When was potatoes introduced to england

They were carried over to Lancashire, according to Gerarde, who had some in his garden in , but only for use as a delicate dish, not as common food.

They were roasted, steeped in sugar, sack wine , baked with marrow and spices, and even preserved and candied. The Royal Horticultural Society took some measures in to encourage more widespread use of potatoes. In gardening books of the late s, they are spoken of rather slightingly, as "food for poor people", "muched used for bread in Ireland and America" and as "food for swine or cattle".

Even John Evelyn seems to have a poor opinion of them. But the use of potatoes gradually spread, as their excellent qualities became better understood. Gerard, John, Catalogus Arborum, Fruticum ac Plantarum tam indigenarium quam exoticarum in horto J.

Gerardi nascentium. First edition Second edition The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. John Norton, London. Hamilton, E. American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, — Harvard Economic Studies, 43, Reprinted Hawkes, John G. The potato in Spain during the late 16th century. Economic Botany, 46 1 , 86— Hunger, F. Charles de l'Ecluse. Lobo-Cabrera, Manuel, Historia General de las Indias. Madrid edition Magazzini de Vallombrosa, Pater, Dell'Agricoltura Toscana, Vallombrosa, Italy.

Marrero, Aguedo in press. Cultivos tradicionales de papas en Canarias y su biodiversidad. Monardes, Nicolaus, — Sevilla Segunda parte Primera, segunda y tercera parte Nicholls, Thomas, There are many expressions of the extended use of the potato in the pre-Inca cultures from the Peruvian Andes, as you can see in the Nazca and Chimu pottery.

As well as using the food as a staple crop, the Incas thought potatoes made childbirth easier and used it to treat injuries.

At the time the Spaniards failed to realize that the potato represented a far more important treasure than either silver or gold, but they did gradually begin to use potatoes as basic rations aboard their ships.

After the arrival of the potato in Spain in , a few Spanish farmers began to cultivate them on a small scale, mostly as food for livestock. From Spain, potatoes slowly spread to Italy and other European countries during the late s. But it did not receive a warm welcome. Throughout Europe, potatoes were regarded with suspicion, distaste and fear.

Generally considered to be unfit for human consumption, they were used only as animal fodder and sustenance for the starving. In northern Europe, potatoes were primarily grown in botanical gardens as an exotic novelty. Even peasants refused to eat from a plant that produced ugly, misshapen tubers and that had come from a heathen civilization.

Some felt that the potato plant's resemblance to plants in the nightshade family hinted that it was the creation of witches or devils. Let Them Eat Potatoes In most of Europe, the upper classes saw the potato's potential before the more superstitious lower classes, and the encouragement to begin growing potatoes had to come from above. In meat-loving England, farmers and urban workers regarded potatoes with extreme distaste.

In , the Royal Society recommended the cultivation of the tuber to the English government and the nation, but this recommendation had little impact. Potatoes did not become a staple until, during the food shortages associated with the Revolutionary Wars, the English government began to officially encourage potato cultivation. In , the Board of Agriculture issued a pamphlet entitled "Hints Respecting the Culture and Use of Potatoes"; this was followed shortly by pro-potato editorials and potato recipes in The Times.

Gradually, the lower classes began to follow the lead of the upper classes. Seize the guano islands! Spurred by public fury, the U. Congress passed the Guano Islands Act in , authorizing Americans to seize any guano deposits they discovered.

Over the next half-century, U. Guano set the template for modern agriculture. Ever since von Liebig, farmers have treated the land as a medium into which they dump bags of chemical nutrients brought in from far away so they can harvest high volumes for shipment to distant markets. To maximize crop yields, farmers plant ever-larger fields with a single crop—industrial monoculture, as it is called. Before the potato and corn , before intensive fertilization, European living standards were roughly equivalent to those in Cameroon and Bangladesh today.

On average, European peasants ate less per day than hunting-and-gathering societies in Africa or the Amazon. Industrial monoculture allowed billions of people—in Europe first, and then in much of the rest of the world—to escape poverty. The revolution begun by potatoes, corn and guano has allowed living standards to double or triple worldwide even as human numbers climbed from fewer than one billion in to some seven billion today.

It sends out tiny bags of 6 to 12 spores that are carried on the wind, usually for no more than 20 feet, occasionally for half a mile or more. When the bag lands on a susceptible plant, it breaks open, releasing what are technically known as zoospores. If the day is warm and wet enough, the zoospores germinate, sending threadlike filaments into the leaf.

The first obvious symptoms—purple-black or purple-brown spots on the leaves—are visible in about five days. By then it is often too late for the plant to survive. Scientists believe that it originated in Peru. Large-scale traffic between Peru and northern Europe began with the guano rush. Proof will never be found, but it is widely believed that the guano ships carried P.

Probably taken to Antwerp, P. The blight hopscotched to Paris by that August. Weeks later, it was destroying potatoes in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and England. Governments panicked. It was reported in Ireland on September 13, Cormac O Grada, an economist and blight historian at University College, Dublin, has estimated that Irish farmers planted about 2. In two months P. The next year was worse, as was the year after that. The attack did not wind down until A million or more Irish people died—one of the deadliest famines in history, in the percentage of population lost.

A similar famine in the United States today would kill almost 40 million people. Within a decade, two million more had fled Ireland, almost three-quarters of them to the United States. Many more would follow. Today the nation has the melancholy distinction of being the only country in Europe, and perhaps the world, to have fewer people within the same boundaries than it did more than years ago. Despite its ghastly outcome, P. Its name notwithstanding, this orange-and-black creature is not from Colorado.

Nor did it have much interest in potatoes in its original habitat, in south-central Mexico; its diet centered on buffalo bur, a weedy, spiny, knee-high potato relative. Biologists believe that buffalo bur was confined to Mexico until Spaniards, agents of the Columbian Exchange, carried horses and cows to the Americas.

Quickly realizing the usefulness of these animals, Indians stole as many as they could, sending them north for their families to ride and eat. Buffalo bur apparently came along, tangled in horse manes, cow tails and native saddlebags. The beetle followed. In the early s it encountered the cultivated potato around the Missouri River and liked what it tasted.

For millennia the potato beetle had made do with the buffalo bur scattered through the Mexican hills. By comparison, an Iowa farm, its fields solid with potatoes, was an ocean of breakfast.

Because growers planted just a few varieties of a single species, pests like the beetle and the blight had a narrower range of natural defenses to overcome. If they could adapt to potatoes in one place, they could jump from one identical food pool to the next—a task made easier than ever thanks to inventions like railroads, steamships and refrigeration.

Beetles spread in such numbers that by the time they reached the Atlantic Coast, their glittering orange bodies carpeted beaches and made railway tracks so slippery as to be impassable.