Opinion Our love-hate relationship with the potato — and where it all began

French fries and tomato ketchup may be a match made in fast food heaven, but the meet-cute that changed the world occurred nine million years ago in the freezing cold of the Andean slopes. A recent study published in Cell has traced the origin of the beloved potato to another pantry essential, the tomato, and its fling with a wild potato species known as the Etuberosum. The research conducted by a team at the Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen, China, solves a mystery that has long gripped the world of botany: How is it that the potato plant, which bears a strong outward resemblance to its wilder relative, is genetically closer to the tomato?

The discovery is exciting for at least two reasons. One, it shows that genomes can help solve the mystery of how much of today’s flora evolved — a significant breakthrough considering the rarity of plant fossils (soft vegetative matter doesn’t preserve as well as, for example, the hard shells of marine invertebrates like snails). Two, it shows how looking to a plant’s past may help preserve its future; the potato, it turns out, could only evolve because a key gene in the tomato unlocked the tuber-producing gene in the Etuberosum, with the resulting hybrid growing a new starchy organ that resembles the modern spud. Given its importance to food security — potatoes only rank behind rice, wheat and maize in global production volume — there are already attempts to use tomato genes to create even hardier varieties of the tuber.

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Despite its wholesomeness and endless flexibility, adding heft, texture and flavour to cuisines everywhere since the Spanish shipped it to Europe in the 16th century, the potato has all too often been reduced to playing a supporting role in meals. In a world obsessed with limiting carbs, it has been vilified and villainised, held responsible for ballooning weights and expanding girths. Could the discovery of the Miocene-epoch romance, a random encounter that led to the birth of a food that can feed billions of the Earth’s hungry, help rehabilitate its image? The world says potayto, genetics says tomahto.