This Spud's For You

Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back.

You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized, so you can be ready to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

Time for a tea break?

Time for a Pure Leaf.

i'm william googe a viewery collaborate and professional ultra runner from the uk i love to tackle endurance runs around the world including a 55 day 3064 mile run across the us

so i know a thing or two about performance wear when it comes to relaxing i look for something ultra versatile and comfy The Ponto Performance Jogger from Viuri is perfect for all of those things.

It's the comfiest jogger I've ever worn.

And the Dreamknit fabric is wild, always reach for them over other joggers.

Check them out in the Dreamknit collection by going to bury.com/slash William.

That's vuori.com slash William, where new customers can receive 20% off their first order.

Plus, enjoy free shipping in the US on orders over $75 and free returns.

Exclusions apply.

Visit the website for full terms and conditions.

Baked potato changed my life.

Baked potato showed me the way.

If you want to know what is wrong from right, you must listen to what potatoes say.

That's right, folks.

This episode, we are listening to what potato has to say.

And potato has a lot to say.

It's been, yes, changing lives and showing the way for thousands of years.

You are, of course, listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And I'm Nicola Twilley.

And whether it's fried, mashed, steamed, or roasted, I love potatoes as food.

But they turn out to be my spiritual soulmates, too.

The potato thumbs its nose at authority and facilitates sloth.

The potato was very much seen as a sort of anarchist crop that enabled peasants to have too much leisure time.

Rebecca Earle is our potato tour guide this episode.

She just wrote a new book called Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato.

The story she tells and the story we're telling today is about the potato's life and adventures once it left home and set sail for distant lands.

First, it traveled to Europe, where it got tangled up in revolutions and tax evasion and soup kitchens.

And then it landed in India and China, where it conquered a new set of taste buds and hillsides, provided an excuse for colonialism, and helped people survive famine.

This episode, we've got all that plus some potato bling.

And in case you were wondering why in the world a baked potato saved someone's life, that song was just some helpful tips from British comedian Matt Lucas about how to stay healthy these days.

Thank you, baked potato.

Remember not to touch your face.

Thank you, baked potato.

And if you want to have a better day,

you must listen to what the baked potatoes say.

I mean, based on our current leadership, why not rely on a baked potato for reassurance and advice?

And if our current leadership has led you to partake a little more frequently of the hard stuff, we have an episode coming up about that.

But more importantly, we have a request for you.

If you or your country or community have a cure for the hangover, or at least a supposed cure, we'd love to hear about it.

Please call us or send us a voice memo.

You can go to gastropod.com/slash contact for details about how to do it and to find our phone number.

Thanks.

Like corn and like tomatoes, the potato was born in the Americas before it conquered the world.

They come from the spine of mountains that run all the way down from Chile, all the way up through the Andes and really into the Rocky Mountains.

Rebecca Earle is a historian at the University of Warwick, where she focuses on the history of food and on the history of Spanish America.

And so potatoes are bang in the middle of her Venn diagram.

Potatoes are from the Andes, that much is clear.

The earliest wild potato ancestor that's been identified is from the shores of Lake Titicaca on the Peruvian side.

But there are a lot of potato varieties claimed by a lot of folks in the region.

In fact, there have been some recent disputes between Chile and Peru over attempts by Peru to sort of patent a whole variety, a number of potatoes as being Peruvian, and Chileans said, wait a minute, no, these are part of our national patrimony.

So where they originate doesn't sit so neatly onto national frontiers.

Wild potatoes spread up and down the Americas.

They've even been found in Utah.

But it wasn't until about 8,000 years ago that people in the Andes started to domesticate these kind of unpromising, marble-sized, super bitter tubers.

Potatoes came to form a really important part of life in the Andes because they can grow in incredibly inhospitable conditions.

I've traveled in the Andes in Peru, and not only did I get intense altitude sickness, but people farming there look like they're hanging off the side of the mountains.

The Andes are super tall and super steep.

It's just rough terrain for growing things.

In the whole of Peru, only something like 3% of the land is classified as suitable for growing crops compared to 21% of the US.

But for the potato, no problem.

It flourishes in those conditions.

So yeah, the potato was a big deal in the region.

But it was still the food of the people.

It was essential, not special.

Unlike the other big American staple, corn.

Planting of the maize crop was something that the Inca himself oversaw.

So the ruler himself planted a symbolic row of maize as part of a big ceremony.

