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The world’s leading professors explain the latest thinking in the humanities and social sciences in just 10 minutes.
Rebecca Earle: Who Invented the Potato and Why Should We Care?
Philomena Cunk, as you probably know, is the invention of actor Diane Morgan. In the words of Wikipedia, Cunk is a “dim-witted, ill-informed, yet earnest interviewer and commentator on history, culture and current affairs”, who regularly flummoxes her interviewees by asking them questions that are often simultaneously idiotic and quite profound.
In ‘Cunk on Britain’, while discussing the British empire with Professor Ashley Jackson, she raised the following question: “How did Sir Walter Raleigh invent the potato?”. Professor Jackson sensibly replied that Raleigh “didn't invent the potato in that I don't think that anyone actually has invented a root vegetable”.
I’m Rebecca Earle, Professor of History at the University of Warwick, and this British Academy 10-Minute Talk takes up Cunk’s question, to explore the global history of the potato, and also to ask why we should care.
Let’s start with Sir Walter Raleigh. Cunk was absolutely not alone in associating the Elizabethan explorer and pirate with potatoes. A tradition dating back to the 18th century maintains that Raleigh introduced the potato to Europe.
This is not totally wrong. Potatoes are from South America, where for millennia they served as a staple for the many people who lived along the slopes of the Andes. Before Europeans invaded in the 16th century no one outside of the Americas had ever heard of, or eaten, a potato. Europeans brought potatoes back to Europe, along with a host of other foodstuffs that have now become absolutely central to diets the world over, from tomatoes to chilli peppers to manioc to chocolate. So, people did take potatoes, along with lots of other foods, from the Americas to all over the world.
But was it Sir Walter Raleigh? As I mentioned a moment ago, the tradition of ascribing the arrival of the potato in Europe to Raleigh goes back to at least the 18th century. Raleigh is indeed credited with introducing all sorts of things, not just potatoes. In 1962, the great US comedian Bob Newhart delivered a memorable sketch in which he imagines Sir Walter Raleigh trying to explain the virtues of tobacco to the head of the West India Company in England. Newhart credits Raleigh with introducing not just tobacco but also turkeys, coffee and chocolate to a sceptical English public. It’s worth listening to if you’ve not heard it.
In Britain then, it’s Raleigh or sometimes Sir Francis Drake, who is said to have introduced us to the potato. Other countries have their own potato heroes. In France, it’s Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, who is credited in Parisian street signs as the man who introduced the potato to France.
In Germany, it’s Frederick the Great. At his palace, Sanssouci, outside of Berlin, people to this day leave offerings of potatoes on a little plaque as a tribute and as a thank you.
They do the same in Paris on Parmentier’s tomb. There are similar potato heroes in lots of other European countries, likewise credited with bringing the American potato to the European masses.
Well this is all fascinating — I mean, at least I think it’s fascinating — but is any of this important?
I’d like to use the remainder of this talk to gesture towards some of the historical lessons that are embedded in these stories.
First of all, who are the agents of history? Who actually makes history? Stories about men such as Sir Walter Raleigh or Frederick the Great introducing the potato to a grateful world offer one sort of answer to this question. Let me point to another way.
Popular histories often imply that the way we eat today is the result of a happy invention by some famous person. The story of the sandwich is a great example of this sort of history. Many people will tell you that the sandwich was invented by the Earl of Sandwich. We’re generally very fond of histories that pin a particular culinary practice to a particular person, who is credited with inventing afternoon tea, or the Easter egg, or what have you. I am periodically asked to comment on this sort of question and to answer “Who invented the sausage roll?”, etcetera.
This is rarely how cultural practices develop, much less culinary ones. In the case of potatoes, they were without doubt introduced to Europe neither by Sir Walter Raleigh nor Sir Francis Drake, but by Spaniards, because it was the Spanish, not the English, who invaded the South American empires of the Incas and other Andean states in the 1530s, and so were the first outsiders to encounter the potato.
It was probably sailors from Galicia who brought the new foodstuff to the British Isles, but we don’t have any idea who they were, let alone their names.
More importantly, the people who did the hard work of adapting the American potato to the European environment were not your Frederick the Greats. They were nameless peasant farmers, who engaged in the experimentation and investigation that allowed the potato to adapt to the different day lengths and climatic conditions of its new home.
These men and women, after all, were the ones with the practical expertise and experience of growing things, especially things to eat. We know of their work because more ‘elite’ writers commented in the 16th century on how this new crop was flourishing in the kitchen gardens of peasants from Italy to Germany.
Indeed, the 18th-century scientist Parmentier, credited in the Parisian street-sign with introducing the potato to France, himself stated that he learned about growing potatoes from a Belgian peasant. We have their knowledge and persistence to thank whenever we enjoy a jacket potato or a roastie.
Wherever in the world they went, potatoes proved popular with ordinary people, who appreciated their nutritive qualities, their adaptability, and their invisibility.
By this I mean that until relatively recently, states were not generally interested in the foods that ordinary people grew in their own gardens to feed themselves, which is exactly how potatoes tended to be grown in the first stage of their journey to global ubiquity.
As a result, garden crops tended not to be taxed, and generally flew under the radar of the state. All this means that the names of the people who helped the potato adapt to new environments, from China to England, have not generally been recorded – not simply because these food innovators were of humble origin, but also because the introduction of a new starchy food was not considered particularly important either.
It wasn’t until the 18th century that states in Europe began to take an interest in what ordinary people were eating. They did this because new ideas about how to build a strong state put increasing emphasis on having a robust and energetic labour force.
Potatoes were increasingly seen as a good way of building this desirable hearty population. And that is why in the 18th century, European writers started to think about who it was who introduced potatoes to Europe. When British writers credited Sir Walter Raleigh with this feat of nutritional benevolence, they were making a nationalist claim about Britain’s contributions to bettering the human condition.
And it's for that very reason, that these claims got right up the nose of Spanish writers, who were incensed by Britain’s snatching the credit for a contribution to which they alone felt entitled.
No one, it should be said, thanked European peasants, let alone the Andean farmers who had originally domesticated the potato thousands of years previously. So the question of who invented the potato in fact opens up a rather more interesting history than we might at first imagine.
I want to end by addressing, briefly, the second question raised in the title of this 10-Minute Talk: why should we care about potatoes?
Since the potato burst onto the historical state in the 18th century, scholars have become increasingly interested in their role in shaping history. They have identified all sorts of important historical processes that were shaped by the potato, from the population grown that fuelled Europe’s industrial revolution, to the Second World War, where potatoes featured everywhere, as the historian Lizzie Collingham has shown in her magnificent ‘The Taste of War’.
They were part of Hitler’s plan for building the master race, and they sustained ordinary people virtually everywhere that the conflict raged.
But it’s not only in these cataclysmic events of undoubted world-shaping significance that the potato’s historical importance may be glimpsed.
I’d like to end by reminding us all of the equal historical importance of the everyday experiences of everyday people, like us. If history is about the experience of the past, then food, and its vast significance to every aspect of human life and culture, must also form part of history.
So my final observation is that Philomena Cunk was quite right to ask about the potato, because it is as much a part of our history as colonialism or Sir Walter Raleigh, and, as I hope I’ve indicated, is also part of those histories, too.
Thank you very much.