From South America to India, how the humble potato swept the world

A potato is composed primarily of water (about 79 per cent), followed by carbohydrates and protein. It also contains essential vitamins and minerals. “Just 100 gm of potato provides nearly half the minimum daily requirement of vitamin C…,” notes author John Reader in Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent (2009). Potatoes are also rich in B-Complex vitamins, calcium, iron, and potassium.

According to Reader, the most primitive living relative of the tuber-bearing potato is a small epiphyte called Solanum morelliforme. The plant has leaves, flowers, and small berries and is found growing on the branches of oak trees in southern Mexico. Scholars suggest that ancestors resembling these wild species were present in the south-west United States and Mexico 40 million years ago, and migrated into South America when the Isthmus of Panama was formed 3.5 million years ago. Reader notes, “Their history thereafter was one of botanical diversification and geographical expansion as the potato advanced and adapted to thrive in the host of ecological niches that South America had to offer.”

Many root plants are still grown commercially in South America, but S. tuberosum, the common potato, is globally known. In Potato: A Global History (2020), academic Andrew F. Smith reckons that the domestication of S. tuberosum began around 10,000 BCE by Andean farmers in the Lake Titicaca basin.

“In one of the world’s most inhospitable terrains for agriculture, the potato became the chief food of the people,” says Smith. The potato was well suited to the summer heat, which made possible the growth of the above-ground plant, while cooler nights encouraged the growth of the tuber.

Once harvested, potatoes last only a few months before they sprout and eventually succumb to mold. Indigenous South Americans, interestingly, developed a method to preserve them in ways that they can be stored for years.

The advent of the Inca Empire around 1430, initially a small tribe living around Cuzco, Peru, changed the fate of the potato. The Inca Empire was conquered by the Spanish around 1532. Smith argues that after the conquest, the Spanish encouraged the cultivation of the potato, and to collect taxes in the form of chuno—a freeze-dried potato—which they used to feed construction workers.

Historians such as William H McNeill suggest that potatoes paid for Spain’s military conquests and political power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Smith notes, “…and thus the potato, which fed the workers, had radically changed world history.”

Potatoes, consumed by the masses in mid-eighteenth-century Europe, led to massive population growth.  “And it was this massive rise in population [in Northern Europe],” argues Smith, “that permitted Western European nations to colonize the world.”

The potato arrives in Europe

The potato arrived in Europe around the 1570s. “What is unclear is precisely where these potatoes came from,” writes Smith. “Potatoes were ideal for feeding sailors on long voyages, but when the ships arrived in Spain, excess provisions would have been jettisoned. So it’s not surprising that the first record of S. tuberosum outside of South America appears in the Canary Islands [in Spain], a stopping point for ships sailing to and from the Americas,” he adds.

Potatoes from Spain were sent to Italy, where they were at first called taratouffli (truffles). When the Spanish engaged in war in the Low Countries (modern-day Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg), they developed a line of supply beginning from Spain through northern Italy, south-western Germany, and south-eastern France. “The Spanish armies brought potatoes with them, and farmers along the supply line grew potatoes to sell to the military formations and supply trains as they passed by,” Smith notes.

He observes that potatoes were grown in Italy by the 1570s, in Germany by 1581, and in Switzerland and France soon after. Smith concludes, “By the seventeenth century the potato was cultivated as an agricultural crop, especially as a substitute for rye”.

However, not all European herbalists were fond of the tuber. Some believed potatoes were poisonous and caused leprosy and other diseases. Some French provincial governments, in fact, forbade their cultivation.

Not until the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) did the potato become an essential item. “This war produced one of the worst famines in European history, and peasants and soldiers alike adopted the potato without hesitation,” writes Smith.

When potatoes reached England is debatable. English explorer Francis Drake is believed to have introduced potatoes from Chile into England in 1578. According to Smith, “In England, Scotland and Ireland, potatoes were mainly grown in gardens until the late seventeenth century.” Although used as horse fodder in England, Scotland and Ireland grew it for human consumption.

When the aloo came to India

“The chronology of the potato’s early spread across the Indian subcontinent is no clearer than that of its dissemination across Europe,” writes historian Rebecca Earle in Feeding The People: The Politics Of The Potato (2020). By the mid-sixteenth century, Portuguese vessels were sailing regularly to Indian ports and had established themselves in Cochin on India’s western coast.

“Edward Terry, who served as a chaplain for the East India Company in the early seventeenth century, reported seeing ‘potatoes excellently well dressed’ at a banquet in Rajasthan hosted by the Mughal statesman Asaf Khan in 1615,” Earle adds.

Later, the British East India Company sent potatoes along its trade routes into the Himalayas, where Sherpas called them ‘English potatoes’. Buddhist monks are said to have begun cultivating potatoes in Bhutan and Nepal in the 1700s. Reader points out that “just as in Europe, the new and prolific food source set the population rising dramatically.”

Earle finds that when nutritionists in Europe were denouncing the potato as inferior to bread, Indian nutritionists such as Baneswar Singha called it superior to rice. She adds, “Potatoes therefore formed part of a larger programme to strengthen the nationalist movement by strengthening Indian bodies”.

The potato that the British viewed as a symbol of superiority, according to Earle, became a symbol of protest for the colonised. While colonialism brought the potato to India, Earle says, “…these forces alone did not determine the roles it now plays in Indian culture”.

Today, the potato has become an indispensable part of Indian cuisine, and India is the world’s second-largest producer and consumer of the starchy staple.