And there was a team of priests who would pray over the course of the year to ensure a good maize harvest.

It was a whole lot of ritual associated with maize.

The Empire was not very interested in potatoes.

They saw potatoes as a kind of lowly, you know, everyday food that didn't have great spiritual resonance.

This is going to be a theme with the potato.

That said, on that lowly local level, the potato did have spiritual resonance.

There was a deity called the potato mother who looked over the potato harvest and ensured that it grew well.

So it was very important, not just in terms of diet, but in terms of kind of ritual, spiritual life on a village level.

This was something the Spanish conquistadors picked up on right away when they showed up in the 1500s.

So they said, oh, these the people here eat a kind of root which is the bread of the Indians as they put it.

They were always comparing it back and forth to European bread.

They said it is their bread, which meant it was the staple, it was the backbone of the diet.

That said, the Spaniards knew it didn't taste like bread.

This is how a Spaniard described the potato.

It's the very first written description that survives.

Potatoes are something like Spanish truffles, aside from being a bit bigger and not as tasty.

They said, potatoes, they are a thing a bit like a chestnut, or a bit like a truffle, or like a parsnip.

They grow underground.

They're a root.

And they eat them the way that we eat parsnips or the way that we eat chestnuts.

So they quickly drew connections between a variety of different things, some root vegetables like parsnips or turnips, and some things like chestnuts that we might not think a potato is exactly like, but the texture is not unsimilar.

If you bake a chestnut, you end up with something mealy, but like a potato.

Europeans brought this new truffle chestnut food back to Europe with them, although we don't know exactly when.

Like many crops that have spread around the world, people didn't always record when they first saw it.

It seems like the potato landed on the shores of Europe somewhere in the second half of the 1500s.

First to the Canary Islands and then to mainland Spain, and from there they spread across Europe and around the world.

But in terms of how potatoes caught on, there's an old story that has stuck around for a long time.

It's almost become conventional wisdom.

And it's that the peasants in Europe were pretty reluctant to give potatoes a try.

The old story is that peasants are inherently conservative and will not do anything new.

They will not try unfamiliar cultivation techniques.

They won't eat new food.

They're basically backward looking and highly superstitious and regard the novel with skepticism.

So there's an old story that says, peasants looked at potatoes and they said, this food is not in the Bible.

We will not eat it.

And they said, our grandparents didn't grow this food and we will not grow it.

Added to that, there was the unfortunate fact that the potato is part of the same botanical family as the deadly nightshade, so that's kind of suspect.

And the potato doesn't grow from seed like a normal crop.

Instead, you sow little bits of the potato in the ground.

I mean, why would you trust a plant like that?

Europeans didn't understand this.

They thought it was the food of the devil.

There's a whole lot of old writing from decades ago by historians who say that Europeans looked at potatoes and when they saw them they saw something freaky and weird.

This is the story people have told for decades.

Peasants were afraid of the devilish potato and so they really needed some convincing from their wise superiors.

The wise superiors part of the story goes like this.

It was only in the 18th century when benevolent and far-sighted aristocrats cottoned on to the idea that the potato might be a nourishing and healthful food for ordinary people and promoted it and encouraged it, and peasants eventually listened up and overcame their superstition and their skepticism and came to love the potato.

In this telling of the story, there are some potato heroes.

If you go to Paris, one of the big boulevards is named after somebody called Parmontier, who was indeed a big promoter of the potato in the 18th century.

And the signs that line the boulevard describe him, and they say he introduced the potato to France.

And in fact, if you go to his tomb in the Père-lachaise cemetery in Paris, people to this day leave little votive offerings of potatoes on his tomb as a little thank you to him for having brought the potato to Europe.

Parmantier supposedly gave potato flowers to Marie Antoinette, and she wore them in her hair, and all the poor, backwards peasants realized that if the queen liked potatoes enough to wear their flowers in her hair, they must be good.

Another potato hero is Frederick the Great, who was the king of Prussia in the 1700s.

People also leave potatoes at his tomb in Potsdam in Germany to thank him for bringing potatoes to the people.

Rebecca says Frederick in Prussia and Parmontier in Paris, they're just two of the best-known heroes in a much larger potato hero pantheon.

Well, there's a kind of prototype story that seems to be replicated across many different European countries about Parmontier

or a priest in Finland or an individual in Greece.

There are a whole variety of different protagonists of this story, but somebody who recognized that a a potato was a good food for ordinary people and thought, how will I convince these ordinary people to eat this food that they're currently shunning?

