How the Humble Potato Saved the World

Full transcript

Look at this dirty, lumpy, thoroughly unimpressive tuber. Yet the humble potato is today the fourth largest food crop on Earth, and its journey here is one of the most remarkable stories in human history. Around eight to ten thousand years ago, indigenous farmers near Lake Titicaca in the Andes domesticated wild potatoes, which were toxic at first. They cleverly bred safer varieties and even invented the world's first freeze-dried food, called Chuño, which could last four years without spoiling. Spanish conquistadors brought the potato back to Europe around 1570, and the reaction was immediate horror. Europeans feared it caused leprosy and worse, because it belonged to the nightshade family, and the Bible never once mentioned it, so farmers fed it only to animals and prisoners. By the late 1700s, clever propagandists changed everything. France's Antoine Parmentier planted a potato field, guarded it with armed soldiers by day, then bribed the guards to leave at night. Curious locals stole the tubers, assumed they were precious, and planted them everywhere across the country. The potato fueled a population explosion across Europe, nearly tripling the continent's population between 1700 and 1900. But total dependence on one single crop variety proved catastrophic in Ireland, where the 1845 blight destroyed harvests for years, killing over one million people and forcing another million to emigrate. The famine sparked modern agricultural science and crop diversity research. In 1995, the potato even became the first vegetable grown in space aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia. From ancient Andean terraces to orbit, this ugly little tuber truly changed the entire world forever.