Human settlers reached that part of our world around 15 thousand years ago, and managed to domesticate wild potato around 8 millennia BC. From that point on, potato slowly started its journey across the continent, but it received great attention in the s when first Spanish conquistadors started exploring beyond the coasts of South America, especially after s when they searched for gold in Peru. Among their numerous discoveries, potato received a very notable attention, and they brought that plant to Europe between the years of and Canary Islands received it in European adoption of potato was slow but steady.
In the beginning, Spanish government used potato as a reliable and easily transported food for their military and navy who while using them did not succumb to the scurvy. Sadly, local population of those countries looked at potato as absolutely unneeded, weird, poisonous only roots of the plant were edible, which was totally unheard off in Europe , and in some cases as downright evil. For many years, potato was accused for causing leprosy, syphilis, early death, sterility, rampant sexuality, scrofula, narcosis and for destroying the soil where it grew.
This sentiment receded from the Europe only after large scale efforts of France to find food that would sustain not only their military, but also population that was starved from continuous warfare. 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 what historians call the Great Columbian Exchange. For the first time in history, the potato ventured beyond the Americas.
These early Andean varieties had a tough time adjusting to Spain and other parts of mainland Europe. Day length is very constant across the year in the equatorial region where potatoes first were domesticated, so the potato plant was used to regular days with 12 hours of sunlight, said evolutionary geneticist Hernan A Burbano Roa.
The International Potato Center created a map to show the global movement of the potato from its origin in the Andes Credit: International Potato Center. The first decades of planting in the Old Continent proved unsuccessful.
But then potatoes found better conditions in Ireland, where a cool but frost-free fall gave the crop enough time to mature after its introduction from Spain in the s. A century of farmer selection produced a variety that set tubers earlier in the summer, and the potato took the mantle it would carry for centuries: the staple crop of peasants.
Villagers prized potatoes because they provided an unmatched nutritional yield per hectare. In Ireland in particular, tenants rented the land they tilled, so as lords increased their fees, they were forced to produce as much food as possible in the smallest possible area. Potatoes contain nearly every important vitamin and nutrient, except vitamins A and D, making their life-supporting properties unrivalled by any other single crop.
Keep their skin and add some dairy, which provides the two missing vitamins, and you have a healthy human diet staple. You even have 2g of protein for every g of potato; eat 5. For landless tenants in 17th- and 18th-Century Ireland, a single acre of land cultivated with potatoes and one milk cow was nutritionally sufficient for feeding a large family of six to eight. No cereal could claim that feat.
Thus, began the centuries-long captivation among Irish and British peasants with the potato, grounded in rented earth and scarcity. From the British Isles, potatoes spread eastwards across peasant fields in Northern Europe, writes Lang: they were found in the Low Countries by , in Germany, Prussia and Poland by and in Russia by s.
After farmer-selection filtered out those varieties and genes less adapted to local climate conditions, it flourished. Villagers in the war-ravaged European plains, by conflicts such as the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War, quickly discovered another advantage of planting potatoes: they were really hard to tax and plunder.
But underground potatoes are well hidden, and you can dig them up one by one, as needed. They rarely stopped to dig up an acre of spuds. The elites and military strategists of the time noticed this. In a matter of centuries, potatoes entered the European and global economies as a staple crop. For decades, food historians such as those noted in this FAO booklet from have explained this spread as the result of well-meaning Enlightened sages obsessed with the nutritional properties of the tubers that managed to persuade a reluctant and conservative populace to adopt the potato.
But Earle has her doubts. It was peasants who adapted the potato to Europe, she argues, thus they needed no persuading. The potato carried on its journey to wider European countries through the hands of sailors who brought the spud to different ports. The spud had a shaky start with farmers who labelled them as distrustful, but it soon became a staple food and crop which inevitably played a role in the 19 th century population boom.
During this time, the potato crop became diseased leaving many people to emigrate from Ireland to survive. Trade halted and with that unemployment followed suit leaving a drought of opportunities. It is the fourth largest food crop on earth trailing rice, wheat and maize. Appreciate the multicultural roots of the potato with our wealth of potato recipes right here on LovePotatoes, from homey comforts to more exotic guises, there's certainly a whole bunch of delicious discoveries ahead.
History of the Potato.
0コメント