Potato: Object Lessons - Softcover

Earle, Prof Rebecca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501344315 ISBN 13: 9781501344312

Verlag: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Explores the question: What can potatoes tell us about the modern world?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rebecca Earle is Professor in History at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of three books, including The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which was Winner of the Conference on Latin America History 2013 Bolton-Johnson Prize, and The Return of the Native: Indians and Mythmaking in Spanish America, 1810-1930 (Duke University Press, 2008), which was Winner of the Conference on Latin American History's 2008 Bolton-Johnson Prize Honorable Mention. She has written about the history of food for The Conversation, BBC History Magazine, The Independent, and The Sunday Telegraph, among other publications.

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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Baked potatoes, Bombay potatoes, pommes frites . . . everyone eats potatoes, but what do they mean? To the United Nations they mean global food security (potatoes are the world's fourth most important food crop). To 18th-century philosophers they promised happiness. Nutritionists warn that too many increase your risk of hypertension. For the poet Seamus Heaney they conjured up both his mother and the 19th-century Irish famine. What stories lie behind the ordinary potato? The potato is entangled with the birth of the liberal state and the idea that individuals, rather than communities, should form the building blocks of society. Potatoes also speak about family, and our quest for communion with the universe. Thinking about potatoes turns out to be a good way of thinking about some of the important tensions in our world. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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Potato

By Rebecca Earle

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © 2019 Rebecca Earle
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5013-4431-2

Contents

Introduction: Lying around like a latke, 1, 
1 Potato mother, 9, 
2 Global citizens, 27, 
3 The state of the potato, 43, 
4 Pleasure and responsibility, 65, 
5 Potato philosophy, 85, 
Acknowledgements, 105, 
List of figures, 108, 
Notes, 115, 
Index, 132, 

CHAPTER 1

POTATO MOTHER

Omphalos

'Those times when we grew gold, pure gold ...'

All 4,500 named varieties of potatoes trace their ancestry to the Americas. Wild potatoes grow along the American cordillera, the mountains that run from the Andes to Alaska. People living on its slopes have been eating potatoes for time out of mind. Stone tools and preserved potato peels show that wild potatoes were being prepared for food in southern Utah and southcentral Chile nearly thirteen thousand years ago; similar evidence dates their domestication from at least 7,800 BCE on the northern coast of Peru. They formed an important part of the diet of many of the cultures inhabiting the nine thousand kilometres between Utah and Chile. Together with foods such as quinoa and maize, they provided a robust, starchy backbone to cuisines also enriched with chile peppers, beans and other vegetables. Each variety can be propagated from a 'mother potato'. She sounds like an ancient deity but in botany the term refers to the mundane tuber or seed potato that provides the genetic material from which additional plants are cultivated.

One difficulty with potatoes is that they are difficult to store. Anyone who has ever lost track of a bag of potatoes knows this. They have an unfortunate tendency to send forth a tangle of roots, and, worse, rot into a foul-smelling puddle. Andean peoples solved this problem by freeze-drying. Exposing potatoes to the intense cold of the high mountains transforms them into little fists of stone, immune to decay. The technique also neutralizes the poisonous glycoalkaloids present in some of the bitter varieties, allowing these to be eaten safely. If the potato-rocks are trampled underfoot like petrified grapes, it is possible to reduce them to a dry powder that lasts for years. This dried substance, chuño, captivated Spaniards when they first encountered it in the sixteenth century, and they invariably described in some detail how it is made. Europeans were however slow in adopting it themselves; it was left to industrial manufacturers in the twentieth century to bring us Smash and other commercially produced instant mashed potatoes.

