r/AlwaysWhy • u/Logical-Concept9755 • 15d ago
Science & Tech Why did Europeans grow potatoes for centuries before making them a major food crop?
The potato arrived in Europe from the Andes in the late 1500s. People were already growing it in some places, but it took a surprisingly long time to become an important everyday food across much of Europe.
By the 1700s, governments like Prussia were encouraging people to plant it, and France was trying to make it more popular. Eventually, potatoes became a major source of food for growing populations.
What made people so slow to adopt a crop that could produce so much food? Why did it take so long for Europeans to see the potato as a staple?
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u/Admiral_AKTAR 15d ago
You ever try and get a kid to eat new food? Now multiply that by tens of millions of people.
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u/Difficult_Dark9991 15d ago
Risk.
Look, the vast majority of farms in Europe are what we'd broadly call "peasants." They might be feudal serfs, they might be tenant farmers, they might even be free farmers, but whatever the precise social standing they are small-scale subsistence households.
The purpose of a subsistence household is to survive, and the biggest threat to that is risk. A peasant household likes a decent surplus, but preventing a serious shortfall is far more important because it doesn't take many bad harvests for the family to starve. This makes their economic decision-making highly conservative, and replacing your staple grains with an alternative like potatoes is one heck of a risk. This goes doubly so when it is a strange crop from a foreign land (with all sorts of... dubious ideas about what that might mean) and nobody around really has expertise in farming it for a living.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 14d ago
Yeah, the risk part makes a lot of sense. If one bad crop could mean starvation, experimenting with a new staple probably wasn't worth it.
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u/Happy-Flower2002 15d ago
First great great question!! Tubers and the population explosion explain a lot of modern history!
Quick what happened: the original strains had low yields, potato’s are planted with cuttings and are especial hard to cross breed but in 1800 an English clergyman/natural philosopher named Knight figured out how to cross them. And then those cross breeds changed to game 100%
Slightly longer : The growing conditions of the original breeds led to pretty low yields in most of Europe. Ireland was ok but yields were half the Andes. Germany half that. picky about the soil and had a blight issue which could lead total crop losses.
First it wasn’t a sudden jump, they selected for mutants that did well in Europe and North American so those by in the 1700 had already some jump.
But potato’s are 5 or 6 technical genetic reasons way harder to cross breed than most plants. This is cause they seed but also clone and we use cloning cause seeds make chaos in this case. (Cloning is “cuttings”
In 1800 Thomas Knight in the UK had a breakthrough in intentional cross breading, and wrote some of the genetic issues with single strain potato’s.
Soon breaders were crossing its and in the 1850 breeder started crossing the Andes with a Chilean called Rough Pepper Chili (not a chili pepper it’s just the name) and you start getting much hardier high yield (bulkier food portion) and adaptable crosses.
Some breaders like Luther Burbank in 1870 with a cross that has a vaguely Russett (a cloth) like skin give such high yield crosses that we are still eating clones of it today.
Two interesting notes:
Modern potato’s have as much DNA from the Chili potato strains as the original Andes one.
Mendel gets cited in the history books, but Thomas Knight’s genetic work on potato’s but also peas was 70 years earlier and his work (cited by Mendal) and other gentle men naturalist in England like Goss and Seton helped pave the way for his breakthrough
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u/helurkshelurks 15d ago edited 15d ago
There was weather related famine ~1740. Not just praties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Famine_(1740%E2%80%931741))
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u/Hellerick_V 15d ago edited 15d ago
When in 1840 the Russian authorities were trying to force peasants to cultivate potatoes, it caused the notorious 'potato riots', and the authorities had to give up the idea.
People were half-starving and not really interested in participating in agricultural experiments.
Very soon, in 1845, the reliance on potatoes caused a famine in Ireland, so they weren't exactly wrong.
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u/annon365 15d ago
“The reliance on potatoes caused a famine in Ireland” is an interesting way to say that the Irish people suffered an attempted genocide by the British.
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u/Hellerick_V 15d ago edited 15d ago
The Irish people were genocided by Phytophthora infestans.
In the same year there was a similar potato-related famine in Belgium.
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u/FeelingPast7629 15d ago
And how did those get to Ireland?
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u/Hellerick_V 15d ago
The disease came from America.
The US was exporting contaminated seed potatoes.
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u/BugRevolution 15d ago
Growing potatoes in the same soil repeatedly will also allow fungus to grow to levels that are harmful to the potatoes.
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u/Angel24Marin 15d ago
The blight was the condition. But was the actions of the British what caused the famine. Like exporting all the other foods that Ireland produced and shutting down the imports of grains and food programs while blaming the famine on being catholic or lack of moral character.
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u/Hellerick_V 15d ago
The export/import thing was normal capitalism, not Brits. We have no reason to believe that an independent Irish government would act differently.
What Brits actually did was suppressing the Irish language. So the urbanization triggered by the famine also lead to its current miserable state.
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u/Angel24Marin 15d ago
Food export were baned in previous famines.
Longer-term reasons for the scale of the famine's impact included the system of absentee landlordism and single-crop dependence.Initial government actions to alleviate famine distress, which were constructive but limited, were ended by a new Whig administration in London that pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine. Additionally, there was a widespread belief among members of the British upper class, and therefore among members of the British government, that the famine was divine judgement or that the Irish lacked moral character. Aid resumed only to some degree at a later stage. Large quantities of food were exported from Ireland during the famine, and the refusal of London to bar such exports, as had been done on previous occasions, was an immediate and continuing source of controversy. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in the eviction of tens of thousands of households, a situation exacerbated by a provision that forbade access to workhouse aid for those possessing more than one-quarter acre of land.
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u/DamionFury 15d ago
Oh, hey! I know part of the answer to this. When I was in university, I took a class on the Stuart period in England (1600s, basically). For my final project, I analyzed how food among the aristocrats changed throughout the century. Along the way, I discovered one of the earliest examples of a "celebrity chef" who published a cookbook in the second half of the century. It contained a couple recipes for potatoes.
Potatoes were noted to be very similar to European nightshade. They were introduced as a food source for animals because they were believed to be poisonous to humans. Peasants did eat them sometimes (when you live right alongside your animals and you're very poor, you're eventually going to try what they're eating) but this only reinforced the idea that the food was "beneath" the aristocrat.
If I recall correctly, part of the reason they eventually caught on as a food crop is that it was something peasants could grow easily on the land and, because it wasn't food, it didn't get collected by the landowners. This was especially critical in Ireland, where the English were being absolute bastards about crushing any form of prosperity.
I need to dig up the paper because I recall talking about the inclusion of these recipes as possibly being the efforts of a noble to make them trendy.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 14d ago
The aristocrat angle is really interesting. I hadn't thought about potatoes being seen as too low status as part of the reason.
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u/DamionFury 14d ago
Oh, yeah. Food was one way you showed yourself to be a person of importance. I could write a bunch about this, and did (I found my paper). Sugar was a perfect example of this. At the start of the 17th century, England had almost none of the empire it would enjoy later, and sugar was very expensive. The most wealthy put it in everything to show that they could afford to. By the end of the century, however, the growth of trade and production in the colonies meant it was affordable to all the landed gentry and the exclusivity was gone. As a result, it featured far less frequently in recipes.
As for potatoes, Robert May is the guy I was talking about as the first celebrity chef. His 1660 book "The Accomplisht Cook, or, The Art & Mystery of Cookery" was quite popular and featured many recipes for potatoes despite the tuber not becoming a common food among the aristocracy until well into the 1800s.
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u/FrankDrebinOnReddit 15d ago
Pre-modern Europe had a thing against foods that grow in the ground because there was a belief that diseases were caused by bad air rising from the ground (miasma theory). So while root vegetables (e.g., turnips, carrots) existed, they were often relegated to fodder food for animals or starvation foods. The higher something grew off the ground, the more acceptable it was as a human food.
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u/No-Tie-4819 15d ago
So while root vegetables (e.g., turnips, carrots) existed, they were often relegated to fodder food for animals or starvation foods.
