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3.0 out of 5 stars
Could have been titled "Potato Vignettes", July 28, 2008
The rather pompous title, "Propitious Esculent" (in the UK edition--looks like they will change it for the US edition) provides a bit of a warning up front. (It means "favorable edible thing", so you don't have to look it up.) This is not a book that draws you along, or really achieves a sense of story. But it you are interested in potatoes there is interesting information that can be extracted.
The author manages to start the book with Mars, asserting that astronauts will take potatoes with them when they go. He then moves to the Andes, from whence potatoes originate. Ancestral potatoes were toxic, and people in the Andes bred non-toxic varieties. The author discusses this as well as he can, but there is little direct evidence of how it was done. He then launches into a discussion of Andean civilizations and then the fall of the Inca to the Spanish. Acceptably done, but if you want a great account (of this and more) look at "1491" by Charles C. Mann.
The potato then makes its way to Europe, and slowly gains acceptance. (Including tales of fraud and the like.) Then comes Ireland, population explosion, and blight, death, and emigration. The discussion of the blight, how it happened, and what the consequences were is good. There is also much discussion of the politics of the time, and the fight over the Corn Laws ("corn" meaning grain, in the British use), which applied tariffs to keep out cheap foreign grain to protect British farmers. It also helped the Irish starve when the potato crop failed, and thus the blight contributed to ending a long political fight.
[Side note: I ordered this book based on a review in The Economist. The Economist was founded in opposition to the Corn Laws ...]
The story then moves back to the potato in Europe, especially in England. Reader argues--excessively, in my opinion--that it was the increase in population allowed by the potato that allowed the industrial revolution to take place. I'll accept that it was a contributing factor, but the author takes the argument too far.
Next is the story of how the blight was understood and means of control developed. Among these was the collection and study of many species not cultivated in Europe as potential breading varieties, good material for some adventure stories.
Reader then takes the potato to Papua New Guinea, where the Irish experience of expanded nutrition followed by blight was played out on a smaller scale. (The level of disaster that occurred in Ireland was not allowed to repeat.) He finally takes the potato to China, where he traces the story from the disastrous policies of Mao that resulted in famine to China becoming the largest producer and consumer of potatoes. But this includes an example of how the author fails to make the book one story rather than many.
Near the end he writes: "But aside from the sheer scale of the disaster, what sets Mao's famine apart from all others is that it was entirely avoidable. It had not been caused by invasion or civil war; no floods had washed away the crops or droughts dried up the fields. No blight had destroyed the harvest, and the world would have shipped in emergency supplies if only China has asked." Having already covered the Irish famine and the Soviet famine of the 1920's it should have been clear to the author that politics has nearly always been a key player in famine over the last few centuries. (In fairness, he does make the nod to "civil war". But how different was Mao's war against the Chinese people from a civil war?) The famine in Ukraine in the 1930's was intentionally imposed by Stalin! But Reader's book is so spud-centric that famine is seemingly always either caused by or alleviated by potatoes. In this he misses the bigger picture.
This book has many good stories about potatoes, but it lacks the integration and continuity to be the story of the potato. I struggled a bit between three and four stars, and chose three because it seems as though either the author or editor could have taken the material available and made a solidly four star book out of it.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Potatoes in all their glory, May 10, 2009
This is a wide-ranging, intelligent book that does a Zelig-like treatment of the potato -- from the European discovery of the continents of the western hemisphere to nineteenth century emigration to America to Mao's Great Leap Forward, the potato is there, shaping human history. John Reader conveys his exhaustive knowledge of the potato's domestication, genetics, and vulnerabilities to disease with a sense of humor and proportion.
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