Where does Potato come from?
The potato comes from the Andes around Lake Titicaca, on the border of southern Peru and Bolivia. Farmers there domesticated it some 7,000 to 10,000 years ago, and today it is one of the world's main food crops.
Tamed near Lake Titicaca
Wild potatoes grow from the southern United States to southern Chile, but genetic studies trace the cultivated potato to southern Peru and the far northwest of Bolivia. A 2005 study of more than 350 wild and farmed potatoes found that the old Andean varieties descend from wild potatoes of southern Peru. The oldest confirmed tuber remains, from Ancón on the coast of central Peru, date to 2500 BC. On the high Altiplano, potatoes were the main source of energy for the Inca Empire.
A slow welcome in Europe
Spanish conquerors met the potato in the 1530s, and the Spanish brought it to Europe in the second half of the 16th century. The first trace of the potato in European trade is a receipt dated 28 November 1567 for potatoes shipped to Antwerp. Europeans distrusted this underground member of the nightshade family, and at first it mostly fed livestock or the starving. After 1750 officials and landowners in France and Germany pushed farmers to plant it, and the potato became a staple of northern Europe.
Why people think of Ireland
Ireland was probably the first part of Europe to grow potatoes on a large scale, in the early 1600s. By the 1840s nearly half its people lived almost entirely on potatoes, mostly of one or two kinds. Then late blight, a water mould, destroyed the crops year after year from 1845. About a million people died and at least a million more emigrated. The Great Famine tied the potato to Ireland in memory, but its home is the Andes.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Potato ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › History of the potato ↗ · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ↗ · britannica.com ↗ · cipotato.org ↗
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