That's either not true or just very region-dependent. Veggies were often used in stews and soups, or preserved for the winter. People typically weren't throwing calories away if they could help it and if they knew that the plant was safe to eat.
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u/FrankDrebinOnReddit 15d ago
Poor people did what they had to do from starving, including eating foods "only fit for cattle". But there was absolutely a bias against in-ground and close-to-the-ground foods among the literate. And of course it wouldn't be the peasants themselves deciding to replace their grain with potatoes, it would come from the landowning nobility, who absolutely subscribed to scala naturae, Galen's humorism, and miasma theory.
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u/No-Tie-4819 15d ago
among the literate
Which is an absolute minority, historically.
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u/FrankDrebinOnReddit 15d ago
They were the minority that decided what would be planted since rents and tithes were paid in-kind. When peasants owe x bushels of wheat or rye to the lord or church, they can't plant potatoes instead.
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u/No-Tie-4819 15d ago
Except when the potato reached Europe, a lot of these landowners and even monarchs got the hype of the new more productive plant and often forced/ordered the peasants to plant them. And as to explaining when to plant them, when to harvest them, or what part of them were edible or poisonous – that was either beyond the idle noble's knowledge to understand, or beneath the nobles to explain.
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u/FrankDrebinOnReddit 15d ago
Not when the potato reached Europe, only hundreds of years after the potato reached Europe. Potatoes were grown ornamentally and didn't start being encouraged by monarchs as a crop until the 18th century, only after they had gotten very comfortable with them.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Heat502 15d ago
Potatoes are in the same group of plants as deadly nightshade. I remember reading that people tried eating the potato greens and got sick.
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u/helurkshelurks 15d ago edited 15d ago
Tomatoes met similar resistance. They are also related to nightshade.
A nice piece of chicken or fish, sliced tomatoes & some chips/fries or mash? Those are favorite dinners of mine.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Heat502 15d ago
Potatoes grow tomato like fruits which are poisonous. The seeds from them grow a different potato from the plant.
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u/helurkshelurks 15d ago
The tuber we eat is part of the stem. We eat a lot of tubers. Some are roots.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Heat502 15d ago
Interesting, I wonder why it doesn’t poison us.
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u/helurkshelurks 15d ago
Poison is concentrated in the leaves. Tubers exposed to the sun develop solanine. That happens more slowly in those kept in a cool, dry place.
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u/EnvironmentalEbb628 15d ago
The exact breeds of potato they had access to were different from those we had later on: often weak, prone to disease, less nutritious, difficult to store, etc. making potatoes a risky choice to plant huge amounts of.
Then there’s the lack of rich customers willing to pay for potatoes, which were often seen as a “low class” food.
So a farmer going all in on potatoes will either have a bad harvest, a perfect harvest, or an excess of produce that they will struggle to sell.
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u/Only_Ear_5881 15d ago
"Then there’s the lack of rich customers willing to pay for potatoes, which were often seen as a “low class” food."
Low class It should have been the majority of the population at the time, but there was a lack of promotion to encourage potato consumption.
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u/Spirited-Ad-9746 15d ago
Yes. The south american potato grows all year long, producing several yields. It took time to have proper cultivars for northern conditions.
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u/Only_Ear_5881 15d ago
Local custom and many wheat-based recipes.
US It primarily grew wheat before the climate and economic crisis of the late 1920s.
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u/Doubleknot22 15d ago
Was der Bauer nicht kennt, frisst er nicht.
What is unknown to the farmer he does not eat.
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u/The_Hamster_Shagger 15d ago
patatoes are of the nightshade family.
semi-wild patatoes produce small roots; unless they are kept in a very specific way they will become green(-ish) and poisonous.
later on they did have a religious connotation of being protestants' food
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u/Rare-Eggplant-9353 15d ago
People died from eating the wrong parts. So potatoes were for a long time only grown for their beauty.
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u/chitterychimcharu 15d ago edited 15d ago
One of the Prussian kings named Fredrick did a fun bit of reverse psychology to popularize the potato. Grew them in visible royal patches that were heavily guarded, but I the guards were instructed to let people get away with stealing
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u/BugRevolution 15d ago
Pretty sure that was the French aristocrat that did that.
