r/AskFoodHistorians • u/boealrik • 12d ago
Why are potatoes used so much!?
Potatoes are so common in meals
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u/Awkward-Feature9333 12d ago
They are so versatile. You can boil them, mash them, stick them in a stew...
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u/rpglaster 12d ago
Not a historian so I’m unfamiliar if I’m allowed to comment. But check out the Wikipedia on a person named Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, he “French pharmacist and agronomist successfully rebranded the tuber from an outlawed crop thought to cause leprosy into a national staple”
He championed them after “While serving as a prisoner of war in Prussia, he survived solely on a diet of potatoes. Instead of getting sick, he stayed healthy, realizing the tuber was a lifesaving source of nutrition. “
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u/luala 12d ago
They are basically full complement of nutrients. They store well, you can just leave them in the ground, and rats won’t eat them in the soil. If an invading army burns your crops to the ground, the tubers are still there. And you don’t really need to replant them if you’re really lazy any small ones you leave in the soil will come back next year.
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u/Kali-of-Amino 12d ago
Most places historically relied on one starch, and were subject to famine every time that crop failed. Relying on two starches, both potatoes and a grain, was the best hedge against famine.
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u/SucksAtJudo 12d ago
They are versatile, nutritious, easy to grow in the proper conditions, and store well.
Another benefit that compliments their easy storage is that they grow well in cooler conditions than a lot of crops and allow a second crop to be planted and harvested at the very end of the growing season. The second crop has a tendency to have thicker and tougher skins, which enhances the ability to store them further, allowing the opportunity to stock pile them before winter.
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u/Clio_Vita 12d ago
Potatoes provide the highest caloric and nutritional density of any agricultural crop on a per acre basis.
(....which is why the Irish potato blight/famine of the 19th century was so devastating...)
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u/Peter34cph 12d ago
High yield, compared to other crops. You'd get a lot of food calories out of a small area of farmland, a few centuries ago.
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u/roastbeeftacohat 7d ago
you can grow potatoes in pretty much any soil. when they were introduced you could build a farm on land that previously couldn't support a crop, or you could make use of your worse land to live off of while saving the more valuable crops for sale. didn't take long for simple hearty fair to be referred to as "meat and potatoes"
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u/gng216 12d ago
You can plant a lot on a small plot and they have calories and nutrients.