The World Traveling Spud
Unlocking the secrets of DNA has opened a new world of understanding about how past civilizations grew, moved around, and intermingled. Thanks to research into the human genome, we now know that Native Americans came into contact with Polynesian peoples as early as 1200 C.E.
But there's another way we know that Polynesians and people of the Americas came into contact. They shared their food, specifically, the sweet potato. Potatoes, like at least 50 percent of commonly used foods, arose in the Americas, in the "fertile crescent" of Peru. But sweet potatoes have been a staple in Polynesia for more than 2,000 years.
Recent findings suggest that Polynesians traveled to western South America long before European contact. Not only did they learn about and adopt the sweet potato but they also intermixed with Native Americans in the Central and Southern continent. Polynesians were known for "island hopping" and covering vast areas of the Pacific region.
Why haven't we known more about this before now? Well, as the journal PNAS Highlights writes, "the connectivities, transformations, and dynamism of traditional
societies in many areas of the world continue to be underestimated for
periods before European exploration."
Learn more at Sweet Potatoes: from the Andes to Polynesia in Science Magazine.
By Robert Müller - www.dhm.de, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3754769
The White Potato is a World Traveler Too
If the sweet potato originated in the Americas, from whence came other varieties? They also came from the same region, not Ireland, Germany, or even Idaho. They came by way of Spanish soldiers using an innovative tactic. Soldiers marching through Europe planted potatoes as they went, so there would be food for subsequent troops as well as for their return to Spain.
But very few people in Europe knew what to do with potatoes. In Bavaria, they were grown for their flowers in ornamental gardens. Then, a visiting American named Benjamin Thompson developed a potato soup to be fed to the poor in Munich. From the late 1500s to the present day, interest and love of the "Earth Apple" has spread throughout Europe to the point where some countries have become dependent on it.
With a caloric value 3.6 times as much as bread, potatoes soon surmounted grain as the food of choice for a traveling army. Peasants also benefited from the extra nutrition in potatoes, and lands grew more populous with healthier people and more children. King Frederick the Great of Prussia was the potato's best marketer, issuing 15 Potato Decrees extolling its benefits and instructing his subjects on how to grow them. There was general widespread resistance at first because tasty recipes for potatoes hadn't been developed. But during two wars in the last half of the 1700s, growing potatoes prevented famines. In 1817, Germans bestowed the name Kartoffel on the potato to distinguish it from other plants growing underground.
Today, Germans eat an average of 125 pounds of potatoes annually per person. No wonder the saying goes: "Potatoes make fries, chips, and vodka. It's like the other vegetables aren't even trying."
My potato crop a couple of years ago