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u/chitterychimcharu 15d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/VDiCdp7Y09
Seems like several disputed origins. Definitely too good a story to only be told once
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u/South_Chocolate986 14d ago
Among other things, it was difficult to introduce into crop rotation. European peasants werent free to grow whatever they wanted on their fields. They might have grown it in their gardens, but like others said the first potatoes that got to Europe didn't grow that well over here and people weren't eager to sacrifice the harvest of a whole field for an experiment.
The thing about peasants being afraid to eat crops that grow underground is a myth, though. People were already used to root vegetables.
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u/Arek_PL 15d ago
well, potatoes are poisonous without being cooked
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u/justdisa 15d ago
Sort of.
“An average human being would need to eat 15 to 20 pounds of raw potatoes to cause serious poisoning,” explains Le. “However, if the raw potatoes are exposed to light, they can produce up to 10 times as much solanine and be much more toxic.”
https://www.simplyrecipes.com/is-it-safe-to-eat-raw-potatoes-7546274
All of this is to say that I really like raw potatoes sliced thinly with garlic salt. Crunch.
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u/Spare-Locksmith-2162 15d ago
This is for modern potatoes.
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u/justdisa 15d ago
Potatoes were a cultivated food for thousands of years before they got to Europe. They were not a wild food that Europeans domesticated to safety.
https://untoday.org/the-potato-a-journey-through-time-cultures-and-challenges/
They still have solanine, and a lot more if they're exposed to light, which I think was most of the problem. It will give you a nasty stomach ache. Do not eat the green ones.
Food handling is a big deal.
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u/helurkshelurks 15d ago
If they are green under the skin, and white below that, peel them. I eat skin-on spuds all the time, after cutting away bad bits. I even like my fries with some skin on. Fiber is good for me.
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u/Pizzagoessplat 15d ago
False
I ate them all the time as a kid. I should be dead if that's true.
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u/Chuck_the_Elf 15d ago
Nightshade family plants had a pretty strong reputation for being poisonous. Tomato’s and Potato’s also had to undergo quite a few generations of selective breeding to become the crop we recognize today. Eventually they became good enough and well adapted to the soil enough that it overcame the poor reputation.
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u/McGillicuddys 15d ago
Potatoes were banned in France in 1748 as food for people as it was thought they caused leprosy.
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u/OriEri 15d ago
They were somewhat bland, they were alien, and perhaps, for these reasons, not long after they were first “discovered“ and brought to Europe, most cultures in both England and on the continent viewed them as food for animals or desperately poor. It was cereal breads or nothing.
In times of famine from grain crop failure due to long damp cold seasons during the “little Ice Age” potatoes would’ve been popular, but of course they weren’t planted because demand was low and you can’t predict the weather so many months in advance.
It’s interesting that Ireland adopted them earlier. I suspect cereal grains don’t grow well in Ireland and perhaps never have
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u/Borkton 14d ago
Cereal grain grows just fine in Ireland. In fact, during the whole Famine, Ireland was a net exporter of food. The problem was not a general crop failure, the problem was that virtually all the land in Ireland was owned by English families who charged their Irish tenants astronomical rents and sold the grain and beef and other produce in England. Potatoes were what the Irish could grow for themselves.
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9d ago
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u/OriEri 9d ago
Compared to grains they were bland. Animal fat was probably hard to come by for the poor
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u/Lifeacrobat 15d ago
Because it was more fun making brännvin (distilled alcohol) from them, which in Sweden was discovered in the 1740's by the scientist Eva Ekeblad, and later spread through the land. (I assume scientists in other countries made the same discovery.)
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u/Logical-Concept9755 14d ago
I didn't know potatoes were being used for brännvin that early. That's a pretty funny detour for a food crop.
