Tuesday, December 16 2008
Year of the Spud
Do you love potatoes?
"Oh, do you like potatoes?"
Do I like potatoes? I like:
Mashed potatoes
Boiled potatoes
Scalloped potato
Whipped potato
Curried potato
French-fried potatoes
Baked potato
"Hash browns!"
Potato chips
Potato roti
Potato soup
Potato salad
Potato knish
Potato pari
Potato gelatti
Potato fritters
Potato pancakes
"Buddy, oh I want a potato pancake!"
Stompin' Tom Connors, Bud the Spud
Canada' greatest bard was proud of our Prince Edward Island potatoes and he's in good company: 2008 is the International Year of the Potato (IYP), a celebration of tubery goodness and starchy delight. Your background might parallel mine, with potatoes on the table for every meal. Solid prairie folk like their spuds, and at our house there was always--always--taters on the menu.
When I found out about the IYP, I couldn't figure out why anyone would want to celebrate an underground tuber, but a quick look around made me realise that while I'd eaten a hundred times my own weight in kartofles I knew almost nothing about them. Most folks know a bit of the basics: they come from south America, they're part of the nightshade family, they were the pivot-point of the Irish potato famine, etc., but a quick list gives some cool facts:
Nightshades (Solanaceae) include eggplant, tomato, datura, mandrake, peppers and petunias
99% of all cultivated potatoes are descended from a single plant from Southern Chile
Except for the starchy tuber itself, potato plants are poisonous
One-third of the world potato crop is grown in China and India
In 2007 the total potato crop was over seven hundred trillion pounds (that's a lot of latkes!)
The Potato Eaters, Vincent van Gogh
The UN marked the IYP for a specific reason. They're concerned about food security in the developing world, and potatoes are key to that security. They're excellent sources of carbohydrate and protein, they're rich in vitamin C, have a very good amino acid profile (making for more complete nutrition), produce more, faster and in less hospitable conditions than any other staple crop, and most of all, they're local.
Rice, wheat and corn can be dried, stored and exported. Potatoes can't move far from their place of origin. This means they provide nutrition to the people who grow them. According to the UN
. . . the potato – unlike major cereals – is not a globally traded commodity. Only a fraction of total production enters foreign trade, and potato prices are determined usually by local production costs, not by the vagaries of international markets. It is, therefore, a highly recommended food security crop that can help low-income farmers and vulnerable consumers ride out extreme events in world food supply and demand.
It turns out the idea behind the IYP is to use potatoes to help eradicate global poverty--that's a goal I can get behind. I think it's time to stop taking my chips for granted. Next year I'm going to show solidarity with the UN by planting a couple of rows of spuds in my garden, and sharing them around. Vive les pommes du terre!
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Comments
Russ Suereth
Posted 5 years ago
Here is an excerpt from an article on spud consumption in Ireland in 1944:On a typical day in 1844, the average adult Irishman ate about 13 pounds of potatoes. At five potatoes to the pound, that's 65 potatoes a day. The average for all men, women, and children was a more modest 9 pounds, or 45 potatoes. If you want to understand the devastation wrought by the notorious fungus Phythophthora infestans, you must begin with those astonishing numbers—numbers that led one 19th-century traveler to observe that "the Englishman would find considerable difficulty in stowing away in his stomach this enormous quantity of vegetable food, and how an Irishman is able to manage it is beyond my ability to explain."