potato comes from some confusion among the Spanish. They had encountered the sweet potato when they arrived in the Caribbean, and had actually taken a liking to its flavor. They knew these as batatas. You can probably see where this is going. When they encountered the potato, or the papa, as it was called by the Inca, it got confused back home with the sweet potato, since they were both similar looking root vegetables. The potato became the patata, which is where our current word comes from. By the end of the 16th century, the potato had been introduced to many areas of Europe, but it was having trouble gaining traction. The potato was little more than a botanical curiosity fighting for acceptance, and that's probably because there was a lot of weird superstition surrounding it. People believed that potatoes caused rickets, tuberculosis, gout, and leprosy. I mean, what else would you expect from those strange globular vegetables grown in the darkness under the earth? Because it wasn't mentioned in the Bible, Scottish clergymen discouraged their parishioners from consuming it. As late as 1781, the Encyclopedia Britannica referred to the potato as a demoralizing esculent. Charming! Prussian rulers, most notably Frederick the Great, went to huge lengths to promote the use of the potato to a peasantry that stubbornly refused to consider it as a crop. The potato's proponents knew that it could become a valuable food source to supplement traditional crops. Just for some context, farming in Europe was entirely dependent on grain harvests that were about as dependable and predictable as the weather. Throw in things like war and disease, and you've got a pretty fragile food supply. Starvation was always a lingering danger, and child mortality was extraordinarily high. Contrast this with what we saw in the Inca Empire and its incredible food security. There was a lot of room for the potato to take an important role in Europe, and eventually, that's what happened. Thankfully, practicality won out. Europeans began to appreciate the potato's qualities just as those Andean farmers had so long ago. Here was a hardy plant that could produce more food on less land, was weather-resistant in a way that grains were not, and could be stored easily. Studies have shown that areas that adopted the potato into their farming and diet consequently saw their populations increase, sometimes dramatically. In 1650, Europe had a population of roughly 115 million people. It would rise to 140 million by 1750, then to 188 million by 1800. 50 years later, it would reach 266 million, and 50 years after that, it would be 400 million by 1900. In certain areas, like Ireland, the adoption of the potato allowed the population to rise from 1.5 million in the early 17th century to a staggering 8.5 million on the eve of the potato famine in 1845. Just for perspective, Ireland's current population is only 6.5 million. Now, I don't want to go into detail on the Irish potato famine. There are better videos on that topic, but one thing that I will point out is the reason that the Irish potato crop was so devastated. And that's that the island primarily grew one variety of potato, and this left them at a very high risk for crop failure, something that would have been far less likely in the Andes with the many varieties of potatoes that they cultivated. But let's take a step back real quick. The potato gave people greater food security and greater food productivity. This also allowed more people to leave subsistence farming completely and take up new professions. Many of these people would go to the cities where their labor was put to use in the new industrial centers. Potatoes played a vital role in feeding and fueling the industrial revolution by helping ensure an adequate food supply and freeing up labor. Now, the potato wasn't just a hit in Europe. It spread far beyond the continent. Accompanying European colonialism, the potato was introduced to Asia and Africa where they are still grown today. By far, the biggest success story is in China where the potato was introduced by the Dutch around 1650 and was even adopted as a delicacy by the imperial family of China. Soon, it had spread throughout China and was being widely cultivated. After China, it reached Central Asia and the Tibetan Plateau, which were ideal environments for the potato to thrive. And in turn, it fueled a population explosion. To this day, China remains the leading producer of potatoes in the world. Mainland Africa also saw the potato's introduction later. And after some initial hesitance, it became a staple in certain areas and it's still widely cultivated today. I think it's fair to say that the potato is one of South America's important historical exports. Perhaps even the most important. It completely changed the world and enabled a period of sustained population growth. The next time you see a population graph that looks like this, remember that one of the big causes for that upward slope is your friend, the potato. At the same time though, we shouldn't just reduce the potato to a bland label of nutritional facts and calories, but celebrate it for its undying appeal. People love potatoes and they've worked their way so deeply into culinary traditions all over the world that their absence is almost unimaginable. Can you imagine an England without fish and chips? An India without sagaloo? A Poland without pierogies? A Hanukkah celebration without latkes? A Thanksgiving Day turkey without mashed potatoes? Just imagine poor Samwise Gamgee without his precious taters. I could wax poetry about this, but I think you get the idea. The ancient people of the Andes are owed a debt that we can never repay, and we are much the better for it. And that's going to wrap us up for today. Hope you all enjoyed this ode to the greatest root vegetable on the planet. 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