The potato crosses the Atlantic

Potatoes were first grown in the Andes and brought to Europe by Spanish ships. Over time they became a staple, and later famines in Ireland showed the risk of relying on one crop.

Context

Potatoes were domesticated thousands of years ago in the Andes of South America, and the earliest reliable records of them in Europe date from the second half of the sixteenth century, often placed in the 1570s in Spain. The exact first arrival and route are uncertain, so the c. 1570 date is approximate.

Acceptance was slow. Many Europeans were suspicious of a crop that grew underground, was not mentioned in the Bible and was related to poisonous plants. In France, for example, authorities at times discouraged it, and it took campaigns, famines and wartime shortages to make it a common food in much of the continent.

Potatoes yield a lot of food per acre and spread widely in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Ireland, a large part of the poor population came to depend heavily on a few potato varieties. When the blight pathogen arrived in the 1840s, crops failed repeatedly, and the Great Famine caused around a million deaths and large-scale emigration, according to commonly cited estimates.

Today the potato is among the world's most widely grown food crops, and the Andes still hold thousands of traditional varieties, which scientists value for breeding disease-resistant plants.