Well, I know.

I will set some guards to guard a field of potatoes, and ordinary people will intuit that if there is a guard guarding this plot of land, there must be something very, very valuable being grown in it.

And I will instruct the guards to let people creep into the field and steal the potatoes.

And the potatoes will then make their way into people's ordinary diets because they'll figure that it must have been a wonderful foodstuff of great value and merit eaten by aristocrats.

And once they've tasted it, they'll love it.

Oh, finally, those poor superstitious peasants have been tricked into helping themselves to potatoes, and then they learn to fall in love.

How brilliant and thoughtful of their wealthy compatriots.

Such a lovely story.

Is it true?

No, peasants were eating potatoes long before this.

First, the argument that they wouldn't have eaten potatoes because the spuds weren't in the Bible?

Nonsense.

Most of the things that people ate in early modern Europe aren't mentioned in the Bible.

So if people were only eating foods that were mentioned in the Bible, they would have had a tough time of it in many parts of Europe.

So that's a non-starter as a historical proposition.

But finding hard evidence that peasants were actually eating potatoes before Parmontier and Frederick tried to persuade them to, that takes some digging.

So you have to think, where did the lives of ordinary people leave a trace in the documentary record?

Where, in any particular moment, where will you find traces of the lives of the great mass of the population?

And so, one place where you find this is in court records.

People whose lives might have been completely unrecorded in any other place will turn up if they end up in court or if they have some kind of brush with the law.

So, one place that you can look is legal disputes about paying tithes, church taxes that people across Europe paid, where a certain percentage of the harvest was required by law to be handed over to the church as part of a tax.

The laws on which bits of your harvest need to be handed over, how much you need to hand over, are extremely complex.

And they produced an elaborate mass of case law.

Records of potatoes in these court arguments start to appear in the late 1600s when parish priests were trying to get their parishioners to pay tithes on potatoes, but the parishioners fought back.

They were saying, we don't know what you're talking about.

We've been growing these potatoes for time out of mind, and you've never tried to tax them before.

But hold on, the peasants would say that, even if it wasn't totally true.

I mean, they don't want to pay more tax.

Well, Rebecca does say that in some places, they actually use the opposite argument.

They'll say things like, oh, no, no, no, we've only just started growing potatoes, and you're not allowed to tax things we just started growing.

Rebecca's point is, it matters less what they were arguing than the fact that they were arguing about growing potatoes, because a lot of these arguments were happening in the 1600s.

So what they prove is that peasants were indeed eating potatoes before Parmantier and Frederick the Great and the rest of the potato heroes started trying to popularize them in the 1700s.

But to figure out just how much earlier, Rebecca had to look somewhere else.

Another area where you find evidence of the farming and horticultural practices of non-elites is in botanical treatises.

Botanical treatises started to become more popular, kind of along with the rise of printing.

By the 1500s, people were publishing books that described important plants, how you'd grow them, how they could be eaten, what they might be useful for in medicine.

And they started to include plants from the Americas by the late 1500s, including potatoes.

And so what they will often say there is, ah, these things have become very common in the gardens of farmers in this part of Germany.

So you can start in these learned texts to see some evidence that the potato is being cultivated not just in the specimen gardens of botanical scientists, but also in the gardens of ordinary farmers.

So, based on all this evidence, Rebecca says that all those stories about the peasants being backwards and reluctant to embrace the potato are completely wrong.

In fact, it was the peasants who did the hard work of adapting the potato to its new home in Europe.

The varieties that first came over from Peru were best suited to a different day length and very different environmental conditions.

Lots of adaptation must have been necessary, and that must have been being carried out by these farmers in Germany or people in northern Italy who were reported to be growing potatoes in the 16th and 17th centuries in their gardens.

So we don't know what they did, but they must have been doing it because they succeeded in adapting these Andean crops to a whole variety of different European environments.

So the peasants were all eating potatoes, but why?

What was so appealing about the potato?

One reason goes back to these tithe disputes to some extent.

For a long time, as these tithe disputes suggest, nobody was paying a great deal of attention to any potatoes that were being grown in people's gardens.

They were simply not attracting the attention of the state or of the church.

So, one very straightforward reason that they might have been popular was that actually nobody was taxing them.

So, you got to keep whatever you grew.

Potatoes, the tax Dodger's best friend.

But a little bit of handy-dandy tax evasion is not the potato's only superpower.

