Potatoes: Hints Respecting The Culture

The potato is a starchy and a crop that stores a lot of nutrients. Nowadays, it’s the fourth most important crop, following rice, wheat, and maize, and sugar cane. People ate the potato much earlier, and we still eat it today. Potatoes had a long history. The origin of the potato was in South America. They were extremely versatile as foods and later on, they served more purposes. Potatoes were discovered in 1536, where the Spanish Conquistadors conquered Peru from the Inca Indians and discovered the flavors of the regular potato. Before the beginning of the seventeenth century, the families of Basque started to farm potatoes along the Biscay coast of northern Spain. At 1621, it arrived in the colonies residing in the United States by the British governor of the Bahamas. The first permanent potato patches

It was finally put to actual use when there was food shortages during the Revolutionary War. The Board of Agriculture issued a pamphlet called “Hints Respecting the Culture and Use of Potatoes” soon after in 1795. Peasants still remained suspicious. Even in 1771, a paper was published by the Faculté de Paris stating the potato did not give negative effects, instead positive! Frederick the Great of Prussia also wanted to use potatoes to reduce the cost of bread and feed his nation. He then issued an order in 1774 to his subjects to grow potatoes against famine. It was hard because people still didn’t think they should eat a potato! Trying to let his subjects plant potatoes, he used reverse psychology and stationed a heavy guard there. In that time, people thought that guarded areas were valuable. They then snatched the plants, but this was all according to Frederick. In the late 1700s, the royal family approved the crop. People started to trust it due to the approval. Louis XVI began to sport a potato flower in his buttonhole, and Marie-Antoinette wore the purple potato blossom in her