Rebecca Earle, "Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
00:00
The Story of the Potato
There is an existing scholarship on how potatoes spread, particularly around europe. And that story goes something like this: potatoes first arrived in europe in the 15 hundreds. They were of interest to botanists and to learned scientists and scholars who studied them but ordinary people refused to eat them. Only in the eighteenth century when far sighted and benevolent aristocrats and scientists started to encourage potato consumption as a way of avoiding famine. But now everybody loves them, and they're a staple.
Play episode from 05:07
Transcript
