Columbus sought the Americas to silence the doubters and prove that a ship might sail west to find the east. In his wake came those conquistadors like Cortés and Francisco Pizarro seeking gold and other riches.
Along the way, and more by accident than by design, Pizarro’s men found a treasure more valuable than all the rest, and with much more power to change the world.
In Peru, while some of their number went about the business of capturing, ransoming and then executing the Incan emperor Atahualpa, other Spaniards took a moment, a crucial moment, to notice some of the locals eating a foodstuff they called chuno. It was a stew, and at its heart was a variant of the plant known around the world now as the potato.
The Incas had found that by leaving the tubers to freeze during the night, and then thawing them during the day and repeating the cycle over and over, they were transformed into soft lumps. These were squeezed to remove moisture and then stored for anything up to ten years and more.
Once cooked, the preserved chuno took on the texture of gnocchi and was so nutritious and sustaining it was the staple food of the Inca army.
Having appreciated the potential, the Spaniards began taking chuno – and the potatoes themselves – aboard their ships as dependable rations that helped them avoid the predations of scurvy. Spanish monks in the Canary Islands were the first Europeans to cultivate potatoes, beginning in the 1560, and by the following decade the plant was on mainland Spain. During the 1580s it spread to Britain, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland and France. Uptake was slow at first and many populations greeted the incomer with suspicion, claiming that eating, even touching, the plant would lead to all manner of ailments including leprosy, syphilis and sterility. For long the crop was fed only to animals. In France, King Louis XVI was persuaded of the value of the potato and, pour encourager les autres, took to wearing its flower in his buttonhole. His wife, Marie Antoinette, wove the blooms into her hair. The public-relations exercise worked and soon French farmers were growing potatoes and French people were eating them.
Historians including the American Alfred W. Crosby have made the case that the arrival of the potato in Europe changed the world. In his 1972 book The Columbian Exchange, Crosby suggested that the voyages of Columbus began the work of stitching back together a world torn apart by geological processes. Once upon a time the dry land of the world was a single continent, known to geologists as Pangaea. Eons of upheaval and drift caused by the movement of tectonic plates had seen to a separation, and then the evolution of unique ecosystems on the disparate landmasses. In the Americas, the nightshade plant (genus Solanum) gave birth to tobacco, sweet peppers, chilli peppers, eggplant (aubergine), tomatoes, potatoes and all manner of variants besides. The wild potato was toxic to humans but by a process of experimentation lasting centuries the Incas produced domesticated plants that were among the most nutritious on earth.
Something in the region of 5,000 potato varieties are stored in the International Potato Center in Peru.
Before the potato, Europe was a continent of famines. Historian Fernand Braudel has calculated that French peasants endured more than one national famine every decade between 1500 and 1800. As if that were not bad enough, he also noted in Civilization and Capitalism that it was a woeful underestimation of reality since it omits the hundreds and hundreds of local famines. All over the continent it was the same, and always had been. Famine was a fact of life, and death.
After the potato, Europe was changed for ever. For centuries the staples had been wheat and barley but the easy-to-grow import provided more nutritious food faster on less land than any other food crop, in any terrain. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Ireland was so dependent upon the potato that half the population ate no other solid food. In other northern European countries the same was true for as many as a third of people. Dependency on a single crop was a double-edged sword, and when the potato blight arose in the middle years of the nineteenth century (the mould Phytophthora infestans likely came to Europe from Peru, aboard ships loaded with the seabird guano used to fertilize the soil) the consequences were brutal. In 1845 an estimated three quarters of a million acres of potatoes were lost to the disease in Ireland alone. The next two years were even worse, and the resultant starvation killed more than a million Irish people. Perhaps as many as two million fled the country, emigrating to the New World whence the plague had come.
The potato had both given and taken away. Its positive impact on the continent was the one that endured, however, and the population growth so boosted the energy of the countries of northern Europe that they were able to reach out and place the shadows of their hands over the Old World and the New. The story of the world has been shaped by the earnest endeavours of men and women, by the forces of nature, and in no small part by the humble spud.
Source ~ “The Story of The World in 100 Moments” by Neil Oliver
