Gregory McNamee: The Potato: A Blessing—and Otherwise—for St. Patrick’s Day and Beyond
As an American of Irish ancestry, I harbor mixed feelings about the potato. It is an essential foodstuff, of course, and, properly cooked, it can be delicious. Still, it was indirectly responsible for the cruel diaspora that nearly emptied the mother country of its people and sent them off to all corners of the world, where, as onetime Pogue Phil Chevron’s song “Thousands Are Sailing” (see the video) has it, we would forevermore “celebrate the land that makes us refugees.”
Ireland took to the potato late, as such things go, many decades after it was introduced to Europe from South America, and there Solanum tuberosum revealed itself as both a blessing and a curse. It must have seemed that thousands of years before to the farming peoples of the central Andes. Long ago, they discovered that certain members of a group of closely related grassy plants produced a tasty tuber over much of the year, adding materially to an otherwise uncertain food supply. The problem was, of the 110 or so species of wild tuber-bearing Solanum found in the region, some were extremely poisonous.
Fortunately, those wild plants were easily hybridized, and the Andean farmers exercised a profound practical understanding of plant genetics by identifying the relatively nontoxic strains and putting them to work. They developed an agriculture that boasted dozens of varieties of potatoes, which were traded far afield, with small-scale cultivation extending northward into the highlands of Mexico.
It was in the potato’s homeland that the Spanish first encountered it, along about 1530, when the conquistador Pedro de Cieza de León described it in his Chronicle of Peru. The plant was soon introduced to Spain. At the same time, it came into English hands, probably somewhere in the Caribbean. The plant was then introduced to the colony of Virginia, where it flourished, so much so that it came to England as the “Virginia potato,” with nary a word about its Andean origins. It has long been supposed, without much solid evidence, that the introducer was the English privateer Walter Raleigh, who certainly brought tobacco to England and earned John Lennon’s damning “stupid git” for his troubles, to say nothing of eventually being beheaded in a court intrigue. Other sources credit the introduction to another Englishman, Thomas Herriot, in 1586, about the time the English privateer John Hawkins brought it to Ireland.
By that time, the potato was being spread widely throughout continental Europe, received with varying degrees of enthusiasm; the heroes who introduced the crop to the welcoming plains of Eastern Europe and Russia are unsung, whereas the French agronomist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier earned a coveted grave in Paris’s Père-Lachaise cemetery for his contributions to French cuisine, in which the potato has long enjoyed a cherished place.
The potato became central to the agriculture of vast regions of Europe. It was particularly prominent in the economy of Ireland, then a despised colony of England, owned in the main by absentee landlords who converted small truck gardens and orchards into vast fields dedicated to producing potatoes for export. (The busy British army and navy alone consumed huge quantities of them.) When the so-called Potato Famine hit in the 1840s, it spread so quickly and devastatingly in at least some measure because so many Irish farms grew that single crop, now ravaged by a fungus, Phytophthora infestans. With it, some three million Irish men, women, and children died or emigrated. The blight spread elsewhere in Europe and caused catastrophic damage to other economies, but that experience is little remembered today. Only in 1883 was a fungicide finally developed, thanks to the great French scientist Alexis Millardet, who had earlier saved the French wine industry from a grape blight.
The potato was less central to the economy of the early United States; in 1806, a popular almanac listed but a single variety, though forty years later a hundred varieties were being grown across the northern tier from New York to Utah. Mormon farmers were responsible for introducing the potato to the extremely hospitable soil of Idaho. Mormon schoolchildren across the border, in British Columbia, introduced the counting rhyme “one potato, two potato, three potato, four” sometime before 1885, when it was first recorded.
Americans are now well versed in matters concerning the potato, and the unversed have been made to suffer. Deak Parsons, the bombardier of the Enola Gay, was reminded into old age that he had missed winning a state-level spelling bee by leaving the “e” out of “potatoes,” whereas J. Danforth Quayle earned national ridicule when, then vice president of the United States, he insisted that the “e” belonged in the singular. Mark Twain would have had a field day with that official faux pas, having once insulted another politician with this witticism: “Your head wasn’t made to put ideas in. It was made to throw potatoes at.”
Plenty of nutritionists and dieticians would sooner throw potatoes away than eat them, for potatoes are the supreme starch in an era when starch is little used, even on clothing. A single baked potato delivers a walloping 51 grams of carbohydrate, along with 220 calories, and with not a lot of payback in terms of protein. Notes the food activist Francis Moore Lappé, the more the poor Solanum is processed, the less nutritional worth it has; anyone who has tasted a boutique or heirloom potato knows that its slightly bitter, slightly peppery flavor speaks to all that we are missing with our reliance on industrial agriculture.
Waverly Root, the food historian, records that per capita, Americans ate 200 hundred pounds of potatoes in 1900, but only 120 pounds in 1960, about two-thirds fresh and the rest in processed form. That figure has risen slightly since, mostly thanks to the American addiction to french fries, a favorite American treat since Thomas Jefferson’s day, but one of those breads by which man had better not live every day.
Jefferson, who served french-fried potatoes at Monticello, walked everywhere, and he stayed lean all his life. Those more inclined to couch potatodom are well to curtail their intake. Just as effective is to avoid eating simple carbohydrates such as pasta, bread, and potatoes after 5:00 in the afternoon. Those mostly empty calories burn off quickly at active times of the day, but they can impede the processing of sugars in quiet moments when the television blazes and the mind grows still—yet more evidence yet that the potato is both a blessing and a curse.