6/16/2020
`
`How the Potato Changed the World | History | Smithsonian Magazine
`
`How the Potato Changed the World
`Brought to Europe from the New World by Spanish explorers, the
`lowly potato gave rise to modern industrial agriculture
`
`Although the potato is now associated with industrial-scale monoculture, the International Potato
`Center in Peru has preserved almost 5,000 varieties. (Martin Mejia / AP Images)
`
`By Charles C. Mann
`Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe
`November 2011
`11.3K
`
`1.4K
`
`164
`
`When potato plants bloom, they send up five-lobed flowers that spangle fields like fat purple stars. By some
`accounts, Marie Antoinette liked the blossoms so much that she put them in her hair. Her husband, Louis XVI,
`put one in his buttonhole, inspiring a brief vogue in which the French aristocracy swanned around with potato
`plants on their clothes. The flowers were part of an attempt to persuade French farmers to plant and French
`diners to eat this strange new species.
`
`Today the potato is the fifth most important crop worldwide, after wheat, corn, rice and sugar cane. But in the
`18th century the tuber was a startling novelty, frightening to some, bewildering to others—part of a global
`ecological convulsion set off by Christopher Columbus.
`
`About 250 million years ago, the world consisted of a single giant landmass now known as Pangaea. Geological
`forces broke Pangaea apart, creating the continents and hemispheres familiar today. Over the eons, the separate
`corners of the earth developed wildly different suites of plants and animals. Columbus’ voyages reknit the seams
`of Pangaea, to borrow a phrase from Alfred W. Crosby, the historian who first described this process. In what
`Crosby called the Columbian Exchange, the world’s long-separate ecosystems abruptly collided and mixed in a
`biological bedlam that underlies much of the history we learn in school. The potato flower in Louis XVI’s
`buttonhole, a species that had crossed the Atlantic from Peru, was both an emblem of the Columbian Exchange
`and one of its most important aspects.
`
`https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-potato-changed-the-world-108470605/
`
`1/7
`
`IPR2019-01050
`PRECISION PLANTING v. DEERE
`EXHIBIT 1082
`
`

`

`How the Potato Changed the World | History | Smithsonian Magazine
`6/16/2020
`Compared with grains, tubers are inherently more productive. If the head of a wheat or rice plant grows too big,
`the plant will fall over, with fatal results. Growing underground, tubers are not limited by the rest of the plant. In
`2008 a Lebanese farmer dug up a potato that weighed nearly 25 pounds. It was bigger than his head.
`
`Many researchers believe that the potato’s arrival in northern Europe spelled an end to famine there. (Corn,
`another American crop, played a similar but smaller role in southern Europe.) More than that, as the historian
`William H. McNeill has argued, the potato led to empire: “By feeding rapidly growing populations, [it]
`permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950.”
`The potato, in other words, fueled the rise of the West.
`
`Equally important, the European and North American adoption of the potato set the template for modern
`agriculture—the so-called agro-industrial complex. Not only did the Columbian Exchange carry the potato
`across the Atlantic, it also brought the world’s first intensive fertilizer: Peruvian guano. And when potatoes fell
`to the attack of another import, the Colorado potato beetle, panicked farmers turned to the first artificial
`pesticide: a form of arsenic. Competition to produce ever-more-potent arsenic blends launched the modern
`pesticide industry. In the 1940s and 1950s, improved crops, high-intensity fertilizers and chemical pesticides
`created the Green Revolution, the explosion of agricultural productivity that transformed farms from Illinois to
`Indonesia—and set off a political argument about the food supply that grows more intense by the day.
`
`In 1853 an Alsatian sculptor named Andreas Friederich erected a statue of Sir Francis Drake in Offenburg, in
`southwest Germany. It portrayed the English explorer staring into the horizon in familiar visionary fashion. His
`right hand rested on the hilt of his sword. His left gripped a potato plant. “Sir Francis Drake,” the base
`proclaimed,
`
`disseminator of the potato in Europe
`in the Year of Our Lord 1586.
`Millions of people
`who cultivate the earth
`bless his immortal memory.
`
`The statue was pulled down by Nazis in early 1939, in the wave of anti-Semitic and anti-foreign measures that
`followed the violent frenzy known as Kristallnacht. Destroying the statue was a crime against art, not history:
`Drake almost certainly did not introduce the potato to Europe. And even if he had, most of the credit for the
`potato surely belongs to the Andean peoples who domesticated it.
`
`Geographically, the Andes are an unlikely birthplace for a major staple crop. The longest mountain range on the
`planet, it forms an icy barrier on the Pacific Coast of South America 5,500 miles long and in many places more
`than 22,000 feet high. Active volcanoes scattered along its length are linked by geologic faults, which push
`against one another and trigger earthquakes, floods and landslides. Even when the land is seismically quiet, the
`Andean climate is active. Temperatures in the highlands can fluctuate from 75 degrees Fahrenheit to below
`freezing in a few hours—the air is too thin to hold the heat.
`
`From this unpromising terrain sprang one of the world’s great cultural traditions. Even as Egyptians built the
`pyramids, Andeans were erecting their own monumental temples and ceremonial plazas. For millennia,
`contentious peoples jostled for power from Ecuador to northern Chile. Most famous today are the Inca, who
`seized much of the Andes in a violent flash, built great highways and cities splendid with gold, then fell to
`Spanish disease and Spanish soldiers. The mountain cultures differed strikingly from one another, but all were
`nourished by tuber and root crops, the potato most important.
`
`Wild potatoes are laced with solanine and tomatine, toxic compounds believed to defend the plants against
`attacks from dangerous organisms like fungi, bacteria and human beings. Cooking often breaks down such
`chemical defenses, but solanine and tomatine are unaffected by heat. In the mountains, guanaco and vicuña (wild
`relatives of the llama) lick clay before eating poisonous plants. The toxins stick—more technically, “adsorb”—to
`the fine clay particles in the animals’ stomachs, passing through the digestive system without affecting it.
`Mimicking this process, mountain peoples apparently learned to dunk wild potatoes in a “gravy” made of clay
`
`https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-potato-changed-the-world-108470605/
`
`2/7
`
`

`

`How the Potato Changed the World | History | Smithsonian Magazine
`6/16/2020
`and water. Eventually they bred less-toxic potatoes, though some of the old, poisonous varieties remain, favored
`for their resistance to frost. Clay dust is still sold in Peruvian and Bolivian markets to accompany them.
`
`Edible clay by no means exhausted the region’s culinary creativity. To be sure, Andean Indians ate potatoes
`boiled, baked and mashed, as Europeans do now. But potatoes were also boiled, peeled, chopped and dried to
`make papas secas; fermented in stagnant water to create sticky, odoriferous toqosh; and ground to pulp, soaked
`in a jug and filtered to produce almidón de papa (potato starch). Most ubiquitous was chuño, which is made by
`spreading potatoes outside to freeze on cold nights, then thawing them in the morning sun. Repeated freeze-thaw
`cycles transform the spuds into soft, juicy blobs. Farmers squeeze out the water to produce chuño: stiff,
`styrofoam-like nodules much smaller and lighter than the original tubers. Cooked into a spicy Andean stew, they
`resemble gnocchi, the potato-flour dumplings in central Italy. Chuño can be kept for years without refrigeration
`—insurance against bad harvests. It was the food that sustained Inca armies.
`
`Even today, some Andean villagers celebrate the potato harvest much as their ancestors did in centuries past.
`Immediately after pulling potatoes from the ground, families in the fields pile soil into earthen, igloo-shaped
`ovens 18 inches tall. Into the ovens go the stalks, as well as straw, brush, scraps of wood and cow dung. When
`the ovens turn white with heat, cooks place fresh potatoes on the ashes for baking. Steam curls up from hot food
`into the clear, cold air. People dip their potatoes in coarse salt and edible clay. Night winds carry the smell of
`roasting potatoes for what seems like miles.
`
`The potato Andeans roasted before contact with Europeans was not the modern spud; they cultivated different
`varieties at different altitudes. Most people in a village planted a few basic types, but most everyone also planted
`others to have a variety of tastes. (Andean farmers today produce modern, Idaho-style breeds for the market, but
`describe them as bland—for yahoos in cities.) The result was chaotic diversity. Potatoes in one village at one
`altitude could look wildly unlike those a few miles away in another village at another altitude.
`
`In 1995, a Peruvian-American research team found that families in one mountain valley in central Peru grew an
`average of 10.6 traditional varieties—landraces, as they are called, each with its own name. In adjacent villages
`Karl Zimmerer, an environmental scientist now at Pennsylvania State University, visited fields with up to 20
`landraces. The International Potato Center in Peru has preserved almost 5,000 varieties. The range of potatoes in
`a single Andean field, Zimmerer observed, “exceeds the diversity of nine-tenths of the potato crop of the entire
`United States.” As a result, the Andean potato is less a single identifiable species than a bubbling stew of related
`genetic entities. Sorting it out has given taxonomists headaches for decades.
`
`The first Spaniards in the region—the band led by Francisco Pizarro, who landed in 1532—noticed Indians
`eating these strange, round objects and emulated them, often reluctantly. News of the new food spread rapidly.
`Within three decades, Spanish farmers as far away as the Canary Islands were exporting potatoes to France and
`the Netherlands (which were then part of the Spanish empire). The first scientific descrip tion of the potato
`appeared in 1596, when the Swiss naturalist Gaspard Bauhin awarded it the name Solanum tuberosum
`esculentum (later simplified to Solanum tuberosum).
`
`Unlike any previous European crop, potatoes are grown not from seed but from little chunks of tuber—the
`misnamed “seed potatoes.” Continental farmers regarded this alien food with fascinated suspicion; some
`believed it an aphrodisiac, others a cause of fever or leprosy. The philosopher-critic Denis Diderot took a middle
`stance in his Encyclopedia (1751-65), Europe’s first general compendium of Enlightenment thought. “No matter
`how you prepare it, the root is tasteless and starchy,” he wrote. “It cannot be regarded as an enjoyable food, but
`it provides abundant, reasonably healthy food for men who want nothing but sustenance.” Diderot viewed the
`potato as “windy.” (It caused gas.) Still, he gave it the thumbs up. “What is windiness,” he asked, “to the strong
`bodies of peasants and laborers?”
`
`With such halfhearted endorsements, the potato spread slowly. When Prussia was hit by famine in 1744, King
`Frederick the Great, a potato enthusiast, had to order the peasantry to eat the tubers. In England, 18th-century
`farmers denounced S. tuberosum as an advance scout for hated Roman Catholicism. “No Potatoes, No Popery!”
`was an election slogan in 1765. France was especially slow to adopt the spud. Into the fray stepped Antoine-
`Augustin Parmentier, the potato’s Johnny Appleseed.
`https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-potato-changed-the-world-108470605/
`
`3/7
`
`

