Life Story Of Humble Potato: Work Published

Greymouth Evening Star, 3 August 1949, Page 6

Life Story Of Humble Potato: Work Published

The potato has found a biographer. As for the last 10 years the English nation has subsisted almost entirely on potatoes and a little bread, the honour is timely, writes Fred Majdalany in the Daily Mail, London.

Potatoes, for so long the friend of man, if not man’s figure, has been commemorated for all time in an encyclopaedic work called “The History and Social Influence of the Potato” which has just been published. The author, Dr Redcliffe N. Salaman, who loves the potato as no one has even loved it, has spent a lifetime studying his subject, and the i last nine years packing the results of his study into 685 pages. By the time Dr Salaman has finished telling the history of the potato he has told you quite a piece of world history. For the potato’s origins, it seems, we must go back to the South American Indians of 2500 years ago. They depended pathetically on the potato. They even went to the extent of regarding it as a god. To the Indians, Dr Salaman thinks, the potato eyes were regarded as mouths. The bigger these mouths the bigger the roots and the better the potato. To appease the potato god and to guide him on sound horticultural lines, they made him a human sacrifice by periodically enlarging the mouth of a man or women by cutting out the lips. Introduction to Europe It' was not until the 16th century that the potato—indigenous to the northern as well as the southern part of America—reversed the procedure of Columbus and crossed the Atlantic to Europe. The Swiss and the Prussians thought is caused scrofula; the French maintained that it caused leprosy—and when leprosy died out they said it caused fevers.

The sweet-potato, however, in due course gained itself a reputation as an aphrodisiac. The Empress Josephine quickly arranged for it to be grown at Malmaison, and the courtesans of the day rapturously adopted it. This reputation of the sweetpotato as as “inciter of Venus” crossed the Channel too.

So, with such publicityy, the sweetpotato could hardly fail to have a success with those who could afford it, and until, the common potato established itself in England the potato was regarded, on the Continent, as something luxurious, expensive and naughty the rich went in for. - The middle class made the potato respectable, as it makes almost everything respectable, given time. Arrival In England Even Dr Salaman is unable to say exactly when the potato arrived in England. It seems to have been around .1580. as there is a price list of 1590 referring to potatoes at 2s 6d per lb supplied to the Queen. It appears that professors of the potato whip themselves into a puree over the question whether Sir Walter Raleigh brought the potato from America. Dr Salaman, after weighing the evidence, thinks that he may well have done.

Lancashire pioneered the common potato in England. It was some time after that that big business in London and Bristol saw that the cheapness and nourishment of the potato'was a splendid way of, keeping workers well fed on low wages.

The one thing everyone knows about potato history is that the Irish not only ate nothing else, but drank them, too, in the form of potato spirit or poteen.

The failure of the Irish potato crop three years running in 1847-49 started a wave of emigration to America, one result of which is that the New York and Boston poliqe forces

are filled with Kellys, O’Learys, and Flahertys. More important, however, is the influence the potato failure has had on Anglo-American, relations. Much of the subsequent animosity which Americans have sometimes felt towards the British has been , inspired by American-Irish, who have not yet forgotten what the English and the potatoes did to their ancestors.