How Carrots Won the Trojan War

by Rebecca Rupp

  “One man, “lying helpless and almost hopeless in his berth,” was so revived by raw potatoes that in no time he was once again “at the mast-head, furling a royal.”

  Potatoes do make seeds, which are contained in the potato berry, a small green tomatolike fruit that usually gets tossed unappreciatively on the compost heap. The seeds are tiny. There are perhaps fifty thousand in an ounce, enough to plant an acre’s worth of potatoes, as opposed to a bulky sixteen hundred pounds of seed potatoes. Potato seed is also relatively disease-free compared to the tubers, which are notorious carriers of viruses, and it’s solely through potato seed that genetic diversity is introduced into the largely uniform national potato crop.

  Such diversity is a two-sided coin: since potato seed is a genetically mixed bag, developing potato varieties that breed true is no Sunday picnic. Most potatoes are tetraploid — containing quadruple sets of twelve chromosomes each — and such complex hybrids are difficult to sort out in even the most dedicated laboratory.

  Seed potatoes, as in pieces of tuber, on the other hand, are reproducible, faster-growing, and produce more infant potatoes. In general, potatoes generate four times the calories contained in an identical area of land planted in grain. A mere acre’s worth can feed a family of six for a year. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the nutritious and comparatively effortless potato ignited a pan-European baby boom. The unprecedented availability of food caused populations to double and double again. The Industrial Revolution was largely fueled by potatoes, which provided a wave of well-fed workers for factories, soldiers for armies, and immigrants for colonies overseas. A lot of us are around these days because of an influential potato in our pasts.

  Nowhere were the benefits of the potato more obvious than in Ireland. By the early 1800s, the Irish had been living off potatoes — and pretty much nothing but potatoes — for over two hundred years. Potatoes first reached Ireland, according to one story, in barrels washed ashore from the wreck of the Armada. Others credit Sir Walter Raleigh, and according to historian William McNeill, the most likely source was visiting Basque fishermen, who originally got their potatoes from Spain. In any case, by the early 1700s, nourished by potatoes, the population of Ireland had doubled to 2 million; by 1800, it had reached 5 million; and, by 1843, 8.5 million.

  Outside observers were of two minds about the prolific potato and its prolific effects. The fiery William Cobbett — who wrote that “the Irish people are brave, generous, hospitable, laborious, and full of genius” — fumed that the “ever-damned potato” had reduced them to the “state of hogs, and worse than that of hogs . . . poor, ragged, half-naked creatures” living in mud huts and burning peat. Sir Walter Scott, on the other hand, touring Ireland in 1825, remarked on the gaiety and lightheartedness of the peasants, who were fond of fiddling and dancing, and were always willing to share their simple bowls of potatoes with passing tourists. Arthur Young, visiting in the late 1770s, praised the fine physiques of the Irish men and the good looks of the women.

  Cobbett’s assessment of the potato proved closest to the truth. Dependence on a single subsistence crop is a recipe for disaster, and nowhere has this proved more tragically true than in Ireland. Potato crop failure and famine had struck Ireland at least twenty-four times between 1728 and 1845, the kick-off year of what we now know as the Great Hunger, but never before were the results so devastating. The Irish Potato Famine of the late 1840s has been cited as Europe’s worst disaster since the passage of the Black Death in 1348-50. A million and a half Irish died, and a million and a half more fled overseas. Ireland, in one fell swoop, lost over a quarter of its population.

  By the 1840s, the bulk of Irish fields were planted with a single variety of potato, a large, ugly, but notably fertile tuber descriptively known as the Lumper. In August of 1845, when the potato harvest began, the tubers, to universal horror, were found to have turned to black slime in the ground. The potato failure was not just an Irish but a global catastrophe — potatoes disintegrated worldwide across Europe and America, from the Andes to the Himalayas — but the Irish, wholly dependent upon potatoes, were by far the worst afflicted.

  By the 1840s, the bulk of Irish fields were planted with a single variety of potato, a large, ugly, but notably fertile tuber descriptively known as the Lumper.