A second reason, I think, has to do with the material qualities of the potato.

It's a real botanical gem.

It's extremely prolific.

They don't need a lot of water, and they can be farmed on really steep land that isn't great for growing grain, and they are incredibly productive.

You could grow a lot of potatoes in a small amount of even marginal land.

If somebody said to you, here you have this little plot of land, and your task is to get the maximum calories out of this plot of land by growing a single crop, you'd be hard-pressed to do better than potatoes.

Certainly, potatoes are a far better choice than something like wheat or oats or

rye, the staple grains that provided the breads of Europeans.

The difference is actually kind of amazing.

Take the same-sized piece of land growing wheat versus potatoes, and the potato field will yield three times as many calories as the wheat field and two and a half times more protein.

That's important if you're poor and don't have a lot of land or food.

Europe's population doubled in a few centuries after the introduction of the potato, and Rebecca says some scholars even attribute that population growth to the potato.

There was a piece of research that was published a couple couple of years ago by a couple of economists who tried to calculate, tried to answer that question, and they came up with an even to me astonishing figure that 25% of the population growth that's occurred since 1500 was due to potatoes.

This argument isn't universally accepted.

It is definitely true that Europe experienced a population boom, but the cause of that boom is something historians like to debate.

But better nutrition is often cited as a factor that must have been responsible for the increase, which then would have allowed people to be more productive in their work, would have allowed the kinds of increase in productivity that lay behind the Industrial Revolution.

And so there are some people who argue that, well, that the potato is connected to the Industrial Revolution.

The link between potatoes and population growth and productivity is intriguing but far from proven.

Rebecca did tell us about one particularly compelling study of a village in the Alps in what's now Switzerland that looked at the potato and population growth.

The author found that the population doubled in the village in the century after the potato showed up, and he concluded it was because the potato was not only more productive and more calorific, but also because it could be grown where no crops had been grown beforehand on steeper hills.

So there's lots of correlation of that sort.

Whether or not you can actually credit the Industrial Revolution to potatoes, it's clear that lots of European peasants loved them and grew them.

Which brings us to the other side of the conventional potato myth, which is that the ruling classes were the first to fall in love with a potato.

Actually, the ruling classes at the time hated potatoes.

Partly, that's because, like we said, potatoes are these under-the-radar tax evasion tubers.

This is an idea that a wonderful scholar called James C.

Scott, who's based at Yale, has developed.

So he presents potatoes as sort of almost anarchists that thumb their noses at the state.

Potatoes were so productive, the ruling classes felt like they just enabled laziness.

And from the perspective of the ruling classes, well, who knew what kind of mischief peasants would get up to if they had some spare time?

There's some interesting writing about Ireland in the 17th century by English colonizers saying, Well, if only the Irish didn't eat potatoes, they would be so much easier to govern.

But because they eat potatoes, they're basically free.

They have lots of leisure and they don't have to work all the time and they don't pay attention to what we tell them to do.

And they just lays around and they have all this time they can just spend smoking.

And it's terrible.

And if only they didn't eat potatoes.

So the potato was very much seen as this sort of anarchist crop that enabled peasants to have too much leisure time.

But by the 1700s, the upper class started to sing a different tune.

Every day, millions of customers engage with AI agents like me.

We resolve queries fast.

We work 24-7 and we're helpful, knowledgeable, and empathetic.

We're built to be the voice of the brands we serve.

Sierra is the platform for building better, more human customer experiences with AI.

No hold music, no generic answers, no frustration.

Visit sierra.ai to learn more.

Support for this show comes from Icy Hot.

You're resilient.

That's how you've gotten through even the most grueling workouts.

You keep pushing no matter what comes your way.

So the last thing you want are those post-workout pains that hold you back from tackling your next one.

But with the right treatment, you can address your aches and injuries and make your comeback.

All it takes is a mixture of cooling and warming sensations plus targeted pain relief.

And that's exactly what the Icy Hot Pro Massage Balm offers.

It's a round, solid balm made with an easy grip design, so you can work it directly onto the problem area.

The massage combined with the Icy Hot Formula makes for a powerful, fast-acting pain reliever to soothe your troublesome post-workout joint and muscle aches.

The formula contains two maximum strength ingredients that target multiple pain receptors.

And on top of that, it moisturizes the area with nourishing cocoa butter and avocado oil, leaving your skin feeling soft and hydrated.

Don't let pain stand in your way.

