What do you think?
Rate this book
土豆的全球之旅：一段不为人知的历史
从秘鲁库斯科太阳神庙里的黄金土豆，到生长在爱尔兰泥地中的同类作物；从如今中国大量种植以制作麦当劳薯条的食材，再到对其基因组的全面测序，比顿夫人、查尔斯·达尔文、列宁等名人故事点缀其间，土豆的历史既引人入胜，又令人直呼过瘾。在人类文明史的灿烂画卷中，约翰·里德成功钩沉出土豆故事的整体脉络：从起源到进化，再到进入食谱乃至成为整个人类社会有机组成部分的神秘欧洲之旅。时至今日，随着全球人口的迅速膨胀，人类生存环境稳定性的重要程度日益凸显，在这本对我们往往视而不见的食物进行研究的著作中，里德生动形象、通俗易懂地向我们展示了土豆仍然可能发挥的作用。
444 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
63 people are currently reading
2263 people want to read
About the author
John Reader
33 books36 followersAn author and photojournalist with more than forty years' professional experience. He holds an Honorary Research Fellowship in the Department of Anthropology at U.C.L.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 82 reviews
May 7, 2021
As a popular history, this book has good points. While most directly a history of the potato, it really uses the potato as the central element around which it constructs a story about what happened in various bits of human history. Sometimes the discussion seems to veer far away from what was happening to (or with) potatoes, but always comes back. As a great yarn about the past, this works quite well, albeit a bit haphazard.
Reader has a central thesis about the potato, that its superior provision of nutrients per farmed hectare (compared to most other crops) has had a vital role in the increasing population of the world, with all sorts of flow-on economic and political effects, which is interesting and worth consideration. He traces this through the Industrial Revolution in England, the Irish famine, to the recent growth in population in Papua New Guinea and the exploding commercial success of Chinese potato growers. At times it seems he is attributing too much to the potato, and I guess this kind of history telling is as perilous (for its tendency to inaccuracy by exaggeration or omission) as it is enjoyable.
Reader's telling of history seems to owe more than a little to left-wing historians, for example he discusses Engels' views on the English working-class at some length, but he appears to employ some level of class analysis in his telling. So I was surprised to find the story was not just about the potato, but about the evils of communism and idealism. The Soviet scientist Vavilov, who developed a large potato breeding centre in the USSR until his sad demise in one of Stalin's purges, is introduced with some decidedly odd comments about Soviet history. Apparently the 1921 famine, coming on the end of four years of bitter civil war (after as many years of the catastrophic world war) was due to "the wilful determination of the Soviets to put the survival of their new political order before that of the people". There is a 1977 article from the journal "Soviet Studies" referenced(1) but it seems that Reader's pithy summary is (at best) a dire oversimplification.
He goes on to state that "most of the country's specialists had either emigrated or perished in the aftermath of the revolution (when higher learning was deemed to be a bourgeois threat)" -- this time unreferenced; all I've read of the Soviet sciences suggests that specialists in the old order tended to (not surprisingly) distrust the introduction of a new order and left, or took the other side; but I have read elsewhere(2) of younger, less ensconced scientists who were happy enough to work in the promising new Soviet system (Vavilov just one among them).
Finally one gets to the end and the anti-communist thrust of the latter chapters of the book is made clear. George Bernard Shaw's (in)famous comment "If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains" is used as a metaphor for the changes in China since the demise of Mao, and the fortunes of the potato in this period when China has become the world's biggest producer. "...not only peasant farmers are inherent capitalists - we all are" says this photojournalist with an Honorary Research Fellowship in Anthropology at UCL. Rather a big claim to make, unannounced, on the final page of a long book - unless you're just preaching to the converted.
Despite this ending on a superficial and poorly researched note of moralistic anticommunism, the earlier sections of the book are an interesting and enjoyable read. Like when you discover a rotten spot in an apple and wonder if you've already eaten more of the same without noticing, I do wonder if any comparable biases are present in those earlier chapters that I enjoyed more. I also wonder what was the political ramifications and machinations of potato cropping were in the (capitalist) US' plantation-slave and Jim Crow sharecropping economies (not mentioned), or the rise of the (capitalist) agrobusiness giants McCain and Simplot (barely touched on, in a rather rosy light, right at the end) (3); or how potatoes were conceived in (capitalist) Nazi Germany and the ghettos and concentration camps where its victims perished (potatoes being an important food throughout central and eastern Europe). It focuses instead on the fortunes of the potato in the troubled Communist camp and a chapter on a recent adopter, PNG - a poor third world country. Whereas the communists were bad and had to learn the error of their ways for themselves, the poor PNG farmers are good because they let the liberal world help them. That seems to be the narrative it ends on. Disappointing.
(1) Charles M. Edmondson (1977) The politics of hunger: The Soviet response
to famine, 1921, Soviet Studies, 29:4, 506-518, DOI: 10.1080/09668137708411152
(2) Models Of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia. Douglas R. Wiener, University of Pittsburgh, updated edition 2000.
(3) I worked at a Simplot-owned factory for a few years, was a union delegate there, and their record as an exploitative multinational capitalist firm with large vertically integrated operations in food production around the world surely deserves more scrutiny for its impact on labour and environment than the rosy vignette Reader sketches of the original Simplot success story, which may as well have been lifted from the company's own promotional material.
Reader has a central thesis about the potato, that its superior provision of nutrients per farmed hectare (compared to most other crops) has had a vital role in the increasing population of the world, with all sorts of flow-on economic and political effects, which is interesting and worth consideration. He traces this through the Industrial Revolution in England, the Irish famine, to the recent growth in population in Papua New Guinea and the exploding commercial success of Chinese potato growers. At times it seems he is attributing too much to the potato, and I guess this kind of history telling is as perilous (for its tendency to inaccuracy by exaggeration or omission) as it is enjoyable.
Reader's telling of history seems to owe more than a little to left-wing historians, for example he discusses Engels' views on the English working-class at some length, but he appears to employ some level of class analysis in his telling. So I was surprised to find the story was not just about the potato, but about the evils of communism and idealism. The Soviet scientist Vavilov, who developed a large potato breeding centre in the USSR until his sad demise in one of Stalin's purges, is introduced with some decidedly odd comments about Soviet history. Apparently the 1921 famine, coming on the end of four years of bitter civil war (after as many years of the catastrophic world war) was due to "the wilful determination of the Soviets to put the survival of their new political order before that of the people". There is a 1977 article from the journal "Soviet Studies" referenced(1) but it seems that Reader's pithy summary is (at best) a dire oversimplification.
He goes on to state that "most of the country's specialists had either emigrated or perished in the aftermath of the revolution (when higher learning was deemed to be a bourgeois threat)" -- this time unreferenced; all I've read of the Soviet sciences suggests that specialists in the old order tended to (not surprisingly) distrust the introduction of a new order and left, or took the other side; but I have read elsewhere(2) of younger, less ensconced scientists who were happy enough to work in the promising new Soviet system (Vavilov just one among them).
Finally one gets to the end and the anti-communist thrust of the latter chapters of the book is made clear. George Bernard Shaw's (in)famous comment "If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains" is used as a metaphor for the changes in China since the demise of Mao, and the fortunes of the potato in this period when China has become the world's biggest producer. "...not only peasant farmers are inherent capitalists - we all are" says this photojournalist with an Honorary Research Fellowship in Anthropology at UCL. Rather a big claim to make, unannounced, on the final page of a long book - unless you're just preaching to the converted.
Despite this ending on a superficial and poorly researched note of moralistic anticommunism, the earlier sections of the book are an interesting and enjoyable read. Like when you discover a rotten spot in an apple and wonder if you've already eaten more of the same without noticing, I do wonder if any comparable biases are present in those earlier chapters that I enjoyed more. I also wonder what was the political ramifications and machinations of potato cropping were in the (capitalist) US' plantation-slave and Jim Crow sharecropping economies (not mentioned), or the rise of the (capitalist) agrobusiness giants McCain and Simplot (barely touched on, in a rather rosy light, right at the end) (3); or how potatoes were conceived in (capitalist) Nazi Germany and the ghettos and concentration camps where its victims perished (potatoes being an important food throughout central and eastern Europe). It focuses instead on the fortunes of the potato in the troubled Communist camp and a chapter on a recent adopter, PNG - a poor third world country. Whereas the communists were bad and had to learn the error of their ways for themselves, the poor PNG farmers are good because they let the liberal world help them. That seems to be the narrative it ends on. Disappointing.
(1) Charles M. Edmondson (1977) The politics of hunger: The Soviet response
to famine, 1921, Soviet Studies, 29:4, 506-518, DOI: 10.1080/09668137708411152
(2) Models Of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia. Douglas R. Wiener, University of Pittsburgh, updated edition 2000.