  “Rotten potatoes have done it all!” raged the conservative Duke of Wellington.

  Left to cope with the Irish situation was British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, nicknamed “Orange Peel” for his notorious nonsupport of the Irish. (Irish activist Daniel O’Connell once described him as having a chilly smile “like the silver plate on a coffin.”) Actually he seems to have been a pleasant man in private life, with an adoring wife, seven children, and a massive manor in Staffordshire known for its magnificent gardens and flock of peacocks. Today he is best remembered for founding the Metropolitan Police, still known, in Sir Robert’s honor, as bobbies.

  To his credit, the chilly Sir Robert did his best, attempting to alleviate the catastrophic situation in Ireland by importing half a million dollars’ worth of Indian corn from the United States. To do so he was forced to put his political reputation on the line. The purchase of food for Ireland necessitated the repeal of the disputed Corn Laws — tariffs that since the turn of century had restricted the import of foreign cereal grains. The Corn Laws had been a bone of vicious contention for decades: rich landowners, who supported them, wanted to ban cheap imported grain that might reduce their incomes; hopeful industrialists, who opposed them, argued that cheaper grain prices would drive down the price of food, thus freeing up more income for consumers to spend on manufactured goods.

  The potato, by self-destructing, tipped the balance, forcing the British government, confronted with an island of starving Irish, to give way. The demise of the Corn Laws changed the political face of England and paved the way for a range of liberal reforms. “Rotten potatoes have done it all!” raged the conservative Duke of Wellington. Peel, in the wake of the potatoes, resigned his post as prime minister and never held government office again.

  In the short term, cheap imported American corn did no good. The Irish, who had no mills and thus lacked the means to process, cook, or eat it, referred to the British offering as “Peel’s brimstone,” and continued to starve. Visitors to Ireland described a land in ruins: land untilled, cottages empty, the people “famished and ghastly,” “tattered skeletons.”

  For many, the better part of valor was to flee: in the wake of the famine, over a million Irish immigrants came to the United States. Despite awful past experience, they brought with them their predilection for potatoes, which in their adopted country were soon nicknamed mickeys or murphys in honor of their prime consumers. The Irish and their potatoes were so closely linked in the popular mind that by the latter half of the nineteenth century the predominantly Irish Boston police were known as the Blue Potatoes.

  The 1846–48 potato failures were blamed on everything from steam locomotives to volcanic eruptions, gases from the newly invented sulfur matches, an elusive “aerial taint” from outer space, wet weather, and (from Charles Trevelyan, director of Britain’s famine relief program) God’s will. From whatever source, the blight was seemingly inexorable. Botanist John Lindley, editor of the Gardener’s Chronicle, wrote despairingly “As to cure for this distemper — there is none.” Queen Victoria called for a national day of prayer.

  The evil genius behind the Great Hunger was eventually run to earth by a handful of amateur mycologists scattered across Belgium, France, and England — most effectively by an unprepossessing country clergyman, the Reverend Miles Joseph Berkeley of King’s Cliffe in Northamptonshire, who, since his college days, had had a passion for fungi. When the blight appeared in the potato fields of King’s Cliffe, the Reverend (“a tall well-built man of singularly noble appearance”) rushed samples to his microscope and emerged with an illustrated 35-page report declaring the perpetrator of the blight to be a fungus.

  Eventually
designated Phytophthora infestans (the genus name means “plant destroyer”), the fatal fungus usually infects the plant leaves first, then spores wash into the soil to infiltrate and destroy the underground tubers. So rapid and devastating is the result that in the past the United States, the Soviet Union, and Germany have all conducted research on P. infestans as a possible biological weapon.

  * * *

  In Event of Disaster

  The Irish Potato Famine led to a frenzy of potato breeding and diversification, to the point where potato cultivars now number in the thousands. The International Potato Center in Peru — home of the ancestral potato — has a collection of 5,500, plus a stash of 1,500 samples of germplasm from 100 wild species. The theory is that if potato disaster strikes again, we can eventually recover. E. O. Wilson said, “We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.”

