From taboo to food revolution
The historical significance of the potato—and its importance in our future.
Kigezi region, the highlands of Western Uganda, celebrates potatoes. I’m not kidding. Potatoes are one of the primary identity markers of the Bakiga people who call it home. So it surprised me to learn that potatoes were introduced to the region just over a hundred years ago. Not only that, they were initially met with skepticism as a taboo food. Anthropologists associated with the International Potato Center in Rwanda were told that German colonizers used to toss their potato peels over the walls, which then rooted into new plants. Despite the warnings of spiritual leaders, hungry cattle boys dug up tubers and roasted them, becoming the first to taste potatoes.
It baffled me how a food could transform from taboo to treasure in one hundred years, and I started digging. Potatoes arrived during a severe food crisis. When the Germans arrived in 1894, up to 95 percent of cattle were being wiped out by rinderpest. Two three-year droughts followed in the next decade. A new food was needed.
A ‘boringly bland’ cure for famine
I often jokingly tell Bakiga friends that Dutch cultural food isn’t that different from theirs; potatoes, cabbage and beef, boiled. But did you know that in the Netherlands, potatoes weren’t recognized as a mature food until 1727, a mere two hundred years before they arrived in Uganda? “What did people eat before that?” I asked my brother in bewilderment.
In the sixteenth century, the Spanish found potatoes growing in the Central Andes and decided that it was a crop that could cure Europe’s frequent famines. But back home, Europeans didn’t know how to cook it. They called it tasteless. (A view that Syl Gerritsma, one of CC’s board members, agrees with: “Everybody knows that potatoes are boringly bland! What people really want is butter, sour cream, cheese, bacon bits, salt, spices, cheese, pea soup, vegetable soup, cheese, gravy, stuffing, leek, cheese, onion, garlic and cheese. If you want to add a pinch of potato, that’s incidental.”)
For two centuries, Europe fed potatoes to pigs and the poor. In 1772, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier convinced the French government to make potatoes legal to cultivate – they had banned the crop out of fear that it caused diseases like leprosy. To convince people to eat potatoes, legend says that Parmentier planted 40-acres of them during the nation’s Flour War. During the day soldiers put on a show of guarding the fields and at night, hungry Parisians stole the potatoes. It worked; potatoes entered the French diet.
Vive la révolution!
I used to chuckle when I read World Potato Congress stories about potatoes precipitating food revolutions. Revolution is a big word to attribute to a tuber. But they’re not exaggerating. The potato did significantly reduce famines in Europe. It completely changed farming; Europe learned fertilizing from Peru, too.
Historian William H. McNeill believes the humble potato even led to empire building, “By feeding rapidly growing populations, [it] permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950.”
Today, the Netherlands exports potato seed to the rest of the world. And when I prepared a “traditional Dutch meal” for my friends this week, it was red cabbage, meatballs and – you guessed it – potatoes.
It’s a good reminder; the cultural things we so fiercely declare to be ours were blown to us on the winds of global trade. They were someone else’s first. At one point, our ancestors probably considered them taboo.