You've earned your comeback.

And with Icy Hot, you're so back.

Buy Icy Hot Pro Massage Balm Now.

So by the 18th century, statesmen and theorists of statescraft had identified the population as an important resource that was part of the wealth of the state.

So, what made a state powerful wasn't just that it might possess mines or manufacturers or other natural resources, but that it also would possess a large population.

So, a large and healthy and energetic population was seen as being a natural resource.

The statesmen finally realized they needed people to grow food and sail away to war and work in the mines and in newfangled factories.

You wanted a large population, and that would make you stronger than France or Spain Spain or whatever your neighbor was.

And so there was this Europe-wide quest for nourishing foods that would build hearty populations, and that brought a totally new attention to foods that began to be seen as producing hearty, robust workers.

And first among equals was the potato.

Some of the motivation for European rulers to start paying attention to the health and wellness of their people also came from the fact that things got pretty rough in Europe in the late 1700s.

There were a series of harvest failures, and most importantly, the second half of the 18th century saw almost continual warfare between different Western European countries, which placed heavy demands on the food supply.

And here is where people like Parmatier and Frederick the Great came in.

They were potato enthusiasts.

Parmatier wrote about potatoes and studied their chemical composition and tried to extract starch from potatoes and worked on developing a recipe for super tasty potato bread.

Parmantier thought he was doing the poor a huge favor, but of course, as Rebecca has discovered, the poor were pretty much already familiar with the potato's many charms.

It was the elites who were playing catch-up.

So people started saying, the potato, look at Ireland.

These people live off potatoes.

Potatoes feature largely in their diet, and they have ten children, and look how healthy they are.

So Irish farmers became, or peasants became exhibit A in demonstrations that the potato was a marvelous nutritive food in these 18th century debates.

Not only did all those Irish peasants become hale and hearty, but since they were growing potatoes on small plots of land with poor soil, that left a lot of other more productive land free to grow more desirable crops like wheat and barley.

So you would have this hearty, energetic workforce, but on top of which, you would then have all this grain that you were producing, which the peasants weren't eating, which you could then export to some other less far-sighted country which hadn't got its population onto potatoes to the benefit of the balance of trade.

We are going to come back to Ireland and its relationship with the potato.

But meanwhile, here we are at the end of the 1700s, and like Rebecca said, there are a lot of hungry people in Europe.

Which leads us to the story of Count Rumford.

He had a checkered career.

He was born in the US.

But during the, in the, well, what year was he born?

I cannot recall.

But he was a young man during the years of the American Revolution, and he picked the wrong side.

So it became expedient for him to depart.

And he went to Europe.

We've spent some time with Count Rumford before in our episode about ovens.

He experimented with improved types of stoves and fireplaces.

He was interested in the design of uniforms for soldiers.

He was a very energetic improver.

He actually started life as ordinary old Benjamin Thompson.

And for his services, he was ennobled and became Count Rumford.

There's nothing like becoming a minor European aristocrat to boost your credibility.

And among his varied contributions to the Bavarian state was the invention of a soup that became famous all across Europe, Rumford soup.

And this was a soup that was designed to be the most nourishing and cheapest way of feeding paupers, such as they could be kept healthy and energetic, but on a very low budget.

You will probably not be surprised to hear that the backbone of this nourishing soup was, yes, potatoes.

And he became famous for his potato soup.

It spread all across Europe, and soup kitchens, you know, from London to Paris to Madrid to all across Italy to Switzerland were serving Rumford soup as a way of feeding the poor in an economical and charitable fashion.

Count Rumford's potato soup canteens were the first modern soup kitchens.

His basic soup recipe contained pearl barley, split peas, potatoes, of course, and vinegar, and it was topped with some stale dry bread to give it a crunch.

Rumford maintained that the crunch factor made his soup even more delicious.

So, of course, we wondered: was it really delicious?

No.

Well, Rumford was convinced that his soup was absolutely wonderful and that people ate it with immense enjoyment.

And in fact, he regarded this as really important.

So he didn't say, Okay, it's not very tasty, but it's very nourishing, and that's what people have to eat.

He devoted a lot of attention in his writings to insisting on how delicious this soup was.

But somehow I'm still not convinced.

Nor was Rebecca, so she decided to try it herself.

Well, I constructed a very small non-scientific experiment, and I would say the verdict was mixed.

So I followed his recipe, and it involves cooking the thing for a very, very long time, and it involves a really hefty dose of vinegar.