(3) I worked at a Simplot-owned factory for a few years, was a union delegate there, and their record as an exploitative multinational capitalist firm with large vertically integrated operations in food production around the world surely deserves more scrutiny for its impact on labour and environment than the rosy vignette Reader sketches of the original Simplot success story, which may as well have been lifted from the company's own promotional material.
March 23, 2015
The wild potato is a masterpiece of evolution. Botanists have discovered 169 species of them, widely dispersed across the Americas, but primarily located in the Andes. Wild spuds have been able to adapt to every type of ecosystem except for lowland tropical rainforest. Their foliage is bitter with toxic glycoalkaloid compounds that promptly spoil the appetite of hungry leaf munchers (or kills them).
Beneath the ground, small tubers grow on the roots, in a wide variety of colors and shapes. The toxic tubers store energy and moisture as insurance against unfavorable conditions. As they mature, the plants flower, and then produce tomato-like fruits containing up to 200 seeds. Because the seeds are the result of sexual reproduction, each one is genetically unique. Some will be resistant to frost, and/or drought, and/or blight. Wherever they happen to grow, plants having the most suitable genes for local conditions will be the most likely to thrive and reproduce. Diverse genes are essential for a species long-term survival.
Wild spuds are not the slightest bit interested in sprawling agribusiness monocultures, cancerous civilizations, population explosions, fungicide industries, or topsoil destruction. They simply find ways to blend into their ecosystem, live well, and not rock the boat, like all proper and dignified organisms do.
After consuming several tons of domesticated spuds over many decades, John Reader was inspired to write Potato, a highly readable book that described the amazing success of the humble spud, and the astonishing unintended consequences. It adds one more chapter to the ongoing comedy of backfiring human cleverness.
Nobody has come up with a compelling explanation for why humans domesticated toxic little tubers, but we did. Some of the myriad mutants resulting from wild potato sex must have produced tubers with low toxicity that tickled the imagination of somewhat-clever minds.
Domesticated tubers are much larger than wild ones, and much better tasting. When the plants stop growing, and the foliage withers, the tubers are no longer poisonous. An acre of spuds can produce as much food as eight acres of wheat — in much less time. Spuds are now our fourth most common food, following wheat, corn, and rice.
They are remarkably nutritious. You can eat nothing but spuds for several months and remain healthy. If you add a glass of milk to every meal, you will be completely nourished — this was the Irish peasant’s diet 200 years ago. The average adult male ate 10 pounds of spuds daily, and 20 when working hard. Seriously!
Potatoes can thrive where grains don’t, and they can be stored for months. Long ago, the people of the Andes learned how to make chuño — freeze-dried potatoes, which can be stored for years, while losing no nutritional value. Sweet potatoes are not related to potatoes, and they spoil far more quickly.
Prior to the arrival of potatoes, European peasants were typically malnourished and short-lived. But spud-gobbling bumpkins were more healthy and vigorous, despite their extreme poverty. Potato-fed kids were more likely to survive into adulthood and reproduce. Infants could be weaned earlier by switching them to a mix of mashed potatoes and buttermilk, allowing mom to get pregnant again sooner, and have more children. When potatoes arrived in Ireland around 1600, the population was no more than 1.5 million. By 1845, it was 8.5 million, of which 90 percent were hardcore spud addicts. This explosive growth could not continue, of course.
I shall now introduce the arch villain in this story: Phytophthora infestans, a fungus commonly referred to as “late blight.” It probably originated in the highlands of central Mexico, and then migrated to other regions. Today it can be found almost everywhere, and wet weather is its call to action. Blight spores can ride the winds to new locations. Nothing gives it greater pleasure than discovering a big field of moist mature potato plants.
In 1845, spores from the US took a steam ship cruise to Ireland, where everyone was eagerly expecting a bumper crop of lumpers. To their horror, entire fields turned black overnight. Blight raced across Europe, destroying two million square kilometers in four months. It struck again in 1846 and 1848. Ireland was hit hardest, and their wretched British overlords could not be bothered to provide much assistance. A million Irish died, and a million emigrated.
I shall now introduce the hapless victim in this story: Solanum tuberosum, the family of domesticated taters. In the process of being transformed from wild toxic tubers to an incredibly productive super food, domestic spuds lost most of their sex drive (via male sterility). Few produce any fruits or seeds. So, commercial American potatoes are not grown from “true seeds.” Instead, farmers plant “seed tubers,” which are hunks of tubers from the last harvest.
True seeds are rugged survivalists, because they are genetically diverse. But domesticated potatoes are helpless sitting ducks, because they are genetically identical clones. If one is susceptible to blight, they all are. Reader says, “In fact, most modern cultivars are biological ‘monsters’ that could not survive in the wild.” They can’t live without human caretakers (like domesticated dogs, cattle, sheep, and maize).
Scientists have two control options. The cheapest solution is to breed new varieties that are blight resistant, but this is a time-consuming process, and there are only a limited number of gene tricks that work. The success of any new variety can only be temporary, because the blight fungus is constantly mutating. Blight will inevitably create offspring that can overcome the resistant spud’s defenses, and each new blight spore can produce 100,000 spores in four days. The scientists will have to start all over again.
The other solution is more expensive and toxic: fungicides. In wet seasons, a field might be sprayed 12 times (or 30 times in super-moist New Guinea). Like plant breeding, the effectiveness of fungicides is temporary, because the fungus will inevitably develop resistance to them. When one poison stops working, you switch to another, use more, or try combos.
There can be no permanent solution to blight. Scientists will run out of clever tricks long before Mother Nature quits producing countless new fungus mutants every minute. Rising energy costs will continue to drive up the price of fungicides, making them unaffordable for a growing number of poor farmers.
Wild spuds still thrive in the high Andes, preserving the wild gene pool that’s essential to the work of plant breeders. Blight has never been a problem in this region — until recently. Climate change has been making the weather warmer and wetter in the homeland of spuds. Some crops of native potatoes have been heavily damaged.
The venerable historian William H. McNeill once penned an essay titled “How the Potato Changed the World's History.” Europe’s population skyrocketed between 1750 and 1900, thanks in part to the spud. Millions of surplus country folks were forced to move to cities, work in factories, earn peanuts, and live on taters. Thus, spuds played a significant role in the mass emigration of Europeans, the growth of colonial empires, and the rise of Russia and Germany as industrial powers.
Reader lamented that “millions [of] lives were spent as fuel for the Industrial Revolution,” but in its wake, “a new and better world emerged.” Really? I have a feeling that it would have been wiser to leave the spuds as we found them — wild, free, and happy.
This book has many, many more spud tales to tell. Throw some French fries in the microwave and find a comfy chair.
Beneath the ground, small tubers grow on the roots, in a wide variety of colors and shapes. The toxic tubers store energy and moisture as insurance against unfavorable conditions. As they mature, the plants flower, and then produce tomato-like fruits containing up to 200 seeds. Because the seeds are the result of sexual reproduction, each one is genetically unique. Some will be resistant to frost, and/or drought, and/or blight. Wherever they happen to grow, plants having the most suitable genes for local conditions will be the most likely to thrive and reproduce. Diverse genes are essential for a species long-term survival.
Wild spuds are not the slightest bit interested in sprawling agribusiness monocultures, cancerous civilizations, population explosions, fungicide industries, or topsoil destruction. They simply find ways to blend into their ecosystem, live well, and not rock the boat, like all proper and dignified organisms do.
After consuming several tons of domesticated spuds over many decades, John Reader was inspired to write Potato, a highly readable book that described the amazing success of the humble spud, and the astonishing unintended consequences. It adds one more chapter to the ongoing comedy of backfiring human cleverness.
Nobody has come up with a compelling explanation for why humans domesticated toxic little tubers, but we did. Some of the myriad mutants resulting from wild potato sex must have produced tubers with low toxicity that tickled the imagination of somewhat-clever minds.
Domesticated tubers are much larger than wild ones, and much better tasting. When the plants stop growing, and the foliage withers, the tubers are no longer poisonous. An acre of spuds can produce as much food as eight acres of wheat — in much less time. Spuds are now our fourth most common food, following wheat, corn, and rice.
They are remarkably nutritious. You can eat nothing but spuds for several months and remain healthy. If you add a glass of milk to every meal, you will be completely nourished — this was the Irish peasant’s diet 200 years ago. The average adult male ate 10 pounds of spuds daily, and 20 when working hard. Seriously!
Potatoes can thrive where grains don’t, and they can be stored for months. Long ago, the people of the Andes learned how to make chuño — freeze-dried potatoes, which can be stored for years, while losing no nutritional value. Sweet potatoes are not related to potatoes, and they spoil far more quickly.
Prior to the arrival of potatoes, European peasants were typically malnourished and short-lived. But spud-gobbling bumpkins were more healthy and vigorous, despite their extreme poverty. Potato-fed kids were more likely to survive into adulthood and reproduce. Infants could be weaned earlier by switching them to a mix of mashed potatoes and buttermilk, allowing mom to get pregnant again sooner, and have more children. When potatoes arrived in Ireland around 1600, the population was no more than 1.5 million. By 1845, it was 8.5 million, of which 90 percent were hardcore spud addicts. This explosive growth could not continue, of course.
I shall now introduce the arch villain in this story: Phytophthora infestans, a fungus commonly referred to as “late blight.” It probably originated in the highlands of central Mexico, and then migrated to other regions. Today it can be found almost everywhere, and wet weather is its call to action. Blight spores can ride the winds to new locations. Nothing gives it greater pleasure than discovering a big field of moist mature potato plants.
In 1845, spores from the US took a steam ship cruise to Ireland, where everyone was eagerly expecting a bumper crop of lumpers. To their horror, entire fields turned black overnight. Blight raced across Europe, destroying two million square kilometers in four months. It struck again in 1846 and 1848. Ireland was hit hardest, and their wretched British overlords could not be bothered to provide much assistance. A million Irish died, and a million emigrated.
I shall now introduce the hapless victim in this story: Solanum tuberosum, the family of domesticated taters. In the process of being transformed from wild toxic tubers to an incredibly productive super food, domestic spuds lost most of their sex drive (via male sterility). Few produce any fruits or seeds. So, commercial American potatoes are not grown from “true seeds.” Instead, farmers plant “seed tubers,” which are hunks of tubers from the last harvest.
True seeds are rugged survivalists, because they are genetically diverse. But domesticated potatoes are helpless sitting ducks, because they are genetically identical clones. If one is susceptible to blight, they all are. Reader says, “In fact, most modern cultivars are biological ‘monsters’ that could not survive in the wild.” They can’t live without human caretakers (like domesticated dogs, cattle, sheep, and maize).
Scientists have two control options. The cheapest solution is to breed new varieties that are blight resistant, but this is a time-consuming process, and there are only a limited number of gene tricks that work. The success of any new variety can only be temporary, because the blight fungus is constantly mutating. Blight will inevitably create offspring that can overcome the resistant spud’s defenses, and each new blight spore can produce 100,000 spores in four days. The scientists will have to start all over again.
The other solution is more expensive and toxic: fungicides. In wet seasons, a field might be sprayed 12 times (or 30 times in super-moist New Guinea). Like plant breeding, the effectiveness of fungicides is temporary, because the fungus will inevitably develop resistance to them. When one poison stops working, you switch to another, use more, or try combos.
There can be no permanent solution to blight. Scientists will run out of clever tricks long before Mother Nature quits producing countless new fungus mutants every minute. Rising energy costs will continue to drive up the price of fungicides, making them unaffordable for a growing number of poor farmers.
Wild spuds still thrive in the high Andes, preserving the wild gene pool that’s essential to the work of plant breeders. Blight has never been a problem in this region — until recently. Climate change has been making the weather warmer and wetter in the homeland of spuds. Some crops of native potatoes have been heavily damaged.
The venerable historian William H. McNeill once penned an essay titled “How the Potato Changed the World's History.” Europe’s population skyrocketed between 1750 and 1900, thanks in part to the spud. Millions of surplus country folks were forced to move to cities, work in factories, earn peanuts, and live on taters. Thus, spuds played a significant role in the mass emigration of Europeans, the growth of colonial empires, and the rise of Russia and Germany as industrial powers.
Reader lamented that “millions [of] lives were spent as fuel for the Industrial Revolution,” but in its wake, “a new and better world emerged.” Really? I have a feeling that it would have been wiser to leave the spuds as we found them — wild, free, and happy.
This book has many, many more spud tales to tell. Throw some French fries in the microwave and find a comfy chair.
January 5, 2016
When I listened to Turning Points in Modern History by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, I was really taken with his surprising and delicious history of the potato. I had no idea how important the potato was in building human civilization. That lecture series caused me to seek out this book. In the past I have enjoyed reading about the history of coal (I recommend Barbara Freese's wonderfully rich history), uranium, and other single subjects that appear to have the potential to be boring but end up being anything but boring. It is the love for this type of history that led me to the book Salt by Mark Kurlansky, which I found a bit boring. I worried the history of the potato might be boring as well, but this book is great.
You can expect to read about how in Shakespeare's time fewer than 70 out of every baby born made it to their first birthday, only 48 to their 5th birthday, and only about 25 were still alive to see their birthday. The potato changed all of that..... except when potato growing met with difficulties. You will learn about what kind of food the rich and poor alike had access to and how the potato sustained entire populations of people to continue the progress of civilization. You will learn that the potato was viewed in much the same way we often view new tech, the work of the devil, a demoralize esculent to be exact. Such a threat was the potato, clergymen and priests banned their parishioners from eating it.
You can also expect to enjoy a wonderful history not only the Irish Potato Famine but the extremely interesting consequences of the famine on Irish culture. The author also provided a great discussion on breeding potato seeds to end world hunger and what needs to be done to make potato planting in various parts of the world successful.
Great book!
You can expect to read about how in Shakespeare's time fewer than 70 out of every baby born made it to their first birthday, only 48 to their 5th birthday, and only about 25 were still alive to see their birthday. The potato changed all of that..... except when potato growing met with difficulties. You will learn about what kind of food the rich and poor alike had access to and how the potato sustained entire populations of people to continue the progress of civilization. You will learn that the potato was viewed in much the same way we often view new tech, the work of the devil, a demoralize esculent to be exact. Such a threat was the potato, clergymen and priests banned their parishioners from eating it.
You can also expect to enjoy a wonderful history not only the Irish Potato Famine but the extremely interesting consequences of the famine on Irish culture. The author also provided a great discussion on breeding potato seeds to end world hunger and what needs to be done to make potato planting in various parts of the world successful.
Great book!
February 7, 2022
Last two chapters were abysmal. The last two paragraphs were criminal. Really ruined the rest of the work, which I do think is one of the better examples of this trite genres. Tis what one ought to expect from a photojournalist and pseudo anthropologist (same mess, different names)!
January 11, 2023
It was definitely best history of potatoes I’ve ever read.
January 23, 2025
I've always been fascinated by the multifaceted use of potatoes & how widely known it is across the globe. Combined with a general interest in history, this book intrigued me.
Learn how the potatoes ended up in every corner of the earth & pick up some really interesting facts along the way.
If you are interested in history, this book is for you. You will leave with a new found respect for potatoes:)
The book does feel like it loses steam toward the end.
Learn how the potatoes ended up in every corner of the earth & pick up some really interesting facts along the way.
If you are interested in history, this book is for you. You will leave with a new found respect for potatoes:)
The book does feel like it loses steam toward the end.
March 1, 2017
Good enough to finish, but not so good that I finished it quickly.
I had a few lucid "why am I reading a book about potatoes" moments. To which there's not an answer - just that I got curious about potatoes, kind of like when you have a random question and then spend an hour on Wikipedia. But with a book.
Anyway, some of it was quite interesting, and I'd even go so far as to say I learned a thing or two (Potatoes came from South America! They don't have seeds, and propagate via cloning!). But some of it I admittedly skim-read.
I give it a positive "meh". I'm probably not the right target audience for this book, so I'm sure it's better if you're a truer potato connoisseur.
I had a few lucid "why am I reading a book about potatoes" moments. To which there's not an answer - just that I got curious about potatoes, kind of like when you have a random question and then spend an hour on Wikipedia. But with a book.
Anyway, some of it was quite interesting, and I'd even go so far as to say I learned a thing or two (Potatoes came from South America! They don't have seeds, and propagate via cloning!). But some of it I admittedly skim-read.
I give it a positive "meh". I'm probably not the right target audience for this book, so I'm sure it's better if you're a truer potato connoisseur.
July 17, 2017
Did you know that my favorite food is the potato? For as long as I can remember. I grew up eating potatoes mashed and covered in butter almost every night for my entire childhood. If I see mashed potatoes on a menu, I cannot ever say no. Poutine is one of Canada's greatest inventions: cheese, gravy, and that wonderfully deep fried, starchy, tuber. Dill and heavy cream with potatoes; stuffed in perogies; eaten with breakfast. This is the most versatile esculent that has ever existed. And so John Reader proves that in his very interesting account of "The Potato in World History".
Now, let's clarify something. When I was reading this, I kept telling anyone who would listen, "I am reading a book about the history OF the potato." This is wrong. Propitious Esculent is *not* about the history of the potato. We do not follow the potato through birth, its tribulations into contemporary times. Rather, we follow how the potato has aided and shaped mankind into what it is today. (There is another review that gives the book a low rating for this reason, claiming they did not want to read about the potato -- because that's all the book ended up being-- well, what did you expect?)
Reader has traced the potato from its origins in the Andes and how it was used and valued by the indigenous and colonialists there, to its affects on European lower classes, into its popularity of a staple food. He tells us what the potato is , scientifically; and yet, with all of its value and benefit, how it remains one of the most delicate, precariously balanced pieces of vegetation that the Mother Earth and evolution has ever cultivated into existence.
I love this book for how it highlights the "adventures" of something that is so overlooked by us today because it is so widely available. How many people look at their food and wonder where it comes from? Could guess that so simple-a-thing could have affected us all in such unnoticed, yet important ways. Now, when I look at the potato, I not only love it for its texture, its taste, nor its versatility, I quietly thank the potato for having saved my Ukrainian family and for making me and keeping me very healthy.
Now everyone: buy some farm fresh, golden potatoes, cook them to perfection, and eat.
Now, let's clarify something. When I was reading this, I kept telling anyone who would listen, "I am reading a book about the history OF the potato." This is wrong. Propitious Esculent is *not* about the history of the potato. We do not follow the potato through birth, its tribulations into contemporary times. Rather, we follow how the potato has aided and shaped mankind into what it is today. (There is another review that gives the book a low rating for this reason, claiming they did not want to read about the potato -- because that's all the book ended up being-- well, what did you expect?)
Reader has traced the potato from its origins in the Andes and how it was used and valued by the indigenous and colonialists there, to its affects on European lower classes, into its popularity of a staple food. He tells us what the potato is , scientifically; and yet, with all of its value and benefit, how it remains one of the most delicate, precariously balanced pieces of vegetation that the Mother Earth and evolution has ever cultivated into existence.
I love this book for how it highlights the "adventures" of something that is so overlooked by us today because it is so widely available. How many people look at their food and wonder where it comes from? Could guess that so simple-a-thing could have affected us all in such unnoticed, yet important ways. Now, when I look at the potato, I not only love it for its texture, its taste, nor its versatility, I quietly thank the potato for having saved my Ukrainian family and for making me and keeping me very healthy.
Now everyone: buy some farm fresh, golden potatoes, cook them to perfection, and eat.
July 26, 2018
I never knew the potato was so interesting nor how it helped fuel the industrial revolution
June 12, 2018
This was an interesting read about the famous potato, now so much a part of our lives, it wasn't always so. I knew much of this history already, but Reader goes into a depth I haven't seen. Like other works, such as Salt, Cod, Spice, etc, the authors use the subject at hand as a medium by which history can be traced and explored. It's always an interesting avenue to explore, and in our case tracing the potato from its roots (ha) to the modern age. This tuber is incredibly important, and is responsible for feeding millions that would have otherwise starved or not been born to begin with. We all have to thank God for the potato, which for many was just what they needed, when they needed it.
December 22, 2023
I thought that I might get a bit bored with this book but, in fact, found it quite fascinating. It's a fairly broad-ranging study of the history of the potato from its origins in Peru to its role as a major food for the world.
By Inca times, potatoes were well and truly established as the staple food of the high Andes, grown in rotation with the indigenous quinoa and kañihua, on land lengthily fallowed and fertilised by herds of domesticated llama and alpaca. Maize displaced potato production at lower altitudes, but this intensified its continuation higher up, at 2,500 metres and above, where maize would not grow. Under the Incas, people were obliged to build terraces and irrigation systems for maize, and tend the crop, but organised labour also increased all-round efficiency.
According to John Reader (the author) every man accompanying Pizarro was obliged to take arms when called upon to do so, but there were only four professional soldiers among the men whom Lockhart identified by occupation. The expedition's largest contingent consisted of artisans: six tailors, two black-smiths, two carpenters, one cooper, one swordsmith, one stonemason, one crier and one barber. Next came the professionals: notaries, secretaries and accountants - twelve in all, who were required to make records of all transactions, double-check the arithmetic, certify the legality of agreements and generally ensure that the bureaucratic foundations of the new colony were soundly laid (as well as compensate for the fact that Francisco Pizarro himself could neither read nor write). I'm not sure that this gels well with the official figures which indicate 180 men and 30 horses......so a lot of men not accounted for in the figures above
The Spanish certainly had intentions of staying in the new world.Though it was only in November 1519 that Cortés and his party had first set foot in Tenochtitlan - soon to be renamed Mexico City — by 1526 even the introduction of European kitchen vegetables was advanced enough for commentators to remark that carrots, caulflowers, beans, turnips, horseradish and lettuce were cheaper in the city markets that year.' But it was wheat that the Spanish really wanted to see under cultivation and it was difficult in the tropical lowlands. But in the higher elevations in central Mexico, wheat thrived. From Mexico, wheat farming followed the Spanish advance into South America. Virtually everywhere it could be said that while many of the sights and smells of the New World bewildered visitors, they could usually count on fresh-baked bread in the Iberian tradition to remind them of home." And as with bread, so with meat.
No one knows precisely how many people lived in the region before the arrival of the Spanish in 1492. Even so, the work of historical demographers strongly suggests that the total population probably fell by over 90 per cent in little more than a century. An authoritative estimate of the decline in the Andes, for example, concludes that where some 9 million people had populated the region in 1520, there were just 600,000 in 1620. Like secret allies, European diseases effectively cleared the way for the Spanish colonisation of South America. There was little contest for the best arable lands when traditional owners were succumbing to smallpox, and little conflict between tillage and pasture when such vast tracts of both were being vacated and left untended.
The date of introduction of the potato into Spain was at least as early as 1570. The historian William H. McNeill has said that the availability of the potato as a food source in northern Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; changed the world's history ... without potatoes Germany could not have become the leading industrial and military power of Europe after 1848, and no less certain that Russia could not have loomed so threateningly on Germany's eastern border after 1891.
It's hard to understand to day the death rates of medieval Europe.Of every 100 babies born in St Botolph's parish during the years that Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were drawing the crowds to London's theatres, fewer than seventy lived to see their first birthday. Only forty-eight saw their fifth, and at the age of fifteen only twenty-seven or thirty of the original cohort were still alive." And nearly 40 per cent of Bergamo's population were registered as paupers in 1575.Similarly in 1630, Madrid too found that 40 per cent of its population were paupers.
The principal factor in this poverty was the change in farming practices that saw farmers turning away from food production as their primary activity and concentrating instead on the production of raw materials for manufacturing industries at home and abroad. Especially wool. Increasingly, cornfields were transformed into sheep pastures. Add to this the fact that agricultural productivity was inherently low and you have what is politely called 'the agrarian problem of the sixteenth century. Among those who spent the greatest proportion of their available income on food - the small farmers, artisans, labourers and the very poor - rising prices eroded their diets, in terms of both quality and quantity. And labourers didn't own the land.
It would be stretching the point to say that the potato actually fuelled the industrial revolution. Many factors were involved. Even so, the potato's contribution was huge and incontestable. But opposing the introduction of the potato into the European diet was the the Doctrine of Signatures held that the most effective medicinal plants were those which in some way mirrored the condition to be treated. It recommended red beetroot juice for anaemic women, for instance, and prescribed the yellow celandine as a cure for jaundice. In the case of the potato, the principles of the doctrine of signatures were inverted. Instead of being regarded as a treatment of leprosy, the potato was deemed to be its cause - and proscribed. This was more than enough to deter potential consumers from eating potatoes.
A document quoted by Vandenbroke explains what it was that persuaded people to set aside their prejudices and begin growing potatoes as their staple food - war:........ this vegetable spread and gradually multiplied in the Vosges because of the proximity of Alsace. Since this province was nearly always the first arena of war in Europe, the peasants valued a ground-crop that could feed the people, their cows and their pigs and give a good yield. It was never exposed to damage by the ravages of war, for when an any camped for a month on a field of potatoes, the farmer could still harvest them when the army had left. But, wherever local communities depended on a store of grain for their survival, outright starvation was the usual and anticipated result of an extended military campaign.
Birth rates were high but death rates were stunning. Figures are well documented and truly shocking. In some of the Italian foundling hospitals, up to 80 and 90 per cent of babies died before they were one year old. In Paris, the figures indicate that foundlings comprised fully 36 percent of all births in the years 1817-20: of 4,779 babies admitted to the Maison de la Couche in 1818 alone, 2,370 died within three months. In France overall, between 20 and 30 per cent of all children born during those three years were abandoned to their fate in the foundling hospitals. But with the introduction of the potato , populations began to rise again. However, it was not until the mid twentieth century, as quantitative science became an integral part of anthropological research, that statistical data could validate the general contention: wherever the potato had been adopted, populations had increased. There was a direct correlation. Even a small village in central Spain" experienced a late eighteenth-century upsurge in population and prosperity when farmers channelled water from a stream and began growing potatoes in fields which had been good only for olives and almonds until then.
