HOW POTATOES CONQUERED THE WORLD
We don’t think of potatoes as exotic. Quite the opposite; they are utterly familiar. When the artist Subodh Gupta was growing up in 1970s India, he wondered whether everyone ate potatoes, or if it was only people in Bihar. A French traveller visiting Colombia in the early 19th century was surprised to see ‘European’ potatoes sold alongside South American vegetables such as cassava.
For an Indian boy, potatoes are Indian. For a Frenchman, they are European. This is pretty remarkable for a food unknown to most of humanity before the 16th century. Until then the only people who ate potatoes lived along the spine of mountains that runs from the Andes in Bolivia and Chile north through the Rockies. This ‘American cordillera’, as it’s called, is the origin of potatoes.
In fact, no one else had laid eyes on a potato before Spanish conquistadors invaded South America in the 1530s and overthrew the Inca empire. That set in motion a whirlwind that blew potatoes to India, France and beyond. This makes it all the more extraordinary just how ordinary potatoes are these days. Their very names proclaim their rootedness in the right-here, in exactly wherever we are: Ayrshire new potatoes, Idaho russet, Irish cobbler, Darjeeling red round.
Even the Incas viewed the potato as pretty ordinary. An Andean legend from long before the Spanish arrived tells of
