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The potato was first domesticated in the region of modern-day southern Peru and extreme northwestern Bolivia between and BC. Cultivation of History by region · South America · Europe · North America.
Table of contents
- potato | Definition, Origin, & Facts | Britannica
- Europe in decline
- The Secret History of the Potato
After completing various sketches and trial paintings of the piece, Van Gogh sent reversed lithograph prints to two art dealers of the time and one of his fellow colleagues, while still planning to create a final draft of the sketch in paint. Van Gogh soon developed a sense of confidence that his finished painting would become an accurate interpretation of what he saw it as. Gogh began to advertise his finished painting before he had even begun it. Never the less The Potato Eaters failed to become the painting he had set his mind to. It was not successful in his life time, nor was it displayed in Salon as Gogh had requested.
Today the piece has reached great heights in the artistic community as well as being considered his first masterpiece, which is what he had intended it to be. The rafter boards in the back of the piece. The soft gentle lines forming a window in the darkness.
The picture frame hung on a darkened wall. The large platter of potatoes, and the boney fingers stretched out to obtain them. The woman pouring a brew similar to coffee. The large rectangular column behind the table that seems to hold the building up. The weathered edges of the table. Parmentier tirelessly proclaimed that France would stop fighting over bread if only her citizens would eat potatoes.
potato | Definition, Origin, & Facts | Britannica
Meanwhile, he set up one publicity stunt after another: presenting an all-potato dinner to high-society guests the story goes that Thomas Jefferson, one of the guests, was so delighted he introduced French fries to America ; supposedly persuading the king and queen to wear potato blossoms; and planting 40 acres of potatoes at the edge of Paris, knowing that famished commoners would steal them. In exalting the potato, Parmentier unwittingly changed it. When farmers plant pieces of tuber, rather than seeds, the resultant sprouts are clones.
By urging potato cultivation on a massive scale, Parmentier was unknowingly promoting the notion of planting huge areas with clones—a true monoculture. The effects of this transformation were so striking that any general history of Europe without an entry in its index for S.
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Hunger was a familiar presence in 17th- and 18th-century Europe. Cities were provisioned reasonably well in most years, their granaries carefully monitored, but country people teetered on a precipice. France, the historian Fernand Braudel once calculated, had 40 nationwide famines between and , more than one per decade. The continent simply could not reliably feed itself. The potato changed all that. Every year, many farmers left fallow as much as half of their grain land, to rest the soil and fight weeds which were plowed under in summer.
Now smallholders could grow potatoes on the fallow land, controlling weeds by hoeing. By the end of the 18th century, potatoes had become in much of Europe what they were in the Andes—a staple.
Roughly 40 percent of the Irish ate no solid food other than potatoes; the figure was between 10 percent and 30 percent in the Netherlands, Belgium, Prussia and perhaps Poland. At long last, the continent could produce its own dinner. It was said that the Chincha Islands gave off a stench so intense they were difficult to approach. The Chinchas are a clutch of three dry, granitic islands 13 miles off the southern coast of Peru. Almost nothing grows on them.
Their sole distinction is a population of seabirds, especially the Peruvian booby, the Peruvian pelican and the Peruvian cormorant. Attracted by the vast schools of fish along the coast, the birds have nested on the Chincha Islands for millennia. Over time they covered the islands with a layer of guano up to feet thick. Although most of the atmosphere consists of nitrogen, the gas is made from two nitrogen atoms bonded so tightly to each other that plants cannot split them apart for use. As a result, plants seek usable nitrogen-containing compounds like ammonia and nitrates from the soil. Alas, soil bacteria constantly digest these substances, so they are always in lesser supply than farmers would like.
In , the organic chemist Justus von Liebig published a pioneering treatise that explained how plants depend on nitrogen. Along the way, he extolled guano as an excellent source of it. Sophisticated farmers, many of them big landowners, raced to buy the stuff. Their yields doubled, even tripled. Fertility in a bag!
Prosperity that could be bought in a store! Guano mania took hold. In 40 years, Peru exported about 13 million tons of it, the great majority dug under ghastly working conditions by slaves from China. Seize the guano islands! Spurred by public fury, the U. Congress passed the Guano Islands Act in , authorizing Americans to seize any guano deposits they discovered. Over the next half-century, U. Guano set the template for modern agriculture. Ever since von Liebig, farmers have treated the land as a medium into which they dump bags of chemical nutrients brought in from far away so they can harvest high volumes for shipment to distant markets.
To maximize crop yields, farmers plant ever-larger fields with a single crop—industrial monoculture, as it is called. Before the potato and corn , before intensive fertilization, European living standards were roughly equivalent to those in Cameroon and Bangladesh today. On average, European peasants ate less per day than hunting-and-gathering societies in Africa or the Amazon. Industrial monoculture allowed billions of people—in Europe first, and then in much of the rest of the world—to escape poverty. The revolution begun by potatoes, corn and guano has allowed living standards to double or triple worldwide even as human numbers climbed from fewer than one billion in to some seven billion today.
It sends out tiny bags of 6 to 12 spores that are carried on the wind, usually for no more than 20 feet, occasionally for half a mile or more. When the bag lands on a susceptible plant, it breaks open, releasing what are technically known as zoospores. If the day is warm and wet enough, the zoospores germinate, sending threadlike filaments into the leaf. The first obvious symptoms—purple-black or purple-brown spots on the leaves—are visible in about five days. By then it is often too late for the plant to survive. Scientists believe that it originated in Peru. Large-scale traffic between Peru and northern Europe began with the guano rush.
Proof will never be found, but it is widely believed that the guano ships carried P. Probably taken to Antwerp, P. The blight hopscotched to Paris by that August. Weeks later, it was destroying potatoes in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and England. Governments panicked. It was reported in Ireland on September 13, Cormac O Grada, an economist and blight historian at University College, Dublin, has estimated that Irish farmers planted about 2.
In two months P. The next year was worse, as was the year after that. The attack did not wind down until A million or more Irish people died—one of the deadliest famines in history, in the percentage of population lost. A similar famine in the United States today would kill almost 40 million people. Within a decade, two million more had fled Ireland, almost three-quarters of them to the United States. Many more would follow.
Europe in decline
Today the nation has the melancholy distinction of being the only country in Europe, and perhaps the world, to have fewer people within the same boundaries than it did more than years ago. Despite its ghastly outcome, P.
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Its name notwithstanding, this orange-and-black creature is not from Colorado. Nor did it have much interest in potatoes in its original habitat, in south-central Mexico; its diet centered on buffalo bur, a weedy, spiny, knee-high potato relative. Biologists believe that buffalo bur was confined to Mexico until Spaniards, agents of the Columbian Exchange, carried horses and cows to the Americas. Quickly realizing the usefulness of these animals, Indians stole as many as they could, sending them north for their families to ride and eat.
The Secret History of the Potato
Buffalo bur apparently came along, tangled in horse manes, cow tails and native saddlebags. The beetle followed. In the early s it encountered the cultivated potato around the Missouri River and liked what it tasted.