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The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World

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With a lively literary style, journalist Larry Zuckerman explains the history and importance of the lowly tuber, from its thirteen-thousand-year origin on the high Andean plateaus to its sixteenth-century discovery by Spaniards down to the beginning of World War I. Zuckerman chronicles just four countries in his treatise about the spud, but these countries: France, England, Ireland, and the United States are, he says, representative of the Western world.

Despite the potato's vital nutrients, it soon became known as the food of the poor and remained out of favor among the gentry. Even the peasants did not appreciate the strange plant that formed odd tubers which sprouted, which they declared to be of the Devil. But by the end of the seventeenth century, the potato as a staple food for Ireland's poor had become widely known. At the same time in England, the potato had yet to become a table food. Farmers fed them to their livestock. Within a hundred years, the potato had "nosed its way into English life." In France, where the fear of nightshades was even greater than in England, the potato caught on because the wet summers did not affect this hardy plant as they did grain.

Zuckerman traces the tuber's history from its beginnings through the horrific Potato Famine of Ireland to farm staple in a post-Civil War U.S. The potato represented a food whose ease of preparation lightened the burden for the average American farm wife. In chapters titled Potatoes and Population, A Passion for Thrift, Women's Work, The Good Companions, and Good Breeding (showing the evolution of the tuber from exotic and fearsome to low class, to beneath notice), Zuckerman educates and entertains, and at the same time shows us that having read the history of the lowly spud, we can never regard it in the same way. Perhaps the humble potato did rescue the Western world.

This title is an eminently readable social history of the potato's influence in Western Europe and the United States. It's full of fascinating facts, e.g. innante prejudice about food sources that came out of the ground delaying acceptance of the potato in Europe.

The book's greatest strength is the lengthy and sympathetic description of the Irish Great Famine of the 1840's. I am somewhat familiar with the secondary historical literature of the period and can confidently say that Zuckerman has thorough grounding in the sources and has fairly presented them.

There are some problems: the book could have been better organized, it skips too lightly over the origin of the potato in South America and although it cites sources, a more traditional footnoting style would have been helpful.

Mr.Zuckerman, I am now your fan and look forward to reading your next book.

While i really liked this book and found it full of useful information and insightful analysis, i also found the book very disappointing.

I was disappointed by his treatment of the pre-Colombian aspects of the potato's history. We find out little about the origins of the potato, its importance and uses in pre-Colombian South America, etc. (They are part of the Western World) We also find little about the potato itself. The book is Eurocentric and just a social history. These are both shortcomings of the book and strengths.

Zuckerman, who writes quite well, provides us with a tremendous social history of the potato in a few countries: France, England, Ireland and the US. The book ranges far and weaves a complex historical story with great explanations. Just the discussion on how social attitudes towards the potato is worth the cost of the book. I would recommend this book, but be forewarned that it is a limited social history.

Nothing could be more boring than the potato. Well maybe not. Larry Zuckerman in the, Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World takes the lowly tuber to new heights. Being of Irish and Anglo Irish extraction, the great famine has always struck a chord with me. I've read Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett which brings home the horror of the famine but I've always been a bit puzzled about it. It is hard living in the age of plenty to understand this event. Why not eat something else if the potato crop goes bad and skip the fries and just eat the Big Mac? Zuckerman's fine book explains the inner workings of the famine. A loaf of white bread could cost most of a days wages leaving nothing else for rent, clothes, or other necessities. The potato was a miracle crop. It would grow where most other crops failed. It was almost a complete diet and provided the much needed vitamin C. It was not labor intensive like grain and did not require an oven, which very few could afford.

The book covers a lot more than the famine and is a wealth of detail about the lowly tuber. Ministers decried it and blamed the Irish population boom on its supposed aphrodisiac qualities. The potato was originally grown for beasts and by definition was unfit for humans. It was easy to grow so therefore encouraged laziness, thus confirming English suspicions. It was not mentioned in the Bible so add one more strike against it.

The Potato is anything but boring. After you've read, it you'll never look at a potato the same way again. I'd love to see Zuckerman do the same treatment on rice.

One of the interesting things Zuckerman notes in this four century social history is the hard time the venerable vegetable has had in the court of public opinion over the years. Such holdovers from days gone by exist in modern pejorative terms like "couch potato" and "potato head." Nonetheless, valuable insights can be learned from this book, and students of history as well as education can glean useful nuggets for their disciplines.

Originally a product of the New World, the potato was slow in gaining acceptance in Europe. Interestingly, one of the reasons for its slow acceptance was the fact that it grew in the ground. Falling under the category of "nightshade," superstitious peasants were loathe to eat it. Conversely, after the Irish began consuming it in mass, and their population exploded, it was opined that potatoes perhaps assisted virility.