So it has a...

a very sharp, vinegary flavor.

And I served it to some friends who are from a variety of nationalities.

And one of the people who tested it was German.

He liked it very much, had a second helping, and I think was really enthusiastic about it, although he was also, he's a Fredified and he's a hearty eater in general.

So maybe he was less discriminating than some.

Most of the other people found it pretty unpalatable, except for

one other British person who said it somewhat reminded him of fish and chips, and the combination of potato and vinegar had a fish and chip-like quality that he didn't regard as entirely unpleasant.

Fish and chips in soup form does actually sound like some advanced molecular gastronomy type thing, maybe Heston Blumenthal's next trick.

Now I'm maybe in, at least to try it.

But I would say, overall,

the consensus was against it.

As Rebecca said, the soup did become really popular all over Europe as a way to feed the poor, and it had some local variations.

In Spain, it included olive oil, cumin, paprika, and dried mint, which seems at least like a marginal improvement.

In Paris, apparently, they included bay leaves.

Potato soup for everybody.

And it was not just the poor in Europe who were the beneficiaries of the ruling elite's newfound potato enthusiasm.

The British, who by then were colonizing everywhere, saw the potato as their special gift to new colonies, like India.

But the Brits weren't actually the ones who benevolently supplied their colonies with this new, delicious, and nutritious food.

Potatoes made their way to India in the early modern period during the voyages of trade and exploration and conquest that were taking place during those centuries.

So, who brought potatoes to India, we don't entirely know.

Surely, though, it must have been sailors from Portugal or from Spain who were arriving in Goa and other parts of the subcontinent and spreading a whole variety of new foodstuffs and new consumer practices into India.

So, that was when tomatoes and chili peppers and other things that are now really essential to the cuisine of that part of the world reached the subcontinent, and along with them came potatoes.

Like the European peasants, Indians had been enjoying potatoes long before their colonial overlords, quote-unquote, introduced them to it.

But that didn't stop the Brits from using their gift of the potato as a kind of excuse for colonialism.

They were somewhat cognizant of the fact that when they were colonizing all these other parts of the world, that they were overthrowing existing states, that they, I mean, sometimes they would arrive and claim, oh, the land was empty, there was nobody here.

But

they knew knew that this was rarely true.

And so there was often an attempt to justify the European presence.

And Brits really saw potatoes as something European, something particularly British to be gifted to the rest of the world.

Just like the way that Anglo-settlers in North America thought that beef was an improvement over bison and the native people weren't appropriately using their land, as we explored in our most recent episode, Moo Done It, this is just how British colonists saw Indians, that they weren't appropriately using their land either, and so they didn't have a good claim to ownership over it.

So, Europeans would say, Well, we're bringing improvements, we're bringing proper agriculture, we're bringing civilization, and it's to the benefit of the people that we're colonizing.

And the potato was held up as part of a package of improved European practices that ought to be adopted, and that if only Indians did that, they would be in a much better place.

So, it was claimed.

Whatever you have to tell yourself, I guess.

Certainly, colonialism and colonial infrastructure, like trains, did help spread the adoption of the potato even more widely to the point that it really became embedded in Indian cuisine and culture.

So much so that it's become a part of religious practice.

There are regular fasts in Hinduism, and during these fasts, the people participating can't eat rice or wheat, but they do eat previously foreign foods, such as the potato, because the prescription against it wasn't part of the original tradition.

What can I say?

Just like with the church tithes in Europe, the spud is a sneaky little tuber.

It's in this under-the-radar gray zone that lets people get away with stuff.

Potato anarchy for the win.

With the Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One, you can earn a limited 2% cash back on every purchase.

And you get big purchasing power so your business can spend more and earn more.

Stephen Brandon and Bruno, the business owners of SandCloud, reinvested their 2% cash back to help build their retail presence.

Now, that's serious business.

What could the Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One do for your business?

Capital One, what's in your wallet?

Find out more at capital one.com/slash Spark Cash Plus.

Terms apply.

Thumbtack presents.

Uncertainty strikes.

I was surrounded.

The aisle and the options were closing in.

There were paint rollers, satin and matte finish, angle brushes, and natural bristles.

There were too many choices.

What if I never got my living room painted?

What if I couldn't figure out what type of paint to use?

What if

I just used thumbtack?

I can hire a top-rated pro in the Bay Area that knows everything about interior paint, easily compare prices, and read reviews.

