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a b P. M. Austin Bourke (1971). "Review: The History and Social Influence of the Potato by Redcliffe N. Salaman". Irish Historical Studies. 17: 410–413. JSTOR 30005769. Bruno, Maria C. (2014). "Beyond Raised Fields: Exploring Farming Practices and Processes of Agricultural Change in the Ancient Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes". American Anthropologist. 116 (1): 130–145. doi: 10.1111/aman.12066. ISSN 0002-7294. JSTOR 24028897. Contreras, Andrés; Ciampi, Luigi; Padulosi, Stefano; Spooner, David M. (1993). "Potato germplasm collecting expedition to the Guaitecas and Chonos Archipelagos, Chile, 1990". Potato Research. 36 (4): 309–316. doi: 10.1007/BF02361797. S2CID 6759459. a b c Weintraub, B. (2019). "Redcliffe Nathan Salaman (1874–1955) and the first potato plant with "genuine resistance" to late blight" (PDF). The Israel Chemist and Chemical Engineer. 5: 28–34. In France, at the end of the 16th century, the potato had been introduced to the Franche-Comté, the Vosges of Lorraine and Alsace. By the end of the 18th century, it was written in the 1785 edition of Bon Jardinier: "There is no vegetable about which so much has been written and so much enthusiasm has been shown ... The poor should be quite content with this foodstuff." [5] The people also began to overcome their disgust of the potato when Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette began wearing potato blossoms in their everyday attire. [25] It had widely replaced the turnip and rutabaga by the 19th century. [30]Salaman, R. N. (1922). "The Influence of size and character of seed on the yield of potatoes". Journal of Agricultural Science. 12 (2): 182–196. doi: 10.1017/S0021859600004901. a b Pitrat, Michel (2003). Histoires de légumes (in French). France. p.167. ISBN 978-2759223558. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link) Europeans in South America were aware of the potato by the mid-16th century but refused to eat the plant. [21] For the Spaniards the potato was regarded as a food for the natives: the Spanish conquerors speak most favourably of the potato, but they recommend it especially for the natives who have to do the heaviest jobs. A similar pattern occurred in England where the potato became the food of the working class. [22] In 1553, in the book Crónica del Peru, Pedro Cieza de León mentions he saw it in Quito, Popayán and Pasto in 1538. Basque fishermen from Spain used potatoes as ships' stores for their voyages across the Atlantic in the 16th century and introduced the tuber to western Ireland, where they landed to dry their cod. The English privateer Sir Francis Drake, returning from his circumnavigation, or Sir Walter Raleigh's employee Thomas Harriot, [23] are commonly credited with introducing potatoes into England. In 1588, botanist Carolus Clusius made a painting of what he called "Papas Peruanorum" from a specimen in the Low Countries; in 1601 he reported that potatoes were in common use in northern Italy for animal fodder and for human consumption. [24]

Who won and fashioned it, so would it be futile were we to leave undescribed the peculiar setting in which both plant and man evolved their mutual understanding.

The people were famished; to sow their usual crops, was but to invite their destruction. Every seed crop, be it oats or barley, rye or wheat, might be trampled over and ruined in a day; if it escaped that hazard, the garnered harvest might be raided or burnt overnight. The vegetable crops, cabbage and parsnip, were no less vulnerable, at best they were but auxiliary foods, and there was never much of either. It was under such conditions that the potato made its entry into Ireland. Its greedy acceptance by the people was no mere accident, for it satisfied their needs as efficiently as it symbolized their helpless destruction…. Beginning in the 1960s Chilean agronomist Andrés Contreras begun to collect neglected local varieties of potatoes in Chiloé Archipelago and San Juan de la Costa. [50] [51] These varieties were mostly grown in small gardens by elderly women, and passed down generation by generation. [50] In 1990 he led a potato-hunting expedition to Guaitecas Archipelago, [52] the southern limit of Pre-Hispanic agriculture. [53] The collection of Contreras became the groundwork for the gene bank of Chilean potatoes at the Austral University of Chile in Valdivia. [50] Contreras reciprocated local communities by genetically improving varieties aimed for small scale agriculture. [51] Which is, quite frankly, a highly plausible and fascinating theory. I'm inclined to give it significant merit, considering, for example, that the use of child labor pushed adult men out of work during the rise of industrialism - but due to low earnings, families heavily relied on potatoes simply to survive and still barely managed to do so - without the potato, industrialists would have been forced to pay a higher wage or rely to a significantly higher degree on the poor laws and the Speenhamland system. The number of children a single family could have was already stretched to the maximum by the demand for child labor and feeding a family - so it's unlikely that most families could have simply chosen to increase their brood for the purpose of buying corn rather than potatoes.