Wheat, barley, and rye were more established crops, and Zuckerman examines the slow inroads potatoes made in France, England, Ireland, and eventually America. The French were encouraged to supplement their crops with the tuber by Antoine Augustin Parmentier throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Parmentier made acceptance of the potato and the abolition of various negative myths surrounding it one of his callings in life. In England, food was accorded rank among the classes, as were many other aspects of British life. Since the upper classes ate only wheat bread, the poor insisted on the same, and efforts to supplement the diet of both were many years in progressing. Most intriguing were government efforts to influence the growth of various crops. In Ireland, potatoes had a slightly easier time when it was discovered they could easily be prepared and eaten, and the scraps could help feed livestock. But the country which accepted potatoes most readily, with few problems concerning superstition and class envy, was the United States. Somewhere in there is a generalization that can be drawn concerning the "bold experiment" and her colonial parents.

Ultimately, of course, potatoes helped cushion the impact of famines in Europe. Later when populaces were more dependant on the tuber and the potato crops failed, wide-scale starvation ensued, often triggering mass migrations to America. In the end, Zuckerman makes a strong case for the power the potato has wielded on European and American civilization. Without it, the entire course of our recent history would not be the same.

I was very disappointed by this book. The subtitle "How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western Word" is misleading to the extreme and appears to be an attempt to play off the subtitle of the great book about Cod "the Fish that Changed the World." Nowhere in this book is there any discussion about the Potato rescuing or even altering Western Europe in any significant way. Larry Zuckerman does make a case that the ease of growing and cooking potatoes may have led to some of the population increases between 1750 and 1850 that helped fuel the industrial revolution. But he also makes the case that over reliance on the potato made the Great Famine of 1845-49 a major European disaster.

Unlike "Cod", "Potato" did not have a central theme around which to organize its narrative. Most of the material in this book appears to be anecdotal and taken from many contemporary diaries and books about food. These are interesting and worth reading. But there are too many of them and most say the same thing. The concept that "the potato almost grew without labor, was inexpensive to buy and easy to cook, and was therefore loved by the lower classes and looked down upon by the upper classes" is illustrated maybe 100 times. There is only a vague chronology. The reader is constantly jumping from Ireland to France to England to the US with a little Russia and Germany thrown in.

Editorial opinions by the author eat up a large portion of the narrative. One economist was said to be "reptilian" for his cold-bloodedness. Many civic leaders were taken to task for blaming the famine on Providence and immorality, as if in the 1840s, before Pasteur and Darwin, there were any other paradigms by which to make sense of what was happening. Especially disconcerting were numerous links by the author between government policies towards relief during the famine, which in retrospect was certainly pathetic, to current American views about welfare. Ronald Reagan is criticized because he "...championed private charity, an ironic position given his family history." Given the failure of government aide during the Irish famine it appears not at all ironic that anyone such as President Reagan with Irish blood, this reviewer included, would trust individual responsibility more than a distant bureaucracy.

Had the author let the facts speak for themselves he would have made a persuasive case for government intervention. By the author being so heavy handed, this reviewer came to believe it likely that the anecdotal evidence was chosen to fit the author's opinions rather than to create those opinions. The book "Cod" opens describing an incredible environmental disaster yet never lectures us or needed to invoke contemporary politicians to make its case. While reading "Potato" I remember thinking it remarkable that this book could be so politically correct without focusing on women. A few pages later I reached the chapter "Women's Work" which pretty much described the kitchen as the Black hole of American womanhood. Typical complaints were that 1) men built kitchens without understanding the needs of women, 2) men would hire extra field hands for the harvest but most women could not hire extra hands for additional cooking and 3) the cast iron-stove (which most women in the world would die for, as they would for a kitchen) by making it possible to bake, boil and simmer different dishes, greatly increased a woman's workload. The potato is barely mentioned in this chapter except to repeat the mantra that the potato saved American women from hard labor because it was economical and easy to cook.

This would have been a much stronger book had the author refrained from so many personal opinions and kept using so many anecdotes saying the same thing. It should have been half the current length. I wish more use had been made of objective statistics and relief efforts placed in the context of what had been done prior to the Great Famine. England may have been guilty of all sorts of sins against Ireland but given the devastation of four years of complete famine, when almost all grain crops failed, it is hard to see what England could have done differently at the time. Unanswered is the question- since starvation was everywhere in Europe, where was England to get the food to feed Ireland? All the alms and jewelry and pounds of sterling in the Bank of England couldn't buy food if there was none to be bought. This book had some statistics but they seemed there more to back the author's opinion rather than to ascertain what really happened. This book did an excellent job of describing how potatoes fit into everyday life. I had expected more.

"Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World," by Larry Zuckerman, North Point Press, NY, 1998. This 320 p. paperback tells the story of the potato, but the focus is the Irish potato famine of the late 1840s. The potato was discovered by the Spanish in South America in 1537, but was not adopted in Europe until the late 18th Century. The book contrasts the spread of potato cultivation in Ireland, Britain, France and the USA.

The potato was especially well adapted to the Irish climate, where the poor often farmed a typical 5 acre plot. High productivity favored potato growing. Six tons of potatoes would support a family of six for a year. High rents and absentee landlords squeezed the poor. Population growth, large families, and early marriage contributed to the problem. The population was dependent on potatoes. When potato blight struck (1845-49), millions starved. A simultaneous cholera epidemic added to the disaster. The population in Ireland fell by half. In 1883, a mixture of copper sulfate and lime proved an effective fungicide that controlled potato blight.

The Penalty Laws which blocked land ownership are mentioned, but the book does not mention the suspension of the laws of primogenitor, which caused farms to be divided into ever smaller plots. Zuckerman dismisses the Corn Laws, supporting high grain prices, as symbolic. These laws suggest the British intended to starve Irish Catholics. (Meanwhile, high spirited American colonists went to war over taxes on their tea.)

In England, class differentials labeled root crops, including the potato, as food for animals or the poor. Along with the tomato, also of the nightshade family, both were thought to be poisonous. Meat was the traditional food, and meat sauces made with animal fats were popular. The "meat and potato" diet came about only slowly, but potatoes appear in some reports in mid-18th Century. That seemed to correlate with the construction of canals making wider distribution of bulky products practical. Potatoes were generally accepted by all classes by 1795, as an important auxiliary to bread. Baked potatoes were sold on the streets of London beginning in the 1820s. They were sometimes purchased as hand warmers in winter.

In France, the potato was initially regarded with disgust. Grain was preferred. Parmentier promoted growing potatoes. He had been a prisoner of the Prussians during the Seven Years War (1756-63), and survived on a diet of potatoes. After failure of the French grain crop in 1788, Louis XIV had a pamphlet on potato cultivation distributed. After more resistance, potato cultivation finally took hold in the time of Napoleon (early 1800s).

In the US, Irish potatoes were known by the 1760s, but reports easily confuse them with Spanish potatoes, i.e., sweet potatoes and yams. Although some were reported earlier, they may have been popularized by the Irish who fled the potato famine. Other immigrants such as the Scots may have contributed to their acceptance.

The book includes an extensive discussion of American rural diet focusing on corn and salt pork or bacon, but with no mention of the kitchen garden. There is no mention of Burpees (from 1876) or Gurney's, traditional purveyors of garden seeds. Eventually the Burbank potato became the Russet. The potato chip was invented in Saratoga Springs, NY, in 1850. It was supplied commercially in barrels beginning in 1895, and in wax paper bags beginning in the 1930s. French fries (or pommes frites) originated in France around 1870. The story of their importation to the US is omitted. (World War I GIs brought them back from Belgium where they were served with mayonnaise.) The story of J.R. Simplot, developer of dehydrated potatoes, instant mashed potatoes, and frozen French fries, is omitted. Fish and chips began in England in about 1900. Their popularity signified the acceptance of fresh fish in the working class diet.

Zuckerman tells parts of the story of the potato quite well, but coverage is spotty. Much of the story of the discovery, transportation to Europe, and gradual acceptance is missing. The book seems to jump to the middle of the story-its acceptance in Ireland contrasted with other parts of Northern Europe. Yet, the potato first arrived in Southern Europe. The book tells a compelling story, but the depth of the research seems inconsistent. One suspects other books are more complete. Notes, bibliography, index.

I got interested in potatoes during a visit to their homeland in Peru. This book gives a great account of how they moved from the Andean highlands to our dinner table.

Never would I have guessed, before discovering Larry Zuckerman's book, that I could be so moved to laugh and learn while reading about a vegetable. His personal, palatable presentation of social history enlightened me with a truer understanding of my Irish roots(!), as much as it entertained.

This is really a solid book - sort of a gateway book - it purports to be about the potato, but it's really about land tenancy laws, enclosure, the advent of crop rotation, population growth,famine, fuel costs, social history of home baking & the like. The chapter "Women's Work" could be an article to stand on its own. He even gets into discussion of the use of utensils, dishes & pots - and given the late adaptation of forks in the US, and the ongoing use of knives for eating in England - it's no wonder that my granddad, who was born in 1910 to English emigrants to who moved SW Pennsylvania to mine coal, perpetually vexed my grandmother with his ingrained habit of eating off his butter knife. He would always laugh and repeat the rhyme of "I eat my peas with honey..." before switching to a fork to please her.

Fascinating issues raised - highly recommended.