Potato



A specimen of Solanum maglia, a species of wild potato, dating from 13000 BC, has been identified at the archaeological site of Monte Verde, near Puerto Montt in southern Chile. Probably consumed but not cultivated, it is the oldest known species that could have been used for human food. This discovery tends to confirm this region as the cradle of the potato.

Only fragmentary information on the conditions and chronology of the events marking his arrival in Europe is available from the accounts of the explorers who travelled through the New World from the 16th century onwards. In two centuries, the potato conquered the Old Continent, spread first from Spain and then from England, through famines and wars, such as the Thirty Years' and Seven Years' Wars, and with the help of high-ranking clergymen.

Until the middle of the 16th century, the potato, considered more as a medicine than as a food, was confined to convents, royal courts and botanists' gardens, and Europe had to suffer the numerous famines and wars that would overwhelm it during the 18th and 18th centuries so that its cultivation and consumption, remedies for famines, could develop in spite of the prejudices and superstitions25 attached to it. In the Fifteenth Century, for example, the potato, along with truffles or mandrakes, will be classified at the bottom of the scale of living beings in the scala naturæ, among the subterranean plants, considered impure and unfit for human consumption. Growing underground, in the Sheol, underground plants are synonymous with food mortification and penance. The mildew epidemic that struck the country between 1845 and 1851, causing the Great Famine, will see this area reduced to 248,000 acres (100,362 ha) in 184717. The Irish Great Famine killed nearly one million people and threw more than two million refugees into exile. This event will warn other European nations of the dangers intrinsically linked to monoculture.
 * '' copyedit needed: