Food - Bee Wilson on the vegetable that changed humanity
The food of the millennium is not chocolate, contrary to what some might hope, nor the hamburger, contrary to what some might fear. It is the potato. For all its parochial, lumpy appearance, the potato has changed human history. The whims of fashion, superstition, faith in scientific progress, human vulnerability, prosperity, disaster, hard labour - all these are part of the potato's story. Of all the items on your Christmas plate, though you may notice it the least, the roast potato is the one that best expresses the struggles and glories of the past 1,000 years.
The potato has been hated and loved, hated and loved again. Though it seems bland now, in its day it was as controversial as any beef on the bone or GM tomato. When Spanish conquistadors first brought them back to Europe from the Andean plateaus, these "venerous roots" were held responsible for lust, wind and even leprosy (though I trust not all three at once). They were seen as inferior to sweet potatoes in flavour, and to chestnuts in texture. Potatoes were loathed by William Cobbett, in the 19th century, as the root of "slovenliness, filth, misery and slavery".
The potato's champions have been as evangelical as its detractors. Once it was fully established as a European crop, some even thought it might be used as a solution to world hunger. After wheat-hungry France endured famine in 1770, an army pharmacist called Parmentier argued that the potato would be the country's salvation. He hosted dinners where all 20 dishes consisted of potatoes. He even persuaded Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to wear purple potato blossoms, sparking off a court fashion, as Larry Zuckerman recounts in The Potato (Macmillan). After the revolution, thousands of copies of Parmentier's pamphlets were distributed; his name is still attached to dishes containing potato. But his potato bread never became a staple: the French peasantry remained wedded to its bread and grain porridge.
As we all know, Ireland was a different case. Explanations for the potato's popularity in Ireland are numerous - the wetness of the land and the mildness of the Gulf Stream, land hunger, the nature of Irish farming - but it is ultimately a mystery why they, above all other nations, even Scotland, took to the potato. You might suppose that superstition would have counted against this weird new tuber. Indeed, after Raleigh introduced it to Ireland in the 1590s, Protestants wouldn't plant it, because it wasn't mentioned in the Bible. Catholics dealt with the superstition by planting on Good Friday, and sprinkling the seed potatoes with holy water. What magical effects that holy water had! As the potato bore countless fruit in Ireland's wet soil, so did the populace. Potatoes fed the population explosion of labouring poor in a way that wheat, which was susceptible to crop failure and fluctuating prices, could not. Potatoes bred babies, albeit poor ones.
Some people even thought that an unvar-ied potato diet made you more fertile, so prolific were the Irish. Others foresaw problems with their spud-u-like existence. "Is it not possible," Malthus presciently asked, "that one day the potato crop itself will fail?" A wheat-eating population could fall back on barley, oats, rice and potatoes; but a potato-eating one was left stranded in a stinking black bog. When the high-yield Lumper crop was hit by blight in 1845, the population caved in like an overcooked baked potato. By 1851, approximately a million Irish had died and a million more emigrated.
Amazingly, the Irish fondness for potatoes persisted and persists, boiled with butter, mashed with buttermilk, mixed with greens in comforting colcannon, eaten so fast and hot they stick to the ribs. But the famine left agriculturalists with permanent lessons about the need to maintain a variety of crops and genes. "Biodiversity" - that current buzzword - is in some senses an offshoot of the Irish potato famine.
The potato itself has also diversified, across the world and across the classes - in varieties, in uses and in social connotations. In Seville, you can smell the olive oil heating for tortillas, clamped between bread for a child's lunch; there is a different oily aroma in Calcutta, promising the golden tenderness of aloo makalla; in Tokyo, Bangkok, Beijing, the golden arches of McDonald's yield the scent of fries, the ultimate global potato; McDo's fries are sniffable in Paris, too, though round a corner there may be affluent men tucking into waxy gratin dauphinoise; other affluent men, this time in Venice, nibble delicate cakes of potato flour and brandy while their poorer cousins eat potato gnocchi; plates of Bavarian Fleisch call out for Kartoffeln, just as "meat" calls out for "potatoes" in Idaho; in Leeds, you watch urchins loafing with packets of prawn cocktail flavour crisps and twice-fried chips, though their dieting sisters are keener on jackets with cottage cheese; in San Francisco, whole heads of roasted garlic are beaten into mash; in Wiltshire they favour those tiny boxes of expensive Charlottes that go so well with salmon fillet; in New York, the same salmon is smoked and paired with latkes; but in provincial Russia they still eat them big and floury, boiled, with pickled mushrooms in times of plenty and nothing but fat in times of poverty, to ward off starvation.
These last are the real Potato Eaters, as painted by Van Gogh in 1885, whose nobbly tubers seem designed to match their careworn faces. "I have tried," wrote Van Gogh of his famous picture, "to make it clear how these people, eating their potatoes under the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish." Potato Eaters speaks of "manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food". How little one associates this honest labour with the microwaved, reconstituted potato waffle, symbol of the new masses; but perhaps the waffle-eater is less susceptible to exploitation than Van Gogh's downtrodden peasants. Boiled potatoes and the proletariat are both archetypes of this millennium. Whether they will flourish in the next remains to be seen.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