Thumbtack knows homes.

Download the app today.

This story keeps repeating.

Just like in Europe, first the peasants loved the potato, then the overlords loved it.

By the 1800s, everybody loved potatoes.

Which means it was time for a backlash.

So there's some very good evidence of that in a rebellion that took place in various parts of England in 1830 called the Captain Swing Revolt, which was Captain Swing was a fictional character who was the signatory of threatening letters that were left on the doors of land of farmers who engaged in practices that the protesters didn't like.

And there would be a letter that would say, you better watch out what you're doing or, you know, this barn is going to burn, signed Captain Swing.

So it's known as the Captain Swing Revolt.

And one of the things that rural workers complained about regularly in this uprising was, as they put it, being reduced to potatoes.

The 1830 Captain Swing revolt took place when the Industrial Revolution was already well underway in England and the poor were pretty fed up with the rich telling them to eat more and more potatoes so that they could do more and more work and the rich could get richer and richer.

They began to associate the potato as a food that you were encouraged to eat.

They began to associate that with the larger changes that were happening in the economy, and they saw the potato as a rhetorical rhetorical device that was part of that shift in the way the world was operating.

And they didn't necessarily like that.

They said, we will not live upon potatoes.

That was printed on a banner that some protesters were carrying in

one of these uprisings.

We will not live upon potatoes.

We do not want to be reduced to potatoes.

Have we not reason to protest, we who have nothing but cold spring water to drink and a potato in our satchel to sustain us?

So eating potatoes and nothing but potatoes became a sort of shorthand for emiseration and the loss of autonomy that many people objected to.

But when it comes to emiseration, nothing beats what happened in 1850 in Ireland.

So the potato famine, I mean, this is this scar in Irish history.

Like we said, in the 1700s, the Irish poor had been lauded as role models because they were eating so many potatoes and doing so well.

And that meant that the Brits, who had colonized Ireland, were exporting huge amounts of Irish grain and getting rich off those exports.

So the potato was not just a staple of the diet of the Irish poor by the 1840s.

It was the diet of the Irish poor.

So which meant that should the potato crop fail, it would have catastrophic consequences.

A failure was made all the more likely by the fact that the variety of potato that was being grown in Ireland was largely a single variety.

It was something called Irish lumper.

And surprise, surprise, a harvest failure is exactly what happened.

In the 1840s, a plant disease that attacked the potatoes spread across Europe, a blight that could wipe out a field of potatoes in just 10 days.

It basically rotted the potatoes in the ground.

They turned dark black-brown and misshapen and mushy and, of course, inedible.

This blight hit everywhere in Europe.

It wasn't limited to Ireland.

Every single country that grew potatoes in Europe was affected.

So there was a potato blight in Belgium, for example, which caused some tens of thousands of deaths, but not the million or so that was estimated to cause in Ireland.

In Ireland, millions of people depended on the potato and only the potato, and so they starved to death.

So many people died that they couldn't make enough coffins to keep up.

People were buried in mass graves, and entire villages were emptied with moss growing over the abandoned cottages.

In descriptions from the time, writers point out the famine's silence.

No children laughing, no companionable greetings or songs from people working in the fields.

Instead, there was just silence and the stink of rotting potatoes.

Of course, like most famines, this wasn't just a natural disaster.

It was also a human one.

The British colonists had basically forced the Irish to depend on the potatoes, and they forced them onto the worst land.

And even during the famine, Brits continued to export food from Ireland.

Not just wheat, they exported peas, beans, rabbits, oysters, and yes, even potatoes.

The Irish were starving while their butter graced British tables.

The potato famine left a huge scar in Irish history and a huge stain on Britain's reputation.

It also led to a lot of emigration and the big Irish-American populations we see on the east coast of the US today.

But even though the potato is associated with national trauma, it's still a huge part of Irish cuisine.

Potato leek soup and kol cannon, which is cabbage and potato mash.

Apparently, 70% of the carbs that the Irish eat today come from potatoes.

They're still deeply loved.

More potatoes are eaten in Ireland per person than in most other countries in the world.

But But these days, the Irish definitely don't grow the most potatoes.

That distinction belongs to China.

China is now the world's largest producer and consumer of potatoes.

Potatoes probably showed up along with Portuguese traders in the 1600s.

And guess who first picked up on the potato there?

Well, you won't be surprised to hear it was peasant farmers, it seems, who were eating it.