But it was in Ireland that the influence of the potato was most dramatically seen - and felt. The Battle of the Boyne (1690) and the Treaty of Limerick (1691) finally gave the English a semblance of political and economic control over Ireland. The Protestant settlers held most of the valuable land and all of the country's social, economic and political privileges. A series of draconian Penal Laws were enacted in the early 1700s, under which Irish Roman Catholics could never vote or take a seat in Parliament; nor could they ever become members of a municipal corporation, aspire to become a barrister or a judge, or act as sheriff, or hold any office under the Crown. They could not serve in the Army or the Navy. No Catholic could buy or inherit land - or even receive it as a gift from a Protestant. No lease could be held by a Catholic for more than thirty-one years. Catholics could not enter the university or teach in a school. They could not own a horse worth more than five pounds, nor have more than two apprentices.And the pattern of landownership established in the early eighteenth century was to remain intact for nearly 200 years: an untidy patchwork of over 2,000 large estates covering most of Ireland's land surface. The majority were between 2,000 and 4,000 acres in extent, though several dozen great estates each covered more than 50,000 acres. The confiscated properties included most of Ireland's best agricultural land; the vast majority were economically viable. It was probably this divorce of those who tilled the land from the owners of the land that led directly to the great problems of Ireland.
Although the potato was certainly being cultivated in Ireland during the early 1600s, it was only during the latter part of the century that it became a dominant part of the diet. So long as cottiers could feed themselves on potatoes, landlords could require them to work more intensively on the production of commodities for export. Grain was the most attractive proposition. Not least by virtue of 'Foster's Corn Law', which provided for a bounty to be paid on Ireland's grain exports, and a duty levied on imports. Ireland supplied 70 per cent of England's food imports in the early nineteenth century. But as long as prices were steady or rising in response to demand from England and elsewhere, farmers, middlemen and landlords prospered; and while potatoes flourished, the labourers were healthy and hard-working. But it could not last.
The golden age of the potato had not lasted long....fifty or sixty years perhaos. It’s beginnings lay somewhere in the two decades after in the Great Frost of 1740-41, and its close was confirmed by the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, which sent grain prices tumbling and farmers looking for other ways of paying the inflated rents they had agreed upon while the market was booming. By 1815 there were 4.7 million people in Ireland for whom the potato was the predominant item of diet, and of them 3.3 million had nothing else.' It was not just the fate of Napoleon that had been sealed at the battle of Waterloo. Ireland's doom was sealed there too. During the forty-five years immediately preceding the famine of 1845-7: no fewer than 114 Commissions and 61 Special Committees were instructed to report on the state of Ireland, and without exception their finding prophesied disaster; Ireland was on the verge of starvation, her population rapidly increasing, three-quarters of her labourers unemployed, housing conditions appalling and the standards of living unbelievably low.
Forster (from the Quakers) visited Cleggan, where he found that: The distress was appalling far beyond my powers of description. I was quickly surrounded by a mob of men and women, more like famished dogs than fellow creatures, whose figures, looks and cries, all showed that they were suffering the ravening agony of hunger ... In one [cabin] there were two emaciated men, lying at full length, on the damp floor, in their ragged clothes, too weak to move, actually worn down to skin and bone. In another a young man was dying of dysentry; his mother had pawned everything ... to keep him alive. What hope was there for the English working man, Engels asked, when faced 'with a competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a civilised country, who for this very reason requires less wages than any other? Wages were forced down, and the mere presence of the Irish immigrants exercised a strong degrading influence upon their English companions in toil':
In January 1846,the people of Ireland were starving. Peel in effect was using the Irish crisis? as justification for a radical shift in policy that was as significant in its time as the Battle of Hastings or Magna Carta. Repeal of the Corn Laws ushered in the era of free trade that established the viability of England's industrial economy in the late nineteenth century; in fact, it marked a crucial point in England's transformation from a small agricultural nation into a wealthy industrial power. Though to give him his due, Peel did try to do something for the starving Irish. In all, England spent a total of £33 million on corn for Ireland, according to a contemporary writer quoted by Redcliffe Salaman. Speculation was rife as the world's corn-bins were scraped for wheat, oats, rice and maize - any food-grain that the starving Irish would eat'. It's worth noting tht the Irish were not in good shape even prior to the potato blight.
Although the potato disease had taken all Europe by surprise in 1845, it had already been ravaging the potato crops of North America for two seasons by then. The first outbreaks occurred in 1843, close to ports on the east coast of the United States, around Philadelphia and New York, In the 1990s, the centre of origin and diversity of the organism responsible for the disease was traced to a valley in the highlands of central Mexico." It is believed to have migrated from there to South America several centuries ago, and from South America to the United States in 1841-2. And shipments that crossed the Atlantic during the winter of 1843-4 included a significant number of infected tubers. The disease was not prevalent enough to arouse concern in Europe in 1844, but a warm damp spring and early summer enabled it to build up to epidemic proportions in 1845. At its maximum range, the disease had infected an area that stretched 1,600 kilometres from the western shores of Ireland to northern Italy, and 1,800 kilometres from northern Spain to the southern tips of Norway and Sweden - potato farms across more than 2 million square kilo-metres of land laid waste in just four months. There was no ministry of agriculture, no government agency with the authority and the funds to assign a team of consultants to the problem, nor any form of government service that could study the disease and offer recommendations for its prevention, or cure. A defining moment came in late August, when a leading agronomist, Dr Rene Van Oye, unreservedly claimed that the one true determining cause of the potato disease was a fungus which, reproducing itself with astonishing rapidity and profuseness, had infected all the potato fields and was clearly contagious." Though it was years later that any reasonable treatment for the fungus was developed. Bordeaux Mixture was the world's first agricultural application to be worthy of production on an industrial scale; to this extent, the vine and the potato were catalysts for the creation and development of the agro-chemical industry which today wields such power in the production of food crops worldwide.
New strains of potato blight emerged in the early 198os that are resistant to Bordeaux Mixture and the succession of more powerful fungicides that have been introduced since the 1930s.
But a plant breeder was already showing a way ahead. In 1926, Salaman reported with justifiable pride:"I was in possession of over a score of seedling varieties endowed with reasonably good economic characters which, no matter what their maturity, appeared to be immune to late blight?' It was an important breakthrough, offering real promise - after all the false starts - that it was possible to breed blight-resistant potato varieties that would spare farmers the cost of spraying and lost crops.
John Reader goes on to examine some of the impacts of the potato on Russia, China, and New Zealand. More than 35 million Soviet citizens were at risk of famine by 1921..... most of the country's specialists had either emigrated or perished in the aftermath of the revolution. But one who survived was an agricultural botanist, Nicolay Ivanovich Vavilov (1887-1943). He proposed between eight and twelve centres-of-origin for crops (the number increased with Vavilov's development of the idea for the origin of the world's major food crops, located wherever the greatest genetic diversity of cultivated plants and their wild relatives was found: wheat in the highlands of the fertile crescent, rice in India (here Vavilov was wrong - Indonesia has the greatest genetic diversity of rice), maize in Mexico, brassicas around the Mediterranean, citrus fruits in China, walnuts in the Balkans ... and potatoes in the Andes.The agricultural research institute that Vavilov created was one of the largest and most active in the world, with a network of 400 research and experimental stations across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, and close links with related establishments worldwide. By 1934, 20,000 people were working under Vavilov's overall direction. In all, more than 300,000 plant samples were available for study. I remember, in my earlier years showing a group of Soviet Scientists from one of the Vavilov Institutes around agricultural research stations in Southern NSW and the ACT.
The potato had a significant impact on the size of the Maori population too - just as it had in South America and throughout Europe. Captain Cook estimated the Maori population at around 100,000 in 1769. This was almost certainly an underestimate (Cook did not see what were probably more densely populated regions inland), but that hardly dents the significance of there having been some 200,000 Maori in New Zealand when Britain claimed sovereignty in 1840, ' seventy years later. Maori numbers tumbled after that, under the impact of colonial settlement, land wars, economic marginalisation, and disease.
There is a lot in this book though I think the author doesn't really give enough attention to the actual development and propagation of the Blight. Nor does he really explain what happened in the years from 1846 through to 1906 when Bordeaux mixture was developed.
But happy to give it four stars.
By Inca times, potatoes were well and truly established as the staple food of the high Andes, grown in rotation with the indigenous quinoa and kañihua, on land lengthily fallowed and fertilised by herds of domesticated llama and alpaca. Maize displaced potato production at lower altitudes, but this intensified its continuation higher up, at 2,500 metres and above, where maize would not grow. Under the Incas, people were obliged to build terraces and irrigation systems for maize, and tend the crop, but organised labour also increased all-round efficiency.
