Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
1
A History of the Potato
Charles Raymond Brown
1
* and Jan-Willem Henfling
2
1
USDA-ARS, Prosser, Washington, USA;
2
Hilversum, the Netherlands
1.1
Domesticating the Potato Crop
Cultivated potato,
Solanum tuberosum
Group
Stenotomum, is now known to have been selected
from the
Solanum brevicaule
complex, which gave
rise to today's potato (Spooner
et al
., 2005).
By the time the Spanish arrived in South
America, Andean societies were highly organ-
ized and had developed agricultural systems, in-
cluding a collective possession of thousands of
types of potato and maize. One of the first de-
scriptions of potato was made by a Spanish
soldier in the highlands of Colombia in 1535.
A drawing of the potato harvest
(Fig. 1.2)
comes
from the handwritten book scribed by Felipe
Guamán Poma de Ayala, who sought to docu-
ment the societal interactions of the Spanish
and native Quechua-speaking peoples. The
drawing depicts harvesting potatoes using the
Andean foot plow, or
chaquitaccla
, an implement
still used in the Andes of Peru.
Guamán's manuscript was taken to Spain
in 1616, ostensibly as a report to King Phillip II,
but was given as a gift to the Ambassador from
Denmark. It disappeared from view and resur-
faced in the Royal Danish Library in 1908.
Years of scholarship were required to interpret
its archaic Spanish mixed with Quechua
(Adorno, 1986). The first facsimile appeared in
1936, produced by the Institute of Ethnography
in Paris (Guamán Poma de Ayala, 1615, 1936,
1944). The topic is available online, with
The popularity of the potato has fluctuated over
the years and it is therefore appropriate to con-
sider the history of the potato leading up to mod-
ern times. About 7000 years ago, inhabitants
of the Andes in South America were predomin-
antly hunter-gatherers and tended semi-wild
herds of native camelids (llamas, vicuñas, and
alpacas), yet they began to take an interest in a
curious plant
(
Fig. 1.1
). It flowered and produced
inedible seed balls, but also produced starchy
underground tubers. The tubers were produced
at the end of underground stems, oftentimes
located a fair distance from the mother plant.
The tubers were large enough for a mouthful
after cooking and were energy rich. Further-
more, they acted as big seeds, and once planted,
they produced potato plants, which in turn pro-
duced more tubers. Because the seeds were large,
they had enough stored carbohydrates to restart
plant growth initially inhibited by a killing frost
(International Potato Center, 2008).
The tubers were storable and transport-
able, and provided nourishment to a society
that was in constant motion. Some of the tubers
were bitter tasting, but a palatable solution
was found. Specific clay soils were used to
render the potatoes non-bitter by adsorbing
glycoalkaloids into the clay (Johns, 1996).
