(10/5) Readers of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy may remember an exchange between Gollum and Samwise Gamgee, Frodo’s trusted companion and gardener. Gollum asks, "What’s taters, Precious? What’s taters, eh?" Sam, apparently surprised that Gollum doesn’t know, answers, "Po-Tay-Toes! Boil ‘em, mash ‘em stick ‘em in a stew!" Afterall, for common peasant folk like hobbits, potatoes would be an important part of their diet, as they were just a century ago for us.

Today, the lowly spud is the fifth most important crop worldwide after wheat, corn, rice and sugarcane. Its history is important, too, especially in Europe. The original plant that we now know as Potato, Solanum tuberosum, was first grown in the Andes, where it is still an important food for the people living there.

The Spanish conquistadors brought the curious tubers grown by the Incas to Spain in the 1500s, where they long remained . . . well, a curiosity. They were cultivated on the Canary Islands and seafarers took tubers from there to Ireland, England, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Peasants understood the virtues of this food crop more quickly than the aristocracy.

Up to this time, European peasants grew mainly grains which could be a precarious crop on which to rely. Grains grow with a head of edible seeds. If the seeds were too heavy, the stem was too weak, or heavy winds or rain blew down these grasses, the seed head flopped to the ground. This made cutting them with a scythe difficult, often leaving them behind, trampled and rotting. Fields frequently needed to be left fallow for a year to rebuild soil fertility.

Also, between 1550 and 1850, several famines occurred leaving the farmer with no harvest at the end of a year’s work, and no seed the following year. To make matters worse, conflicts between nations meant marauding armies could unexpectedly appear and burn or steal the grain crop.

Peasants saw that potatoes had lots of advantages. First, the potato’s yield was beneath the soil, and the tubers kept growing as long as the plant’s stems and leaves maintained them. It did not take a lot of land to yield enough to feed themselves and have tubers to plant the following year.

As the diet of the farming class shifted more toward potatoes, they became healthier. Potatoes have a high nutritional value with significant amounts of vitamin C and B6, potassium and manganese, as well as some protein and significant amounts of starch, the carbohydrate that powered the hard-working peasants.

Since the peasant population was often caught in the middle of violent political upheavals, potatoes had another feature that helped spare the crop. Growing underground, a marauding army couldn’t see the valuable part of the crop, and burning a field may have diminished the yield but it didn’t eliminate it entirely.

The aristocracy was not as astute as the peasants and it took some time before potatoes took on value as a culinary delight and a staple to feed their populations, particularly their armies. The French seemed particularly slow to catch on.

During the Seven Years War, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier spent time as a Prussian prisoner of war, forcing him to eat a diet consisting largely of potatoes. Imagine his disgust as he was expected to eat what the French considered hog food. Imagine his dismay when he became healthier on this fare. Once Parmentier returned to Paris, he began promoting potatoes as healthy and fit for human consumption.

It still took a lot to convince the French aristocrats to put potatoes on their dinner plate. Parmentier tried different schemes, including adding potatoes to the food given to patients of dysentery, making them stronger (1773) and holding grand dinner parties, one of which included Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson is said to have introduced French fries to the American colonies on returning to Virginia.

Potato cultivation in Europe is seen by Charles C. Mann ("How the Potato Changed the World," Smithsonian Magazine, November 2011) as the beginning of industrial farming. It became possible by the mid 1800s to cultivate large fields of potato, using plows and a new source of fertilizer – guano from islands in the Peruvian Pacific Ocean.

Unfortunately, there was one problem – all the potatoes grown in Europe were from just a few germ lines. Potatoes are grown from ‘seed potatoes’ or clones. A piece of potato the size of a small egg and having a couple of eyes (sprouts) grows a new plant. Each plant is genetically identical to its parent plant. Some breeding took place since their arrival in Europe, but the primary goals involved taste, storage and larger yields. Thus, monocropping genetically similar potatoes led one infectious pathogen, Phytophthora infestans, Late Blight, to infect most of Europe’s potato crop between 1845 – 1852, causing a devastating and long-lasting famine.

Just when European farmers were beginning to get over late blight, along comes an insect invader from North America – the Colorado Potato Beetle. This foliage-devouring insect that was ravaging potatoes in the US Missouri River Valley in the 1860s, hopped on a ship and made its way to Europe. The story goes that a frustrated farmer threw left over green paint on his potatoes, ridding them of the beetle.

The green pigment in the paint was Paris green, which gets its color from copper and arsenic. It turned out to be effective against both the beetle and late blight. Chemists quickly started trying other combinations of metal compounds to determine their effectiveness against other pests and diseases. Thus began the modern pesticide industry. Monocropping, bagged fertilizers, and chemical pesticides ‘factory farming’ transformed agriculture, leading to the Green Revolution that followed World War II.

While the human side of the history of potato cultivation is interesting, we would like to know how to grow them today in our home gardens. It isn’t really difficult, but that’s a story for next week. In the meantime, Bon Appetit!