According to John Reader (the author) every man accompanying Pizarro was obliged to take arms when called upon to do so, but there were only four professional soldiers among the men whom Lockhart identified by occupation. The expedition's largest contingent consisted of artisans: six tailors, two black-smiths, two carpenters, one cooper, one swordsmith, one stonemason, one crier and one barber. Next came the professionals: notaries, secretaries and accountants - twelve in all, who were required to make records of all transactions, double-check the arithmetic, certify the legality of agreements and generally ensure that the bureaucratic foundations of the new colony were soundly laid (as well as compensate for the fact that Francisco Pizarro himself could neither read nor write). I'm not sure that this gels well with the official figures which indicate 180 men and 30 horses......so a lot of men not accounted for in the figures above
The Spanish certainly had intentions of staying in the new world.Though it was only in November 1519 that Cortés and his party had first set foot in Tenochtitlan - soon to be renamed Mexico City — by 1526 even the introduction of European kitchen vegetables was advanced enough for commentators to remark that carrots, caulflowers, beans, turnips, horseradish and lettuce were cheaper in the city markets that year.' But it was wheat that the Spanish really wanted to see under cultivation and it was difficult in the tropical lowlands. But in the higher elevations in central Mexico, wheat thrived. From Mexico, wheat farming followed the Spanish advance into South America. Virtually everywhere it could be said that while many of the sights and smells of the New World bewildered visitors, they could usually count on fresh-baked bread in the Iberian tradition to remind them of home." And as with bread, so with meat.
No one knows precisely how many people lived in the region before the arrival of the Spanish in 1492. Even so, the work of historical demographers strongly suggests that the total population probably fell by over 90 per cent in little more than a century. An authoritative estimate of the decline in the Andes, for example, concludes that where some 9 million people had populated the region in 1520, there were just 600,000 in 1620. Like secret allies, European diseases effectively cleared the way for the Spanish colonisation of South America. There was little contest for the best arable lands when traditional owners were succumbing to smallpox, and little conflict between tillage and pasture when such vast tracts of both were being vacated and left untended.
The date of introduction of the potato into Spain was at least as early as 1570. The historian William H. McNeill has said that the availability of the potato as a food source in northern Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; changed the world's history ... without potatoes Germany could not have become the leading industrial and military power of Europe after 1848, and no less certain that Russia could not have loomed so threateningly on Germany's eastern border after 1891.
It's hard to understand to day the death rates of medieval Europe.Of every 100 babies born in St Botolph's parish during the years that Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were drawing the crowds to London's theatres, fewer than seventy lived to see their first birthday. Only forty-eight saw their fifth, and at the age of fifteen only twenty-seven or thirty of the original cohort were still alive." And nearly 40 per cent of Bergamo's population were registered as paupers in 1575.Similarly in 1630, Madrid too found that 40 per cent of its population were paupers.
The principal factor in this poverty was the change in farming practices that saw farmers turning away from food production as their primary activity and concentrating instead on the production of raw materials for manufacturing industries at home and abroad. Especially wool. Increasingly, cornfields were transformed into sheep pastures. Add to this the fact that agricultural productivity was inherently low and you have what is politely called 'the agrarian problem of the sixteenth century. Among those who spent the greatest proportion of their available income on food - the small farmers, artisans, labourers and the very poor - rising prices eroded their diets, in terms of both quality and quantity. And labourers didn't own the land.
It would be stretching the point to say that the potato actually fuelled the industrial revolution. Many factors were involved. Even so, the potato's contribution was huge and incontestable. But opposing the introduction of the potato into the European diet was the the Doctrine of Signatures held that the most effective medicinal plants were those which in some way mirrored the condition to be treated. It recommended red beetroot juice for anaemic women, for instance, and prescribed the yellow celandine as a cure for jaundice. In the case of the potato, the principles of the doctrine of signatures were inverted. Instead of being regarded as a treatment of leprosy, the potato was deemed to be its cause - and proscribed. This was more than enough to deter potential consumers from eating potatoes.
A document quoted by Vandenbroke explains what it was that persuaded people to set aside their prejudices and begin growing potatoes as their staple food - war:........ this vegetable spread and gradually multiplied in the Vosges because of the proximity of Alsace. Since this province was nearly always the first arena of war in Europe, the peasants valued a ground-crop that could feed the people, their cows and their pigs and give a good yield. It was never exposed to damage by the ravages of war, for when an any camped for a month on a field of potatoes, the farmer could still harvest them when the army had left. But, wherever local communities depended on a store of grain for their survival, outright starvation was the usual and anticipated result of an extended military campaign.
Birth rates were high but death rates were stunning. Figures are well documented and truly shocking. In some of the Italian foundling hospitals, up to 80 and 90 per cent of babies died before they were one year old. In Paris, the figures indicate that foundlings comprised fully 36 percent of all births in the years 1817-20: of 4,779 babies admitted to the Maison de la Couche in 1818 alone, 2,370 died within three months. In France overall, between 20 and 30 per cent of all children born during those three years were abandoned to their fate in the foundling hospitals. But with the introduction of the potato , populations began to rise again. However, it was not until the mid twentieth century, as quantitative science became an integral part of anthropological research, that statistical data could validate the general contention: wherever the potato had been adopted, populations had increased. There was a direct correlation. Even a small village in central Spain" experienced a late eighteenth-century upsurge in population and prosperity when farmers channelled water from a stream and began growing potatoes in fields which had been good only for olives and almonds until then.
But it was in Ireland that the influence of the potato was most dramatically seen - and felt. The Battle of the Boyne (1690) and the Treaty of Limerick (1691) finally gave the English a semblance of political and economic control over Ireland. The Protestant settlers held most of the valuable land and all of the country's social, economic and political privileges. A series of draconian Penal Laws were enacted in the early 1700s, under which Irish Roman Catholics could never vote or take a seat in Parliament; nor could they ever become members of a municipal corporation, aspire to become a barrister or a judge, or act as sheriff, or hold any office under the Crown. They could not serve in the Army or the Navy. No Catholic could buy or inherit land - or even receive it as a gift from a Protestant. No lease could be held by a Catholic for more than thirty-one years. Catholics could not enter the university or teach in a school. They could not own a horse worth more than five pounds, nor have more than two apprentices.And the pattern of landownership established in the early eighteenth century was to remain intact for nearly 200 years: an untidy patchwork of over 2,000 large estates covering most of Ireland's land surface. The majority were between 2,000 and 4,000 acres in extent, though several dozen great estates each covered more than 50,000 acres. The confiscated properties included most of Ireland's best agricultural land; the vast majority were economically viable. It was probably this divorce of those who tilled the land from the owners of the land that led directly to the great problems of Ireland.
Although the potato was certainly being cultivated in Ireland during the early 1600s, it was only during the latter part of the century that it became a dominant part of the diet. So long as cottiers could feed themselves on potatoes, landlords could require them to work more intensively on the production of commodities for export. Grain was the most attractive proposition. Not least by virtue of 'Foster's Corn Law', which provided for a bounty to be paid on Ireland's grain exports, and a duty levied on imports. Ireland supplied 70 per cent of England's food imports in the early nineteenth century. But as long as prices were steady or rising in response to demand from England and elsewhere, farmers, middlemen and landlords prospered; and while potatoes flourished, the labourers were healthy and hard-working. But it could not last.
The golden age of the potato had not lasted long....fifty or sixty years perhaos. It’s beginnings lay somewhere in the two decades after in the Great Frost of 1740-41, and its close was confirmed by the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, which sent grain prices tumbling and farmers looking for other ways of paying the inflated rents they had agreed upon while the market was booming. By 1815 there were 4.7 million people in Ireland for whom the potato was the predominant item of diet, and of them 3.3 million had nothing else.' It was not just the fate of Napoleon that had been sealed at the battle of Waterloo. Ireland's doom was sealed there too. During the forty-five years immediately preceding the famine of 1845-7: no fewer than 114 Commissions and 61 Special Committees were instructed to report on the state of Ireland, and without exception their finding prophesied disaster; Ireland was on the verge of starvation, her population rapidly increasing, three-quarters of her labourers unemployed, housing conditions appalling and the standards of living unbelievably low.
Forster (from the Quakers) visited Cleggan, where he found that: The distress was appalling far beyond my powers of description. I was quickly surrounded by a mob of men and women, more like famished dogs than fellow creatures, whose figures, looks and cries, all showed that they were suffering the ravening agony of hunger ... In one [cabin] there were two emaciated men, lying at full length, on the damp floor, in their ragged clothes, too weak to move, actually worn down to skin and bone. In another a young man was dying of dysentry; his mother had pawned everything ... to keep him alive. What hope was there for the English working man, Engels asked, when faced 'with a competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a civilised country, who for this very reason requires less wages than any other? Wages were forced down, and the mere presence of the Irish immigrants exercised a strong degrading influence upon their English companions in toil':
In January 1846,the people of Ireland were starving. Peel in effect was using the Irish crisis? as justification for a radical shift in policy that was as significant in its time as the Battle of Hastings or Magna Carta. Repeal of the Corn Laws ushered in the era of free trade that established the viability of England's industrial economy in the late nineteenth century; in fact, it marked a crucial point in England's transformation from a small agricultural nation into a wealthy industrial power. Though to give him his due, Peel did try to do something for the starving Irish. In all, England spent a total of £33 million on corn for Ireland, according to a contemporary writer quoted by Redcliffe Salaman. Speculation was rife as the world's corn-bins were scraped for wheat, oats, rice and maize - any food-grain that the starving Irish would eat'. It's worth noting tht the Irish were not in good shape even prior to the potato blight.