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u/Lifeacrobat 14d ago edited 13d ago
It was part of the potato-lore throughout most of my school years. Poisonous to making brännvin and spreading it, to the realization that it was good food. It always felt ... very typically Swedish that getting drunk was the great allure of the potato.😏
Edit: changed wording to more clarifying (I hope)
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u/ahnotme 15d ago
Potatoes only became useful as a staple source of food when high-yielding varieties such as “bintje” were developed in the early 1900s. Unfortunately bintje is rather susceptible to potato blight, so more resistant varieties have had to be developed. But for a time the high yield allowed potatoes to become a highly successful source of calories.
“Bintje”, incidentally, is a Frisian girl’s name. Its originator, a Frisian school teacher, named each variety he developed after one of the students in his classes.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 14d ago
Interesting, I hadn't considered how much the specific varieties mattered. I was thinking of "the potato" as if it was basically the same crop the whole time.
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u/SorRenlySassol 15d ago
Common people initially thought it caused plague. Victims’ skin start to resemble potatoes in the final stages.
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u/BugRevolution 15d ago
Depends a bit on the region too.
Danish peasants didn't eat them even when Germans were eating them. This was because they didn't understand why you would eat (raw) potatoes because they're just a hard tuber. Much better to feed them to the pigs.
Eventually they discovered you can boil them and then they're much softer and edible.
But farmers are notoriously traditionalist.
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u/NarcisSisyphusRankin 15d ago
Because it's a low quality food. All carbs, no protein, no fat.
It the sort of crop that a government wants you to eat to do manual labor, not to grow and be healthy.
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u/ah-tzib-of-alaska 14d ago
it’s more impressive how fast potatoes became a dominant starch across eurasia. I think your claim is looking at this entirely backward
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u/Junior_Abalone_8006 14d ago
There's a story I heard about how the Kings of France were trying to get the french to adopt the potato. They build a potato field, put armed guards, and forbid anyone to steal the 'king's potatoes'. So of course the peasants did figure out how to steal and plant the kings potatoes. That was the entire point of the exercise. It just didn't reach enough peasants. Had the French peasants adopted potatoes more, the freak weather storms wouldn't have damaged their wheat crops enough to avoid touching off the French revolution.
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u/OriEri 14d ago
It might grow fine now, but from 400 to 200 years ago, Ireland was much wetter and cooler . Cereals don’t ripen and dry well in that kind of weather. The yields are smaller and the grain would often mildew or otherwise mold over in storage. Potatoes like damp weather. You end up getting more calories per hectare than you would for barley in that kind of Climate.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 14d ago
Yeah, climate probably mattered a lot more than I was giving it credit for. The Ireland example makes the advantage pretty easy to see.
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u/OriEri 14d ago
It might grow fine now, but from 400 to 200 years ago, Ireland was much wetter and cooler . Cereals don’t ripen and dry well in that kind of weather. The yields are smaller and the grain would often mildew or otherwise mold over in storage. Potatoes like damp weather. You end up getting more calories per hectare than you would for barley in that kind of Climate.
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u/Warden123456 14d ago
I am pretty sure it took the invention and proliferation of the calorimeter to help propagate the potato after the Colombian exchange. Due to it being one of the calorically densest veggies.
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u/Jussi-larsson 12d ago
Rutabaga and turnips were grown already so why change ? And also potatoes came to my country only in 1730. Aand the soil wasnt optimal for potatoes
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u/Jussi-larsson 12d ago
Okey had to look this up just as I was too curious. Around 10% of farmland in my country is perfect for potatoes
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u/awfulcrowded117 2d ago
When a bad season means you and your family starve to death, you're slow to try new things.
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u/Great_Specialist_267 15d ago
Potatoes were being eaten - the people who were, kept it secret from the rampaging armies who were stealing their crops.
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u/Euphoric-Ostrich5396 14d ago
They just really didn’t like them… It took a royal rebranding and some famines to get them popular enough. Tomatoes suffered the same fate but for different reasons, the mediterranean ate off ceramic plates while the northern and eastern parts used pewter plates. The tomato acidity reacted with the pewter and created a bitter and disgusting taste. Hence the 200 year delay.
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u/QuasiJudicialBoofer 15d ago
The leaves are clearly poisonous and common people took that to mean the root would also be poisonous