The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Just before the First World War, an American explorer traveling in Peru witnessed an ancient agricultural ceremony..." (more)
Key Phrases: Great Famine, Poor Inquiry, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

During the 17th and 18th centuries, the potato was berated, feared, and loathed. It was blamed for everything from population explosions to population implosions, not to mention social upheaval and financial despair. Yet now, with the luxury of hindsight, Larry Zuckerman regards the potato as a saving grace for Western civilization, a crop that protected populations from starvation, encouraged self-sufficiency, and improved the lives of ordinary people. The potato's roller-coaster journey from dreary boiled peasant food into the most widely consumed vegetable on the planet is chronicled in this refreshing history lesson. The Potato goes way beyond the usual scope of spud history, which commonly focuses on the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. Although this disaster is a key event in the book, the potato's broader influence in the Western world was far more complex--changing the shape of agrarian societies, triggering world emigration, and even influencing social-welfare reforms. Snippets from journals, newspaper editorials, and government documents make this a convincing and fascinating glimpse of four centuries' worth of a vegetable to which we normally wouldn't give a second thought. --Naomi Gesinger --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"The story of the potato in Western civilization is part of the history of the table, of living conditions, of social attitudes, and even of views of heredity and degeneration. Zuckerman's exploration of these areas without losing his grip on the tuber is masterful, executed with economy and wit." -- Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Sunday Globe

"Thorough and lively . . . Zuckerman is an excellent storyteller, both conscientious and colloquial . . . The book stimulates and illuminates." -- Emily Gordon, Newsday

"Throrough and lively....Zuckerman is an excellent storyteller, both conscientious and colloquial....The book stimulates and illuminates."--Emily Gordon, Newsday

"The story of the potato in Western civilization is part of the history of the table, of living conditions, of social attitudes, and even of views of heredity and degeneration. Zuckerman's exploration of these areas without losing his grip on the tuber is masterful, excuted with economy and wit."--Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Sunday Globe
-- Review

"To mash the several-thousand-year history of the potato into a couple hundred pages and to whip that history into lively and engaging prose is a feat worthy of the subject. The potato matters and I'm glad to know why." -- Betty Fussell, author of The Story of Corn

"Zuckerman . . . knows a frightening great deal about potatoes . . . He knows how the darn things sustained the European population boom and helped along the Industrial revolution . . . [His] exhaustive, fine research pays off big." -- Ben Neihart, Baltimore Sun

Informative . . . To single [the potato] out as the salvation of the world as we know it is . . . not, as this book proves, preposterous -- Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

The story of the potato in Western civilization is part of the history of the table, of living conditions, of social attitudes, and even of views of heredity and degeneration. Zuckerman's exploration of these areas . . . is masterful, executed with economy and wit -- Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Sunday Globe

Thorough and lively . . . Zuckerman is an excellent storyteller -- Emily Gordon, Newsday

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: North Point Press; 1 edition (October 25, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865475784
• ISBN-13: 978-0865475786
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #388,488 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Humble Spud in History, September 21, 2002

By	S. Barrett (Santa Cruz, CA) - See all my reviews

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.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Popular History, March 26, 2003

By	Constant Librarian "constantlibrarian" (Columbia, MD United States) - See all my reviews

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.

35 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but not in the same league as "Cod.", July 16, 2000

By	Royal A Masset (Austin, TX United States) - See all my reviews

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.