`

`How the Potato Changed the World | History | Smithsonian Magazine
`6/16/2020
`Trained as a pharmacist, Parmentier served in the army during the Seven Years’ War and was captured by the
`Prussians—five times. During his multiple prison stints he ate little but potatoes, a diet that kept him in good
`health. His surprise at this outcome led Parmentier to become a pioneering nutritional chemist after the war
`ended, in 1763; he devoted the rest of his life to promulgating S. tuberosum.
`
`Parmentier’s timing was good. After Louis XVI was crowned in 1775, he lifted price controls on grain. Bread
`prices shot up, sparking what became known as the Flour War: more than 300 civil disturbances in 82 towns.
`Parmentier tirelessly proclaimed that France would stop fighting over bread if only her citizens would eat
`potatoes. 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. All of Europe’s potatoes descended from a few tubers
`sent across the ocean by curious Spaniards. 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. tuberosum should be ignored. 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 1500 and 1800, more than one per decade. This appalling figure is an underestimate, he wrote, “because
`it omits the hundreds and hundreds of local famines.” France was not exceptional; England had 17 national and
`big regional famines between 1523 and 1623. 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. Because potatoes were so productive, the effective result, in terms of
`calories, was to double Europe’s food supply.
`
`“For the first time in the history of western Europe, a definitive solution had been found to the food problem,”
`the Belgian historian Christian Vandenbroeke concluded in the 1970s. 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. Routine famine almost disappeared in potato country, a 2,000-mile band that
`stretched from Ireland in the west to Russia’s Ural Mountains in the east. 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 150 feet thick.
`
`Guano, the dried remains of birds’ semisolid urine, makes excellent fertilizer—a mechanism for giving plants
`nitrogen, which they need to make chlorophyll, the green molecule that absorbs the sun’s energy for
`photosynthesis. 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 1840, 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
`
`https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-potato-changed-the-world-108470605/
`
`4/7
`
`

`

`How the Potato Changed the World | History | Smithsonian Magazine
`6/16/2020
`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. Journalists decried the exploitation, but the public’s outrage
`instead was largely focused on Peru’s guano monopoly. The British Farmer’s Magazine laid out the problem in
`1854: “We do not get anything like the quantity we require; we want a great deal more; but at the same time, we
`want it at a lower price.” If Peru insisted on getting a lot of money for a valuable product, the only solution was
`invasion. Seize the guano islands! Spurred by public fury, the U.S. Congress passed the Guano Islands Act in
`1856, authorizing Americans to seize any guano deposits they discovered. Over the next half-century, U.S.
`merchants claimed 94 islands, cays, coral heads and atolls.
`
`From today’s perspective, the outrage—threats of legal action, whispers of war, editorials on the Guano
`Question—is hard to understand. But agriculture was then “the central economic activity of every nation,” as the
`environmental historian Shawn William Miller has pointed out. “A nation’s fertility, which was set by the soil’s
`natural bounds, inevitably shaped national economic success.” In just a few years, agriculture in Europe and the
`United States had become as dependent on high-intensity fertilizer as transportation is today on petroleum—a
`dependency it has not shaken since.
`
`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 1700 to some seven billion today.
`
`The name Phytophthora infestans means, more or less, “vexing plant destroyer.” P. infestans is an oomycete, one
`of 700 or so species sometimes known as water molds. 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.
`
`P. infestans preys on species in the nightshade family, especially potatoes and tomatoes. 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. infestans. Probably taken to Antwerp, P.
`infestans first broke out in early summer 1845, in the West Flanders town of Kortrijk, six miles from the French
`border.
`
`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, 1845.
`Cormac O Grada, an economist and blight historian at University College, Dublin, has estimated that Irish
`farmers planted about 2.1 million acres of potatoes that year. In two months P. infestans wiped out the equivalent
`of one-half to three-quarters of a million acres. The next year was worse, as was the year after that. The attack
`did not wind down until 1852. 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.
`
`https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-potato-changed-the-world-108470605/
`
`5/7
`
`

