![]() The English were afraid to dig for the potato because its roots were so deep spuds were "in a different realm - an unearthly one." To the French, bread-loyalists, potatoes were unfashionable, a food for old women and housewives and grandmothers. When I broke into print twenty-five years ago, I did so as a historian, tracing the potatos social and political. They thought that lettuce was immoral, and when they said greens they usually meant the herbs you used to season a rump roast. Surely, the devil crafted that magic."Įuropeans were comically superstitious about their food, and they liked to eat a whole lot of fatty meat, anyway. They knew that "every other edible plant reproduced by means of seeds, not grotesque, misshapen tubers. It "had thick, slightly hairy stems" and "the main root branched into a whitish network to which long, thick fibers were attached." Sure, botanists - those twee aesthetes - were aroused by an obscene, furtive root, but your everyday European was grossed out. He starts right off by telling us how much the early 17th-century Europeans, who first encountered the potato in Peru, hated it. ![]()
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