  * * *

  The catastrophic passage of Phytophthora infestans had a substantial impact on the types of potatoes grown, and breeders were egged on by such incentives as the offering of a ten-thousand-dollar prize from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to the person to discover “a sure and practical remedy for the Potato Rot.” The best of the proposed remedies was a new potato known as the Garnet Chili, developed in 1853 by Reverend Chauncey Goodrich of Utica, New York, from a wild South American variety.

  From the Garnet Chili, Albert Bresee of Hubbardton, Vermont, produced the Early Rose, an introduction of the 1860s that rapidly became America’s top potato. The Early Rose gave way in the 1870s to the Burbank potato, developed in 1873 by twenty-three-year-old Luther Burbank from a seedball stumbled across in his mother’s Massachusetts garden. Burbank sold his landmark potato for $150 to nurseryman J. J. H. Gregory and used the proceeds to move to California. There he settled down in Santa Rosa and went on to create a white blackberry, a stoneless cherry, and a spineless cactus, plus a grand total of seventy-eight new fruits, nine new vegetables, eight new nuts, and several hundred new varieties of ornamentals, including the Shasta daisy. His potato is the ancestor of the Russet Burbank, the potato that made Idaho famous.

  P. infestans, however, is still around. The killer mold — which can also doom tomatoes — still wipes out crops to the tune of over $6 billion a year worldwide. The reason, according to the international team of scientists who mapped the P. infestans genome in 2009, is the fungus’s enormous and versatile complement of DNA. P. infestans has over twice as much DNA as its feebler and less invasive relatives, and it appears to be able to juggle its genes to adapt rapidly to varying conditions. With a little genetic adjustment, it evades chemical pesticides and demonstrates an uncanny persistence in overcoming the defense mechanisms of resistant potatoes.

  Scientists continue to produce fungus-fighting potatoes. Best known in the United States is the defiantly named Defender potato, which came on the market in 2004, offspring of a cultivar called Ranger Russet and a blight-resistant Polish potato. Most recently geneticists at the Agricultural Research Service in Madison, Wisconsin, are attempting to cross cultivated potatoes with Solanum verrucosum, a highly blight-resistant wild potato species, and potatoes genetically engineered for blight resistance are being tested in Ireland, where a new and meaner strain of P. infestans popped up in 2009.

  By the early twentieth century, potato varieties numbered in the thousands. The seed house of Vilmorin-Andrieux, announcing despairingly that “the number of the varieties of the Potato is prodigious,” listed a mere 135, including 31 French varieties, 18 German, 19 American (including the Jumbo White Elephant), and 25 English, among them the quintessentially British Rector of Woodstock and Vicar of Laleham.

  Production of potatoes today tops 325 million tons a year, putting the potato fourth on the list of the world’s staple crops, behind wheat, rice, and maize. China is the world’s top potato producer, turning out about a quarter of the total crop, most of which goes into vodka or livestock feed. Next in line are Russia, India, and the United States. (Ireland no longer even makes it into the top ten.) The U.S. accounts for about 20 million tons of potatoes a year, the lion’s share from Idaho, whose modest state license plate reads “Famous Potatoes.”

  Jefferson encountered “French” fried potatoes in Paris while American ambassador to France in the 1780s and become fond enough of them to offer fries to guests at Monticello.

  * * *

  Mr. Potato Head

  When George Lerner invented the Mr. Potato Head toy in the late 1940s, it consisted of an assortment of plastic features — eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and a wardrobe of silly little hats — intended to be jabbed into a real potato. Toy manufacturers didn’t think much of it; the industry buzz was that the public would hate the frivolous waste of perfectly good food.

  Nevertheless, a tiny Rhode Island business named Hasbro, Inc. consented to take it on. It was a brilliant call on Hasbro’s part. In 1952, the year Mr. Potato Head hit the toy stores, he earned the company $4 million. He also had the distinction of being the first toy ever to be advertised on the then brand-new television.

  By 1953, in a spirit of potato gender equality, Mrs. Potato Head came on the market, followed by a pair of Potato Head offspring, Spud and Yam. A plastic potato was substituted for the genuine vegetable in 1964.