Although the potato disease had taken all Europe by surprise in 1845, it had already been ravaging the potato crops of North America for two seasons by then. The first outbreaks occurred in 1843, close to ports on the east coast of the United States, around Philadelphia and New York, In the 1990s, the centre of origin and diversity of the organism responsible for the disease was traced to a valley in the highlands of central Mexico." It is believed to have migrated from there to South America several centuries ago, and from South America to the United States in 1841-2. And shipments that crossed the Atlantic during the winter of 1843-4 included a significant number of infected tubers. The disease was not prevalent enough to arouse concern in Europe in 1844, but a warm damp spring and early summer enabled it to build up to epidemic proportions in 1845. At its maximum range, the disease had infected an area that stretched 1,600 kilometres from the western shores of Ireland to northern Italy, and 1,800 kilometres from northern Spain to the southern tips of Norway and Sweden - potato farms across more than 2 million square kilo-metres of land laid waste in just four months. There was no ministry of agriculture, no government agency with the authority and the funds to assign a team of consultants to the problem, nor any form of government service that could study the disease and offer recommendations for its prevention, or cure. A defining moment came in late August, when a leading agronomist, Dr Rene Van Oye, unreservedly claimed that the one true determining cause of the potato disease was a fungus which, reproducing itself with astonishing rapidity and profuseness, had infected all the potato fields and was clearly contagious." Though it was years later that any reasonable treatment for the fungus was developed. Bordeaux Mixture was the world's first agricultural application to be worthy of production on an industrial scale; to this extent, the vine and the potato were catalysts for the creation and development of the agro-chemical industry which today wields such power in the production of food crops worldwide.
New strains of potato blight emerged in the early 198os that are resistant to Bordeaux Mixture and the succession of more powerful fungicides that have been introduced since the 1930s.
But a plant breeder was already showing a way ahead. In 1926, Salaman reported with justifiable pride:"I was in possession of over a score of seedling varieties endowed with reasonably good economic characters which, no matter what their maturity, appeared to be immune to late blight?' It was an important breakthrough, offering real promise - after all the false starts - that it was possible to breed blight-resistant potato varieties that would spare farmers the cost of spraying and lost crops.
John Reader goes on to examine some of the impacts of the potato on Russia, China, and New Zealand. More than 35 million Soviet citizens were at risk of famine by 1921..... most of the country's specialists had either emigrated or perished in the aftermath of the revolution. But one who survived was an agricultural botanist, Nicolay Ivanovich Vavilov (1887-1943). He proposed between eight and twelve centres-of-origin for crops (the number increased with Vavilov's development of the idea for the origin of the world's major food crops, located wherever the greatest genetic diversity of cultivated plants and their wild relatives was found: wheat in the highlands of the fertile crescent, rice in India (here Vavilov was wrong - Indonesia has the greatest genetic diversity of rice), maize in Mexico, brassicas around the Mediterranean, citrus fruits in China, walnuts in the Balkans ... and potatoes in the Andes.The agricultural research institute that Vavilov created was one of the largest and most active in the world, with a network of 400 research and experimental stations across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, and close links with related establishments worldwide. By 1934, 20,000 people were working under Vavilov's overall direction. In all, more than 300,000 plant samples were available for study. I remember, in my earlier years showing a group of Soviet Scientists from one of the Vavilov Institutes around agricultural research stations in Southern NSW and the ACT.
The potato had a significant impact on the size of the Maori population too - just as it had in South America and throughout Europe. Captain Cook estimated the Maori population at around 100,000 in 1769. This was almost certainly an underestimate (Cook did not see what were probably more densely populated regions inland), but that hardly dents the significance of there having been some 200,000 Maori in New Zealand when Britain claimed sovereignty in 1840, ' seventy years later. Maori numbers tumbled after that, under the impact of colonial settlement, land wars, economic marginalisation, and disease.
There is a lot in this book though I think the author doesn't really give enough attention to the actual development and propagation of the Blight. Nor does he really explain what happened in the years from 1846 through to 1906 when Bordeaux mixture was developed.
But happy to give it four stars.
November 3, 2020
Very enjoyable history of the potato and all it has touched.
March 21, 2011
So far, a tour-de-force of history of politics, social history, botany...I'm not through yet!!
Finished this today, 3/21/11. This is one of the best "popular" syntheses of history, botany, sociology that I have read. Mr Reader takes the lowly potato, which most of us do not give two seconds' thought to,
from its origins in western South America, early domestication by indigenous peoples and export by Spanish explorers (too nice a word for how they treated, i.e., murdered the Incas and of course Aztecs/Mayans)to Europe, the slow adoption in Europe, how the easy cultivation and prolific production of the potato changed the health and fortune of Irish folks, how the vulnerability of the concentration of one variety of S tuberosa led to the Great Famine of 1845-1847 (as well its echo in China), as well as many other facets of the place of the potato in our current world economies.
I highly recommend this book.
Finished this today, 3/21/11. This is one of the best "popular" syntheses of history, botany, sociology that I have read. Mr Reader takes the lowly potato, which most of us do not give two seconds' thought to,
from its origins in western South America, early domestication by indigenous peoples and export by Spanish explorers (too nice a word for how they treated, i.e., murdered the Incas and of course Aztecs/Mayans)to Europe, the slow adoption in Europe, how the easy cultivation and prolific production of the potato changed the health and fortune of Irish folks, how the vulnerability of the concentration of one variety of S tuberosa led to the Great Famine of 1845-1847 (as well its echo in China), as well as many other facets of the place of the potato in our current world economies.
I highly recommend this book.
March 14, 2021
The attempt to link the potato to world history fails - the author fails to make the connections and explain the tangents into human history, and how they are connected to the potato. The potato gets lost. Plus, it is hard to stomach a history of Irish famine written by a British author.
November 8, 2011
I was underwhelmed. Some interesting anecdotes, but I felt the author didn't really make much of a case for why the potato has had such an impact on the world. Made me hungry for potatos though.
November 5, 2013
This was an interesting book with lots of information on the biology and history of the potato, but it lacked a central argument beyond, "the potato is important and lots of people eat it."
June 25, 2020
The other potato book was better
July 8, 2020
Sometimes shit is insane and you just need to listen to a book on the history of the potato. 🥔 📖
September 7, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads #Food History
John Reader’s Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent is one of those books that takes something utterly ordinary—humble, dirt-covered, found-in-every-kitchen potatoes—and reveals them as world-historical agents of change.
When I read it, I kept thinking: this tuber has done more to shape human destinies than many kings and conquerors.
Reader traces the potato’s journey from its Andean roots, cultivated thousands of years ago by Indigenous communities in Peru, to its global dominance. The Inca had already mastered techniques of storage and preservation (freeze-dried chuño) long before Europeans even knew the potato existed. Once the Spanish brought it back across the Atlantic, it slowly made its way into European fields and kitchens, sparking suspicion, acceptance, and eventually dependence.
The most compelling chapters deal with how the potato became entangled with politics and survival. The reader emphasizes how it fed booming populations in Europe, especially Ireland, where its tragic overreliance set the stage for the Great Famine. The irony is striking: the very crop that seemed like salvation also became a symbol of vulnerability when monoculture collided with disease.
Beyond Europe, the potato powered the Industrial Revolution by sustaining cheap labor. It was “propitious” because it delivered calories in abundance, feeding armies, workers, and migrants. The book doesn’t just celebrate the potato as a food—it positions it as a geopolitical player. Even wars, colonization, and global migrations, the Reader suggests, can be understood through this starchy lens.
The narrative is factual and well-researched, though sometimes the prose tilts toward the academic. What makes it worthwhile is the clarity with which the Reader dismantles the idea that human history is driven only by big personalities and battles. Here, it’s the esculent—the edible plant—that tips the scales.
By the end, I found myself looking at a plate of fries or a bag of chips very differently. Behind them is a 10,000-year-old story of innovation, adaptation, and survival. Reader convinces us that the potato is not just a comfort food—it is a quiet architect of modern civilization.
If Rachel Laudan’s Cuisine and Empire gives us the big picture of global food systems, and Paul Freedman’s Ten Restaurants That Changed America zooms in on dining culture, Reader’s Potato sits somewhere in between: one crop, one humble root, carrying the weight of world history.
John Reader’s Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent is one of those books that takes something utterly ordinary—humble, dirt-covered, found-in-every-kitchen potatoes—and reveals them as world-historical agents of change.
When I read it, I kept thinking: this tuber has done more to shape human destinies than many kings and conquerors.
Reader traces the potato’s journey from its Andean roots, cultivated thousands of years ago by Indigenous communities in Peru, to its global dominance. The Inca had already mastered techniques of storage and preservation (freeze-dried chuño) long before Europeans even knew the potato existed. Once the Spanish brought it back across the Atlantic, it slowly made its way into European fields and kitchens, sparking suspicion, acceptance, and eventually dependence.
