17 November 2008

By Ethel White and Jim McAdam, AFBI Applied Plant Science and Biometrics Division, Plant Testing Station, Crossnacreevy, Belfast

The potato, believe it or not, only reached Britain at the end of the 16^th century and Ireland in the early 17^th century.

The story of the potato actually began in South America.  Archaeologists recently uncovered evidence from a bog in Southern Chile that humans had been settled in Chile about 12,500 years ago and that these people had gathered, processed and eaten potatoes, along with many other plants and also animals. These early nomadic peoples colonised right to the southern tip of South America but further north, in the mid-Andean highlands a remarkable civilisation, the Incas, emerged some time later.

The empire of the Incas was based on a technologically sophisticated agriculture – terraces, irrigation systems, fertilisers, and maize, with potatoes as the staple crop in the high Andes.

Sir Walter Raleigh, surprisingly, is credited with introducing the potato to Europe but the potato wasn’t actually present in North America at the time either Sir Walter visited Virginia or the settlers he sent there did. Sir Francis Drake also knew the potato because he recorded in his journal seeing it on an island off the coast of Chile in 1578 but it seems clear that he didn’t bring it back to England.

Historical investigations have recently confirmed that the potato was first brought to the Canary Islands as early as 1567 and from there to Spain in about 1570.  

However, the science of botany was still in its infancy and it would be another 150 years before Linnaeus simplified the method of naming plants. So it is not surprising that historians have had difficulty in knowing whether references to potatoes mean sweet potatoes or the ‘common’ potato.  

In Europe it was war which forced people to grow potatoes. In France, a pharmacist, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, pioneered nutritional chemistry and persuaded the government that potatoes could solve their food security problems. In Ireland also the potato took off and in the wetter north-west of England, to the extent that in the mid 18^th century potatoes were exported from Liverpool to Gibraltar.  

The climate of Ireland suited the potato and the potato suited the people of Ireland. Up to about 1675 it was a supplementary food and famine standby, grown in gardens, and no serious disease was recorded.  From 1675 to 1750 it was a winter food for the poor, a supplement to meals for most people, grown widely in ‘lazy beds’ and constituted at least one meal a day.  By the time of the famine, the average rural person in Ireland was eating over 6 pounds of potato per day - an annual consumption of almost 1 ton per person!  

Spores of the potato blight fungus arrived from Europe in 1845, destroying most of the crop in the years 1845 – 1847. The resulting famine, largely brought about by a single crop dependency, resulted in rural devastation on a scale not encountered elsewhere in Great Britain or in Europe. Between 1845 and 1851 almost one million people died and two million emigrated.  

There can be no doubt the role of the ‘humble spud’ has indeed played a huge part in changes on landscape and population dispersion throughout the world.

Notes to Editors

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