  * * *

  Americans eat about 117 pounds of potatoes a year, which averages out to about a potato a day apiece. About a third of these are fresh potatoes; the rest are processed, that is, frozen, dehydrated, French-fried, or chipped. Processing results in unavoidable vitamin loss, but that doesn’t seem to hold American consumers back any. In this country, five billion pounds of potatoes a year go to make French fries.

  We owe French fries to the Francophilic Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson encountered “French” fried potatoes in Paris while serving as American ambassador to France in the 1780s and become fond enough of them to offer fries to guests at Monticello once he returned home. The recipe “To fry Sliced Potatoes” that appears in Mary Randolph’s Virginia Housewife (1824) is most likely Jefferson’s, possibly by way of his French chef at the President’s House in Philadelphia, Etienne Lemaire.

  Despite this elite introduction, French fries didn’t catch the public fancy until the 1870s and weren’t really common until the twentieth century. They were known quite formally as “French fried potatoes” until the 1920s, when the name was shortened to “French frieds”; then a decade later it was truncated even further to the now-familiar “French fries.” Most French fries today are Russet Burbanks, vaguely rectangular potatoes eminently suitable for dissection into squared-off strips.

  In Great Britain, French fries are known as chips, as in “fish and chips,” while potato chips are known as crisps, presumably because they are. Like ice-cream cones, Hula-Hoops, and Frisbees, potato chips are an American invention. The story goes that they first came to light in the late 1800s at the Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, a then-fashionable upstate New York spa. The chef, an American Indian named George Crum, ran afoul of a cantankerous customer — embellished versions claim it was Cornelius Vanderbilt — who kept sending his fried potatoes back to the kitchen, complaining that they were too thick. Driven to the wall, Crum finally sliced his potatoes paper-thin and served up the fried result. The crispy potatoes were a wild success, and for years afterward, dubbed “Saratoga chips,” were a specialty of the Moon’s Lake House, stuffed into paper cornucopias made by the owner’s wife.

  * * *

  No Small Potatoes

  The term “small potatoes” — meaning insignificant things or people — has been an insult since 1831. It’s a terrible misnomer. Potatoes are productive, nutritious, and easy to grow. Over the last few decades, potato consumption has steadily increased in Asia, Africa, and Latin America — which means that potatoes are now providing food for a lot of previously empty tables. There’s nothing small about potatoes.

  * * *

  Dehydrated potatoes date at least to th
e Civil War, when they were included — along with salt pork and hardtack — in the unappetizing rations of the Army of the Potomac.

  Dehydrated potatoes date at least to the Civil War, when they were included — along with salt pork and hardtack — in the unappetizing rations of the Army of the Potomac. They first made it big, however, in World War II, when they were mercilessly fed to the U.S. troops. Civilians voluntarily ate 12 pounds apiece of these in 2009. Instant-potato proponents claim nutritional advantages, citing the average 20 percent nutritional loss that results from the amateur peeling of fresh potatoes in the home or institutional kitchen. That’s easy to do, since one-third of the potato’s nutrients are squeezed into a thin band called the cortex, located just beneath the peel. (It shows up as a darker border around the rim of potato chips.)

  Instant potatoes are also said to be cheaper than genuine mashed potatoes. My personal feeling, however, is that potatoes should not have the consistency of Cream of Wheat, and that the best use of dehydrated potatoes is by the assorted filmmakers who have used the flakes in Christmas movies to imitate snow.

  Even more inedible is the Amflora potato, a genetically modified spud designed for purely industrial use. The ordinary potato contains about 25 grams of carbohydrate per medium-sized tuber, most of it in the form of starch. The quickie test for starch, as you might remember from Biology 101, is to dunk the questionable material in iodine; if it turns black, it’s starch. Perhaps the most creative use of the starch test in history was that of master criminal John Dillinger, who carved a pistol out of a potato, stained it with iodine, and used it to escape from jail. (To be fair, an alternative story claims he whittled the pistol from a piece of a wooden washboard and painted it with shoe polish.)