But

the northern provinces of China, which had been settled by people who had migrated from other parts of China and who were often living on marginal or somewhat mountainous land that wasn't necessarily conducive to growing rice or sorghum or other crops, or even not necessarily so conducive to growing maize or sweet potatoes, other New World foods that were also taking off in other parts of China, started growing potatoes because, like villagers in the Andes, they recognized that they could be cultivated on these steep and bits of marginal land.

Meanwhile, just like back in Europe, China's rulers basically ignored the potato.

Rice was what counted.

The potato was once again under the radar as far as official bureaucracy was concerned, which turned out to help during China's own great famine in 1959.

During the Cultural Revolution, when there was vast famine that was provoked by unwise agricultural practices, villages that grew potatoes, villages that had adopted potato cultivation, had a particular resource and were able to pull through better than villages that didn't have access to potatoes.

And so then the government started to get interested in the potato, of course.

It is the same old potato story once again.

The Chinese government wanted to make sure that their people had enough to eat, and they wanted to promote growing a variety of staple crops, not just rice.

And of course, potatoes can grow in places that rice can't.

So there's been a huge push in growing and eating potatoes in China in the last 20 years or so, which has resulted in lots of state promotion of the potato, lots of state support for potato agriculture, and overall a big propaganda campaign in favor of potatoes.

For a lot of Chinese people, especially after the Great Leap Forward and the famine, the potato was linked with desperation and hunger.

So the Chinese government has come up with some really creative propaganda to reposition the potato as a lifestyle choice.

Well, so for example, there's an individual who goes under the nom d'actiste as sister potato, who has made a name for herself singing a series of promotional songs about why potatoes are good for you and how you ought to eat more potatoes in ways that would have in some ways been familiar to people in the 18th century.

And there's a wonderful image of her showing her

cavorting with two cartoon potatoes who are labeled, I think, little sister and big brother potato.

And there's a caption in Mandarin that that has puns off the one of the common words for potato and also the word for sort of nouveau riche, or the caption could translate something like, let's all be rich potatoes together, or let's all make some potato bling together.

And that suggests that potatoes could be associated with a kind of upwardly mobile, wealthy,

health-conscious lifestyle, rather than being a foodstuff that was associated with peasant farmers.

This propaganda campaign was successful because, as we said, now China is the world leader in both production and consumption.

The potato triumphs again.

There is no stopping the not-so-humble spud.

In fact, it's already moved on from taking over on Earth.

The potato is taking over the universe.

It was the first food grown in space back in the 90s.

And it's going to be the first food grown on Mars.

Or, if you watch The Martian, it already has been grown on Mars.

Here's the rub.

It's going to be four years for another mission to reach me.

And I'm going to have design to last 31 days.

So I got to make water and grow food on a planet where nothing grows.

Spoiler alert, the potato saves the day.

So basically, this episode is one long victory lap for the potato, right?

Well, there's still a fight over potatoes today, especially with this question of whether the nourishment it provides is good or bad.

Many anti-carb people think the potato is pretty evil, but the rest of us, which includes most nutrition researchers, think it's pretty great.

And in fact, we see this particularly in Peru, where potatoes partially originated, where there's a huge heritage potato boom going on.

And new Andean cuisine, which is a site of interest among people interested in gastronomy, makes much of the local varieties of potatoes.

And one day, Gastropod will get on a plane again and go to Peru to tell that story.

I cannot wait to see you there.

Thank you, baked potato.

And if you want to have a better day,

you must listen to what the baked potatoes say.

Thanks for this episode to Rebecca Earl.

Her new book is called Feeding the People.

We have a link on our homepage, gastropod.com, where we also have instructions on how to leave us a voicemail or send us a voice memo with your best hangover cures.

Or also the most ridiculous ones that are popular in your country or community.

We need them before October 9th.

We'll be back in a couple weeks, till then.

Thank you to CVS CareMark for supporting this show.

CVS CareMark allows you to get the prescriptions you need, where you need, at the best price for you.

CVS CareMark allows for greater access to medication through broad, flexible network strategies.

They work with more than 64,000 pharmacies nationwide, 44% of which are independent pharmacies.

This coverage means CVS CareMark can give their members the unmatched ability to choose where and how they want to receive their prescriptions.

Go to cmk.co slash stories to learn how we help you provide the affordability, support, and access your members need.

Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back.

You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized, so you can be ready to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf iced tea.

Time for a tea break?

Time for a Pure Leaf.