The Mysteries of the Potato Revealed
Europe took a very long time to get used to the spud, according to John Reader in Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent. The Bible never mentions potatoes, so European clergymen in the 1700s banned the consumption of the suspiciously anonymous tuber. Doctors in the previous century had already decided that the lumpy vegetables appeared too similar to human hands and feet deformed by leprosy, and professionals suggested that potatoes probably caused the dreaded disease. Frederick of Prussia allegedly threatened violence when his starving subjects refused to eat potatoes, his government’s solution to a famine caused by the Seven Years’ War, because some peasants were sure potatoes caused scrofula, rickets, and gout. Not all Europeans thought ill of the potato upon first introduction, though. Dr. Tobias Venner in 1622 decided that the potato “incites to Venus,” and in the next century, herbalist William Salmon said the new vegetables “provoke Lust.” Well, stranger things have been declared aphrodisiacs.
We may laugh at the Europeans’ early confusion, but the potato has left us with a few mysteries even to the present day. Tracking the history of prehistoric farming is tricky enough, but the potato added a significant question mark to agricultural history thousands of years ago. In Mount Verde, a site in Chile, remains of a human settlement about 12,500 years old were found in the 1970s. Soon after the settlement was abandoned, a bog formed, and the peat layers preserved usually perishable materials. Among the artifacts discovered were pieces of potatoes. This is odd for several reasons: nobody thought humans had migrated so far south into the Americas by 12,500 years ago, and everyone believed humans were still hunter-gathers at that period. Not only did it shock the archaeological community to find a settlement that old, but they now had to deal with the complications the potatoes added to their theory. The next “reliable evidence” of ancient potato consumption after Mount Verde cannot be dated to more than 8,000 years ago, so there’s quite a gap in potato history. The Andean origins of potato farming are nearly as mysterious as what (exactly) is inside your fast-food French fry, in its pretentious imitation of the “propitious esculent.”