`

`How the Potato Changed the World | History | Smithsonian Magazine
`6/16/2020
`Within a decade, two million more had fled Ireland, almost three-quarters of them to the United States. Many
`more would follow. As late as the 1960s, Ireland’s population was half what it had been in 1840. 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 150 years ago.
`
`Despite its ghastly outcome, P. infestans may be less important in the long run than another imported species:
`Leptinotarsa decemlineata, the Colorado potato beetle. 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. Buffalo bur apparently came along, tangled in horse manes, cow tails and
`native saddlebags. The beetle followed. In the early 1860s it encountered the cultivated potato around the
`Missouri River and liked what it tasted.
`
`For millennia the potato beetle had made do with the buffalo bur scattered through the Mexican hills. By
`comparison, an Iowa farm, its fields solid with potatoes, was an ocean of breakfast. Because growers planted just
`a few varieties of a single species, pests like the beetle and the blight had a narrower range of natural defenses to
`overcome. If they could adapt to potatoes in one place, they could jump from one identical food pool to the next
`—a task made easier than ever thanks to inventions like railroads, steamships and refrigeration. Beetles spread in
`such numbers that by the time they reached the Atlantic Coast, their glittering orange bodies carpeted beaches
`and made railway tracks so slippery as to be impassable.
`
`Desperate farmers tried everything they could to rid themselves of the invaders. Eventually one man apparently
`threw some leftover green paint on his infested plants. It worked. The emerald pigment in the paint was Paris
`green, made largely from arsenic and copper. Developed in the late 18th century, it was common in paints,
`fabrics and wallpaper. Farmers diluted it with flour and dusted it on their potatoes or mixed it with water and
`sprayed.
`
`To potato farmers, Paris green was a godsend. To chemists, it was something that could be tinkered with. If
`arsenic killed potato beetles, why not try it on other pests? If Paris green worked, why not try other chemicals
`for other agricultural problems? In the mid-1880s a French researcher discovered that spraying a solution of
`copper sulfate and lime would kill P. infestans. Spraying potatoes with Paris green, then copper sulfate would
`take care of both the beetle and the blight. The modern pesticide industry had begun.
`
`As early as 1912 beetles began showing signs of immunity to Paris green. Farmers didn’t notice, though,
`because the pesticide industry kept coming up with new arsenic compounds that kept killing potato beetles. By
`the 1940s growers on Long Island found they had to use ever-greater quantities of the newest variant, calcium
`arsenate. After World War II an entirely new type of pesticide came into wide use: DDT. Farmers bought DDT
`and exulted as insects vanished from their fields. The celebration lasted about seven years. The beetle adapted.
`Potato growers demanded new chemicals. The industry provided dieldrin. It lasted about three years. By the
`mid-1980s, a new pesticide in the eastern United States was good for about a single planting.
`
`In what critics call the “toxic treadmill,” potato farmers now treat their crops a dozen or more times a season
`with an ever-changing cavalcade of deadly substances. Nonetheless, the pests keep coming back. Researchers
`were dismayed in the 1980s to discover that new types of P. infestans had found their way to Europe and
`America. They were more virulent—and more resistant to metalaxyl, the chief current anti-blight treatment. No
`good substitute has yet appeared.
`
`In 2009, potato blight wiped out most of the tomatoes and potatoes on the East Coast of the United States.
`Driven by an unusually wet summer, it turned gardens into slime. It destroyed the few tomatoes in my New
`England garden that hadn’t been drowned by rain. Accurately or not, one of my farming neighbors blamed the
`attack on the Columbian Exchange. More specifically, he said blight had arrived on tomato seedlings sold in big-
`box stores. “Those tomatoes,” he said direly, “come from China.”
`
`https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-potato-changed-the-world-108470605/
`
`6/7
`
`

`

`How the Potato Changed the World | History | Smithsonian Magazine
`6/16/2020
`Adapted with permission from 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann.
`Copyright © 2011 Charles C. Mann.
`
`Charles C. Mann has written five previous books, including 1491, plus articles for Science, Wired and other
`magazines.
`
`11.3K
`
`1.4K
`
`164
`
`https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-potato-changed-the-world-108470605/
`
`7/7
`
`