SEEING EYE TO EYE

My posting is no small potatoes today!  Follow along with the tater outline and you'll realize that while some cultures worshipped the potato, others didn't "dig" it at all and considered it evil.  These days, most people love french fries, baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, potato chips, etc., but let's found out where this tuber tale all began!
 

Potatoes are thought to have grown wild between the south of Peru and the northeast of Bolivia almost 13,000 years ago.  Incas grew them, dried and stored them, ate them, and even worshipped the potato and buried it with their dead.  The Spanish conquistadors first encountered the potato when they arrived in Peru in 1532 in search of gold. 

1565 - Spanish explorer and conqueror, Gonzalo Jiminez de Quesada, took the potato to Spain in lieu of the gold he did not find.  The Spanish though that they were a kind of truffle and called them "tartuffo."  Potatoes were soon a standard supply item on the Spanish ships when they noticed that the sailors who ate papas (potatoes) did not suffer from scurvy!

The potato was carried on to Italy and England about 1585, to Belgium and Germany by 1587, to Austria about 1588, and to France around 1600.  Wherever the potato was introduced, it was considered weird, poisonous, and downright evil, blamed for causing leprosy, early death, and even destroying the soil where it grew!  In 1588, an Irish legend says that ships of the Spanish Armada were carry potatoes when they wrecked off the Irish coast in 1588. 

1589 - Sir Walter Raleigh, British explorer and historian known for his expeditions to the Americas, first brought the potato to Ireland and planted them at his Irish estate.  Legend has it that he made a gift of the potato plant to Queen Elizabeth I.  The local gentry were invited to a royal banquet featuring the potato in every course.  Unfortunately, the cooks were unfamiliar with the vegetable; they tossed out the lumpy-looking tubers and served the royals a dish of boiled stems and leaves (which are poisonous), which promptly made everyone deathly ill.  The potatoes were then banned from court.

1719 - Potatoes had been introduced to the United States several times throughout the 1600s.  They were not widely grown for almost a century until 1719, when they were planted in Londonderry, New Hampshire, by Scotch-Irish immigrants, and from there spread across the nation. 

1771 - Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a French military chemist and botanist, won a contest sponsored by the Academy of Besancon to find a food "capable of reducing the calamities of famine" with his study of the potato called Chemical Examination of the Potato.  According to history, he was taken prisoner five times by the Prussians during the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) and obliged to survive on a diet of potatoes.  He also served dinners at which all courses were made of potatoes.  Many French potato dishes now bear his name today.

1785 - Parmentier persuades Louis XVI, King of France, to encourage planting of potatoes.  The King let him plant potatoes in 100 useless acres outside Paris, France, with troops keeping the field heavily guarded.  This aroused public curiosity and the people decided that anything so carefully guarded must be valuable.  One night Parmentier allowed the guards to go off duty, and the local farmers (as he had hoped) went into the field, confiscated the potatoes, and planted them on their own farms.  From this small start, the habit of growing and eating potatoes spread.  It is said that Marie Antoinette, Queen of France and married to Louis XVI, often pinned potato flowers in her curls.  Because of her, ladies of the era wore potato blossoms in their hair.

1774 - Russian peasants refused to have anything to do with the potato until the mid 1700s.  Frederick the Great sent free potatoes to the starving peasants after the famine of 1774, but they refused to touch them until soldiers were sent to persuade them.

1836 - Although potatoes are grown throughout the United States, no state is more associated with the potato than Idaho. The first potatoes in Idaho were planted by a  Presbyterian missionary, Henry Harmon Spalding.  Spalding established a mission to bring Christianity to the Nez Perce Indians and wanted to demonstrate that they could provide food for themselves through agriculture rather than hunting and gathering.  His first crop was a failure, but the second year the crop was successful.  However, the potato growing ended for a number of years because the Indians massacred the people of a nearby mission and Spalding left the area.

1845-1849 - The "Great Famine" in Ireland was caused because the potato crop became diseased (potato blight).  At the height of the famine (around 1845), at least 1 million people died of starvation.  This famine left many poverty-stricken families with no choice but to struggle for survival or emigrate out of Ireland.  Over 1-1/2 million people left Ireland for North America and Australia.  Over just a few years, the population of Ireland dropped by one half, from about 9 million to little more than 4 million. 

1850s - Most Americans consider the potato as food for animals rather than for humans.  As late as the middle of the 19th Century, the Farmer's Manual recommended that potatoes "be grown near the hog pens as a convenience towards feeding the hogs."

1872 - It was not until the Russet Burbank potato was developed by American horticulturist Luther Burbank in 1872 that the Idaho potato industry really took off.  Burbank, while trying to improve the Irish potato, developed a hybrid that was more disease resistant.  He introduced the Burbank potato to Ireland to help combat the blight epidemic.  He sold the rights to the Burbank potato for $150, which he used to travel to Santa Rosa, California.  In Santa Rosa, he established a nursery garden, greenhouse, and experimental farms that have become famous throughout the world.  By the early 1900s, the Russet Burbank potato began appearing throughout Idaho.

"What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a

pretty decent sort of fellow."

- A. A. Milne (author of Winnie the Pooh)

 If beef's the king of meat, the potato's the queen of the garden world.
Irish Saying

In addition to providing starch, an essential part of the diet, potatoes are rich in vitamin C, high in potassium, and an excellent source of fiber.  In fact, potatoes alone supply every vital nutrient except calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin D.  

Blog Dog Dan says: "It's okay to be a couch potato, as long as you're reading my blog and watching my videos!  Let's watch a Tiny Toons Adventure and listen to Duncan ask for mashed "topatoes."