What We Call Potatoes

If I had to go back and do it all over again, I'd probably be an ethnobotanist. Oh sure, the career path is a bit more limited, and I probably would have tired of plants after a bit, but something about tying together history, culture, and ecology gets me really jazzed. The field of ethnobotany examines the relationship between plants and people, situating plants within societies and humans within ecosystems. But we're not talking about just any botany; it's the stuff we end up eating that is fascinating.

Lunchtime conversations in my department range from the completely random and truly bizarre to classic ecology nerdiness. Yesterday veered more toward the latter and ended somewhere in between, when  my unassuming purple sweet potato instigated a discussion on what is potato. 'That's taro, right?' 

Ok, so according to the International Potato Center, a potato (Solanum tuberosum) – part of the nightshade family along with eggplant and tomatoes - is a species native to the Andean region of South America composed of 4,500 varieties and consumed by people for about 10,000 years. Now in third place in terms of crops of global importance for human consumption (and more limited to a small subset of this vast gene pool), this genetic diversity and cultural, climatic, and ecological specificity persist in the Andean heart. It's not all sunshine and roses, though, and potatoes proved to be front and centre of such tragedies as the Great Famine in Ireland - in which the monochromatic landscape of 'lumper' potatoes presented fertile ground for a devastating fungal blight.

Now sweet potato is a separate genus (Ipomeoea batatas) – hailing from the morning-glory family – but is also from Latin America. Contrary to my initial understanding, it is not a tuber (a thickened stem) but a “storage root”. It was one of the big botanical travelers, probably hitching a ride with Polynesian sailors to the Pacific Islands. Eventually it hit Japan and radiated throughout Asia. High in vitamin A, the sweet potato has more recently found itself a favourite staple introduced to Africa for nutritional improvement. And while batata (one of its names) may sound similar to patata, the sweet potato is most definitely not.

Taro, a not particularly notable-looking tuber, also belongs to another genus (Colocasia esculenta), although in some languages it is called a type of ‘potato’ (e.g. itchy potato in Vietnamese and village potato in Japanese). Thought to have originated in South Asia (India, Nepal, Bangladesh), taro has spread widely throughout Oceania and the Pacific, embedding itself in culture and tradition. For instance, Hawa'iian folklore has the ancestral human and the first seed of taro as siblings, borne of the sky father and earth mother. 

Deceptively plain from the outside, sweet potatoes as art!

Finally, yams - no not those deep orange gems eaten at Thanksgiving - are also from a different genus (Dioscorea, spp) and are indigenous to West Africa (although one species originated in Asia). After cassava, it is the most cultivated root/tuber crop in Africa. A central part of people's diets for upwards of 10,000 years, yams have also found their place as symbols for marriage and fertility. And if you're around Ghana or Nigeria next month, there is a 'Yam Festival' in celebration of the rainy season ending and the harvest commencing.

Botanically speaking, these four are all very different; my purple sweet potato is not a taro or a yam, or I guess even a potato for that matter. But I suppose culturally, they have similar preparations and culinary manifestations as a result of common characteristics as starchy staples. The astounding thing is how far each has travelled, and how non-native crops have immersed themselves so thoroughly that they become invaluable, pivotal in traditions and diets, and imbued with their own local significance and names. 

Further Reading: 

How the Potato Changed the World (Smithsonian Magazine 2011)
How the Sweet Potato Crossed the Pacific Way Before Europeans Did (NPR 2013)
A Map of Where Your Food Originated May Surprise You (NPR 2016)

Visions of Sheep

It's been nearly a month since my last post, so I thought the obvious solution was to focus on photos. Well OK, this musing has actually been written for a couple of weeks now, since returning from a five-day trek in England's Lake District. It might seem a bit odd to see me writing about herd animals on the blog, but this time of year it is hard to venture anywhere in the UK without confronting an army of rambunctious lambikins*. The topic is an important one regardless of one's dietary tendancies, in terms of people's lives and incomes, as well as ideals of natural beauty. In a country with a pastoral tradition at least two millennia old, and a landscape that now suits the venture to a T, it's no surprise that of the 67,000 holdings most herds are on the smaller size (under 500 animals). There were nearly 23,000,000 sheep and lambs in the United Kingdom in 2013. Just for a sense of scale, the UK's human population is 64,100,000 (not quite the 20:1 ratio of New Zealand, but still...).

 

During the last week in March, I went to hang out on the farm, and of course play with all the lambs now running around. It was a beautiful site, but having sworn off meat over 15 years ago, the knowledge that these young'uns had half a year left and at most two made the day bittersweet. That is until I noticed the deep empathy the farmers had with their animals - the comments about different sheep's personalities (and praise for their good mothering), the attachment and sorrow when a mother falls ill or succumbs, the tenderness when bottle-feeding an abandoned lamb. Of course this is not the case for all farmers, especially as the size of farm or the intensity of production increases (remember that livestock research centre...?). Yet it is also an injustice to demonize an entire industry when there is in fact no cookie-cutter scenario.

Sure, it doesn't make killing young animals any easier to swallow, but from a socio-ecological perspective, it is also important to recognize and respect how much this way of life has become part of the landscape in certain regions of the world. Having recently returned from traipsing through northern England's Lake District, this is clear. The hilly, some would even say mountainous, terrain lends itself poorly to grain production or horticulture. What woodland exists is either plantation or remnant from the large-scale deforestation five centuries ago. So across the region (ok, let's be honest, across the whole country!), sheep abound. From valley floors to highland meadows. While only 6% of the 41,000 inhabitants of the Lake District are in farming, this is considerably higher than the national average of less than 1%. Without the grazing currently underway, the character and aesthetic of the landscape would also fundamentally change. Maybe change wouldn't be a bad thing, but right now it embodies this iconic image of pastoral England that holds a certain significance to a great number of people. 

*You might recall this reference from childhood...

Mountain sheep in the early morning light!

The Show-Down: Man vs. Sheep (I'm pretty sure sheep won)

A Cultural Landscape

Greetings from the Canarian island of Tenerife! As part of my graduate programme, my class has migrated down to this Spanish Atlantic volcanic isle off the coast of North Africa to learn about conservation and management in this island context. Since that has been tiring to say the least, I'm keeping this short and sweet. One of the topics we've discussed while busing around from park to park is the change in landscape character over the past sixty years. During that time, the main industry has shifted from agriculture employing 73% of the population (now only 3%) to cheap European tourist packages dominating.

Among many other consequences of this transition, has been the abandonment an development of agricultural land. Taking a look at a traditional cross-section of the island, you would see costal fishing, inland terraced agriculture on the rich volcanic soils, and then goat herding in the steep upland hillsides. Today, the goats remain to some extent, but most traditional agriculture is gone, while some banana and other export crops remain.

While this rapid erosion of traditional systems and landscape character seems rather depressing, I was also intrigued to learn that many of the cultivars grown in what remains of small scale farms are local endemic varieties. Potato types may be found nowhere else in the world. Vineyards are popping up and defining distinct Canarian wines. With a little infusion of interest and a spark of demand, perhaps farming on this island full of a rich diversity of ecosystems will rejuvenate its long agricultural tradition. For now, I just have these mediocre photos!