The most compelling chapters deal with how the potato became entangled with politics and survival. The reader emphasizes how it fed booming populations in Europe, especially Ireland, where its tragic overreliance set the stage for the Great Famine. The irony is striking: the very crop that seemed like salvation also became a symbol of vulnerability when monoculture collided with disease.
Beyond Europe, the potato powered the Industrial Revolution by sustaining cheap labor. It was “propitious” because it delivered calories in abundance, feeding armies, workers, and migrants. The book doesn’t just celebrate the potato as a food—it positions it as a geopolitical player. Even wars, colonization, and global migrations, the Reader suggests, can be understood through this starchy lens.
The narrative is factual and well-researched, though sometimes the prose tilts toward the academic. What makes it worthwhile is the clarity with which the Reader dismantles the idea that human history is driven only by big personalities and battles. Here, it’s the esculent—the edible plant—that tips the scales.
By the end, I found myself looking at a plate of fries or a bag of chips very differently. Behind them is a 10,000-year-old story of innovation, adaptation, and survival. Reader convinces us that the potato is not just a comfort food—it is a quiet architect of modern civilization.
If Rachel Laudan’s Cuisine and Empire gives us the big picture of global food systems, and Paul Freedman’s Ten Restaurants That Changed America zooms in on dining culture, Reader’s Potato sits somewhere in between: one crop, one humble root, carrying the weight of world history.
July 23, 2023
Since I live in Idaho, and in fact work for a global agribusiness that produces a large percentage of the world's potatoes (and which is mentioned by name in this book), knowing more about the potato would seem to be a requirement. In fact, John Reader's style reminds me a lot of Simon Winchester, whose ability to take what some would consider to be mundane topics and make them fascinating has led him to be one of my favorite authors. Diving into this book, one might be tempted to wonder why Reader seems to veer off onto tangents so often—the administrative structure of the Inca Empire, a search of archival sources only a library scientist could love, the horrors of Mao's Great Leap Forward—but he never fails to weave these loose threads back into the larger narrative in a way that gives a greater appreciation for the way the potato has influenced the development of human civilization on Earth for the past 400+ years.
This book can be a little dense, but you'll enjoy every chapter, and you'll put it down in the end with a sense that reading it was time well spent and that you have a little different, more complete perspective about our modern food palette and how much effort by earlier generations went into bringing the "lowly" potato to our tables.
This book can be a little dense, but you'll enjoy every chapter, and you'll put it down in the end with a sense that reading it was time well spent and that you have a little different, more complete perspective about our modern food palette and how much effort by earlier generations went into bringing the "lowly" potato to our tables.
February 19, 2022
Tällaiset tiettyyn asiaan keskittyvät historiankirjat ovat ihanaa viihdettä. Niitä lukiessa tulee pysähdyttyä aiheena olevan asian äärelle ja toisaalta oppii kuin huomaamatta paljon muutakin.
Olin luullut että peruna ja bataatti ovat vähän sama asia, mutta eivät olekaan.
Peruna on voittaja. Se sopeutuu ja selviää, se ruokkii ihmiset tehokkaasti. Sillä on ollut merkittävä rooli maailmanpolitiikassa: se on tuonut hurjaa väestönkasvua ja pidentänyt ihmisten elinikää.
Olisin tykännyt kirjasta enemmän ilman viimeistä lukua, jossa esitetään tunkkaisia, perunaan liittymättömiä näkemyksiä globaalista kehityksestä.
Olisin kaivannut analyysia perunanviljelyn ilmasto- ja ympäristövaikutuksista (tiedän, etteivät ne ole suuret), mutta ehkä sellaiset seikat eivät kirjan ilmestymisen aikaan olleet niin paljon esillä että niihin olisi kiinnitetty tässä huomiota.
Viihdyttävä ja yleissivistävä teos.
Olin luullut että peruna ja bataatti ovat vähän sama asia, mutta eivät olekaan.
Peruna on voittaja. Se sopeutuu ja selviää, se ruokkii ihmiset tehokkaasti. Sillä on ollut merkittävä rooli maailmanpolitiikassa: se on tuonut hurjaa väestönkasvua ja pidentänyt ihmisten elinikää.
Olisin tykännyt kirjasta enemmän ilman viimeistä lukua, jossa esitetään tunkkaisia, perunaan liittymättömiä näkemyksiä globaalista kehityksestä.
Olisin kaivannut analyysia perunanviljelyn ilmasto- ja ympäristövaikutuksista (tiedän, etteivät ne ole suuret), mutta ehkä sellaiset seikat eivät kirjan ilmestymisen aikaan olleet niin paljon esillä että niihin olisi kiinnitetty tässä huomiota.
Viihdyttävä ja yleissivistävä teos.
May 18, 2017
You might not think a book about the potato would be that interesting, but this was a really good read. The potato has had a tremendous impact on every country it's been introduced to. John Reader goes through the entire history of the potato and it's journey across the planet. He spends a significant amount of time on the Irish Potato famine, and the late blight, which was its cause. Late blight is still the most significant problem with raising potatoes and Reader addresses the various methods for dealing with blight, including genetic manipulation and spraying copper based fungicides. Because the potato is relatively easy to grow in a variety of soils and climates and is a complete food when you pair it with a little fat, it has tremendous value as a food source. It also has a fascinating history, well worth the read.
October 9, 2021
I confess to a love of potatoes in all forms, hence my interest in the subject. I am surprised at how important a work, this is. This is not just a biography, but a history of the species. The potato is so intertwined with our own growth and development, John Reader's work is also an excellent explanation of our own history. The details and depth of this work is simply breathtaking. It makes one consider the political ramifications, our growth as a species and what, where, and how our own futures may develop. I was especially intrigued by the changes the potato made in Ireland, Papua New Guinea, and China. This book, or at least portions of it, should be required reading for economic, and history majors. This impressive book was also highly readable, interesting.
January 17, 2020
The story of the potato through history truly is fascinating, and John Reader covers it thoroughly. My only complaint is the book is not very linear chronologically, which I prefer in a historical text. There is quite a bit of jumping back and forth in time that I personally found hard to follow. However, the book is packed with incredible examples of the potatoes impact on the world told in a way that is intersting. It was hard to put this book down. I definitely would recommend reading it to anyone.
January 4, 2018
An interesting journey through history with the humble potato as the main ingredient.
Perhaps more on the historical than nutritional side, this is an interesting and educational read – chasing the use and influence of the tuber around the world.
He also clinically dispels the myth that Sir Walter Raleigh introduced the vegetable into Europe and gives a good understanding of the reasons why the potato blight in Ireland and other places was so devastating.
Perhaps more on the historical than nutritional side, this is an interesting and educational read – chasing the use and influence of the tuber around the world.
He also clinically dispels the myth that Sir Walter Raleigh introduced the vegetable into Europe and gives a good understanding of the reasons why the potato blight in Ireland and other places was so devastating.
May 4, 2018
A Book With A Fruit or Vegetable in the Title
This is an excellent book in the subgenre of micro-history-- combining agriculture, economics, science, and history.
Of course, the Irish Potato Famine features predominately- but also the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the commercialization of the potato and spread to China-- and the impact on the world economy.
I loved this book-- and I don't think the average reader would find it boring.
This is an excellent book in the subgenre of micro-history-- combining agriculture, economics, science, and history.
Of course, the Irish Potato Famine features predominately- but also the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the commercialization of the potato and spread to China-- and the impact on the world economy.
I loved this book-- and I don't think the average reader would find it boring.
March 29, 2020
One of the most fascinating social histories I have read - eloquent, interesting and with lots of little details that make it a memorable read. I promise you will never look at potatoes the same way once you have finished this book. Reader manages to place the potato into various historical contexts, emphasising the incredible role it played throughout human history shaping the outcomes of wars and policies. Absolutely recommended.
May 11, 2023
A 12hr audio book. The first half of the book feels like it has nothing to do with the potato, or it sound like the author gets way off topic...a lot. The second half is much better about incorporating info about the potato but a quarter of it is all speculations. Overall though, despite getting off topic, I did enjoy this book and wish their had been more on the verities, benefits, structure, and scientific data on the potato added in.
May 28, 2025
If you only have time this year to read one overly-comprehensive history of the potato, if you aren’t shy about perhaps beating the story to death and veering way off course into subjects having nothing to do with spuds, then this is the book for you.
I may come back and give this more of a review, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Just trying to do some spring cleaning in my "Currently Reading" file.
I may come back and give this more of a review, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Just trying to do some spring cleaning in my "Currently Reading" file.
February 25, 2019
Audiobook. Excellent. A social and political and botanical history of the potato - told through the lens of 3 specific time periods. The initial discovery and domestication of the potato all the way to the Irish potato famine and beyond. This book was packed with interesting facts and stories. Gave me a deeper appreciation of the potato.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 82 reviews