How the Potato got to the American Dinner Table

When you dip your fork into a soft mound of mashed potatoes brimming with gravy or pop that hot French Fry in to your mouth, do you have any idea where potatoes came from. It is a fascinating story.
When I wrote the article for growing potatoes in a barrel it reminded me of the long journey of centuries that it took to bring the potato from the early Inca's to your bag of hot French Fries. I owe the information below to a wonderful book, Green Immigrants, Plants that Transformed America by Claire Shaver Haughton.
She take plants from A to Z and tells the story of how they came to America. With the help of the Internet and great search engines it is easy to explore interesting bits of history and science as you wander along in this story of the Potato Journey.

It was a long long journey with lots twists and turns. If you are making a potato barrel with your family this true story will add richness and excitement to your potato adventure.

Here is the Journey

Imagine a high peak in the Andes mountains and that you are along with the Spanish Conquistador Pizarro. There hasn't been enough food for a few days and now you find the campfire that the Indians had just recently left. By this campfire you find a strange new something. Something that the Indians had been eating. Brown corky skin and a sort of white insides. Say hello to the first taste of what the Spaniards eventually called 'batata'

With every group of those adventurers were botanists and of course the Spanish Padres. While the soldier looked for gold and silver the Botanists and the Padres were interested in the plants that they discovered along the way. they went home with seeds and plants and bulbs. There in the monastery gardens these plants were grown and a green revolution all over Europe and eventually America was beginning to grow.

The batata that the Spaniards brought back was a native to Peru and had been grown and eaten by the Andean Inca Indians for many years. The Indians were quite advanced and had advanced irrigation systems long before we figured out the same thing.
The Spaniards soon recognized that this 'batata' grew well, tasted good and made good food to go along on the ships to feed the sailors.
So how and where did it get to American? Well, it came to an early Spanish colony in what is now St. Augustine Florida. This was in 1565.

So did the food that we know as potato become an immediate hit in America.
Sorry! no such luck. It will take another 100 years for the potato to even get out of Ireland to the rest of Europe, not even thinking about America again.

More adventures to come.

Enter Sir Walter Raleigh, you remember there was a brand of Tobacco named after him. If you are an old enough adult reading this you might remember the kid's joke of years past where we called any store that sold tobacco and ask the person who answered if they had Walter Raleigh in a can? When they said, Yes, we would gleefully tell them to let him out!

Back to the story...Sir Walter Raleigh had tried to get a colony started on Roanoke Island , Virginia. The colony failed but the colonists had somehow gotten potatoes from the Indians in the Florida area. Francis Drake, another one of those early explorers picked up the discouraged colonists and brought them back to England and the potatoes came back with them.

Sir Walter Raleigh was a gardener, he really loved his gardens. He brought all sorts of plants home from his travels. He brought the potatoes to his estate in Ireland. There the potatoes thrived and grew like crazy. That was the start of the Irish potato. Of course, the potato of that day didn't look anything like the big yummy potatoes that we have today.

Sir Walter Raleigh found the potato such a great item for eating that he brought some back to England and presented them to Queen Elizabeth.

It had a brief moment of interest but for the next 100 years except for Ireland the potato was not very well thought of. In the rest of Europe it was considered an oddity, a green plant, a strange foreign herb. The potato was growing and feeding people in Ireland but in the rest of Europe it was considered a good food only for prisoners, slaves and pigs. Even though there was a lot of hunger at that time the potato was only used for the poorest people. No record of it being grown in the American colonies exists for that time.

But the potato was getting closer to America. It came to the island of Bermuda along with tobacco in the 1620's. It did so well there that potatoes were used like money to barter for other things. However when it was brought to Virginia.Remember it had been in roanoke Island...tobacco came too and the farmers of Virginia chose to grow tobacco. Tobacco was a good cash crop so you can't really blame them. the potato failed again to interest the Americans. Irish immigrants did bring potatoes with them sometime around 1719 according to historian, W.R . Van Dersal. But it seems only the Irish ate the potatoes.

In Scotland even though there was a famine going on and the Highlanders were being ordered by England to plant potatoes, the Scottish government said that "Good Presbyterians would plant none of the heathenish food recommended by papist neighbors,the Irish.

Even in France the poor potato was not getting the popularity it deserved.
King Louie XVI was the one who got the potato really started in France. You remember that was the time when the Royalty and the rich people had everything and the peasants had nothing. The King decided that the potato would be good food for the French and had a unique way of promoting it. He had a big Potato Ball and everything served from soup to dessert was from potatoes. The Queen even had potato flowers in her hair. Everybody was there, even Benjamin Franklin. A noted agronomist Parmentier was credited with having invented the French Fry. Then the King did something even more clever. He had a field that had been planted in all potatoes. The field was on the outside of town on the route that the peasants took to market. He put guards on the field by day but they were told to not do be there at night. The peasants stole potatoes knowing that they were exotic food that the Royals were eating. It didn't take long before potatoes were being grown all over France and all sorts of good recipes were being invented. So the potato was spreading. If yours is a family project a little research into the war called the Potato war of 1778-9 might be fun. Russia began to grow potatoes and even Napoleon got into the act. When the British blockaded the ships coming from the West Indies with sugar Napoleon offered 10,000 francs to anyone who could come up with a sugar substitute and the a sweet syrup from potatoes came about. Potato syrup, potato starch, the potato was at last gaining popularity. then a disaster struck, the terrible potato rot epidemic struck Ireland. All over Ireland entire fields of potatoes were rotting. There was almost nothing to eat. the potato famine was full blown and as a result thousands of Irish immigrants came to America. they brought their love of potatoes with them and helped to make potatoes what they are today.

In 1861 Luther Burbank, the great and famous plantsman was responsible for developing a new hybrid potato known as the Burbank Russet potato. Today there are lots of varieties of potatoes. All of them are good and tasty and loaded with history.

Just as a sidelight for interested readers. It is a new strain of Phytopthera, the Phytopthera ramorum fungus that is killing mature giant oak trees all over central California into Oregon. It is either the same pathogen or closely related to the phytophera that caused the dreaded potato famine in Ireland.
This killer fungus pathogen is such a serious threat to oak trees that extreme measures are being taken by the department of agriculture to keep the disease from spreading to other states.
The famous famine of the 1840s killed more than a million people and forced another two million to immigrate to the United States and other countries. The catastrophic crop failure has been widely blamed on an infection with the potato fungus Phytopthera infestans. Scientists are still researching which Phytopthera was the one that caused the potato rot.
When you are growing potatoes it is really important to start with clean seed potatoes. These clean seed potatoes will help to keep your potato plants from rotting with phytophtera.

I hope you enjoyed this journey of how the potato came to America. I do not know if it is still possible to buy the book Green Immigrants but if you can find it there are so many more delightful tales. My other 3 favorites are coffee, marigolds and pineapples.

Evelyn Weidner