Propitious Esculent: The Potato in World Histor

Book Review by: Rich2809

Original Author: John Reader

Summary rating: 4 stars (2 Ratings)
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There is something seriously wrong with the famous story of Sir Walter Raleigh’s gift of a potato to Elizabeth

I. It wasn’t a potato. It was a tuber-bearing climber from North America called “openawk”. A decade later, Falstaff rejoiced “Let the sky rain potatoes” in The Merry Wives of Windsor. He wasn’t referring to the spuds we know, either: those didn’t become a field crop until the early 18th century. Falstaff’s vegetable was the unrelated sweet potato, not the hardy Andean tuber that almost single-handedly solved western Europe’s food-supply problems and helped spur the industrial revolution.
John Reader’s superb history traces the potato’s rise from mistaken identity to the basic food now cultivated in 149 countries. The potato is singularly nutritious, yielding four times more calories than grain. As a result, Reader claims, “the innocent potato has facilitated exploitation wherever it has been introduced”.
For instance, after its discovery in 1532 in Peru, by Francisco Pizarro, it was fed to the Indian slaves in the conquistadors’ mines. Spanish settlers made such a fortune supplying potatoes that they moved many of these labourers to work on their plantations. A similar process took place in Europe, where the potato was the perfect fuel for industrialists at the turn of the 19th century. Its affordability meant they could keep wages down and produce goods cheaply for foreign markets. Its popularity had a dark side, however, leading, in Ireland, to monoculture and famine.
For all its merits, the potato’s potential to relieve poverty remains in doubt. Developing countries can ill afford the pesticides on which the rest of the world’s farmers of this foodstuff spend nearly $25 billion a year. The potato, as Reader says, “is very good at feeding hungry people but not so good at improving their economic status”