Because potatoes were an essential part of the daily diet in the Andean world, their cultivation was a matter of importance. Various rituals helped ensure an abundant harvest. One account from sixteenth-century Peru describes the festivities that marked the inauguration of the planting season in the mountain village of Lampa. Local dignitaries seated themselves on carpets to watch the proceedings. A procession of richly attired attendants accompanied the seed potatoes, which were carried by six men making music on drums. Events culminated with the sacrifice of a particularly beautiful llama, whose blood was immediately sprinkled on the potatoes. Comparable practices (not necessarily involving llama blood) persist to the present day. Spanish priests objected strongly to these ceremonies but were often powerless to prevent them.

The Andean writer Felipe de Guaman Poma de Ayala described the agricultural potato cycle in an extraordinary manuscript that he composed in the early seventeenth century, after the arrival of Europeans. The son of indigenous nobility, Guaman Poma was born shortly after the Spanish conquest of his homeland. Late in his life he was moved to recount the history that he had to some extent witnessed first-hand. Guaman Poma's New Chronicle, as he titled the thousand-page text, offered a universal history of the world, from Adam and Eve, through the Inca monarchs, to the dismal period of Spanish rule, whose multiple evils Guaman Poma documented in detail. It also described the ritual calendars of both Christian and Incaic religions, and the agricultural tasks carried out each month. The chronicle is illustrated lavishly with Guaman Poma's idiosyncratic and immensely appealing line drawings. Several show the labour required to cultivate the essential potato. Digging sticks in hand, a man and woman weed the field in the picture for June, while a second woman ports a heavy sack away for storage. Other drawings depict men and women at work sowing seed potatoes and tending the abundant plants.

Unlike maize, which held a high status within the Inca state, potatoes were considered a lowly food, necessary but banal. Even in the potato's omphalos they were viewed with some disdain. Along the Andes, maize was used to brew the all-important chicha or aqha, the corn beer that accompanied virtually every important political encounter. Potatoes played no comparable role in high diplomacy; for Andeans as for us, they were ordinary things. Guamon Poma contrasted the robust stature of maize eaters with puffy, effete villagers forced to subsist on dried chuño.

For these reasons, potatoes did not enjoy the intense state ritual lavished on the maize crop. The Inca himself participated every year in a symbolic maize-planting ceremony, to the accompaniment of music and song. Similar state-level festivities marked the maize harvest, and the intervening period was overseen by a team of priests who fasted throughout the planting season and kept track of the crop's progress. In the sacred fields around the Inca capital, Cuzco, small gold replica cornstalks were interspersed amongst the growing maize, to 'encourage' it. No such imperial oversight was bestowed on potatoes. Cultivated a village level, they were traded and consumed within more local orbits, their growth fostered by smaller rituals such as the one that took place centuries ago in Lampa, where the sprinkling of llama blood on seed potatoes distressed the Catholic cleric.

All potatoes nonetheless benefitted from the attention of the Potato Mother, Axomama, daughter of the earth goddess Pachamama, and sister to Saramama, the Maize Mother. As these names suggest, Andean potato language and cosmology are rich in feminine reproductive power. Plant breeders, perhaps unwittingly, replicate this vocabulary when they speak of the mother tubers from which all potato plants derive. Watching over the potato fields in the Andes – which scientists suggestively call the tuber's 'cradle area' – Axomama cares for her tuberous offspring. Together with her sisters and their all-powerful mother, Axomama controls the earth's fertility, overseeing the growth of potatoes and other things necessary for sustenance. Household shrines to Pachamama and her fertile daughters balanced state-level neglect of potatoes. The veneration of this feminine dynasty long pre-dated the official rituals of the Inca empire, and persists to the present.

For Andean farmers, human history and human bodies were entangled with these plants and the broader universe. Beautiful or unusual potatoes were themselves miniature Potato Mothers, and all encapsulated the generative powers of the female body. 'Corn and clay, potatoes and gold were linked together as emblems of female powers of creation', writes the historian Irene Silverblatt. Just as Abosch's Potato 345 is at once a solid, earthly potato, an organic, living planet, and perhaps a human body, so a Potato...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Academic
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1501344315
• ISBN 13: 9781501344312
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 144
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland