Potatoes - an old innovation to learn from

Potatoes are an interesting plant for all of us who work with the question of how to successfully introduce a new staple into an already existing food culture. The Swedes had no experience of the potato before the middle of the 18th century. The base of the everyday food was instead cereals - beer, porridge and bread. So, bread made up the main part of our food and potatoes were evaluated to replace the grain. It did not go well.

For a while, in the high-quality food culture, we tried to roast unpeeled potatoes. It went better, but fried food was not something every man ate. For a while, they put the green fruits that occasionally emerge from the potato's flower in vinegar. That should have resulted in poisoning symptoms of the solanine toxin in the fruits.

Pigs and children could not convince

When the authorities in the 18th century organized what we would call "test event" today, They boiled the potato to pigs in order to prove its edibility. But when the country people saw that the pigs ate with good appetite, they took it as a hint that the tubers were not for human consumption. The Royal Finnish Housekeeping Society requested in a letter in 1801 that adults should take an impression from the children who liked boiled potatoes.

A heavy argument against the potato was the storing costs. As you know, cereals can be stored in wooden trays and it does not matter if the winter temperature drops to minus levels. Potatoes, on the other hand, must be stored frost free. Potatoes therefore often required an underground storehouse, something that was a significant investment at the time. However, the potato had an advantage as it fit well after the soil shift reforms when the peasants would take advantage of their newly allocated land, and could now build an underground storehouse instead of their own mill.

Yesterday's potato research

Potatoes are almost a universal food ingredient. Students who choose to live on a pasta diet today, to save on their student loans, should rather go for a potato diet for nutrition and vitamin purposes. A strict potato diet was tested in Denmark in the 1920s, where a Professor let his PhD student eat only potatoes for almost a year (during that time, Professors could use students as experimental rabbits).

The trial went well, no deficiency diseases, although it was obviously a lot of work for the student to eat several kilograms of potatoes every day. The body can compensate for the shortcomings of such a one-sided diet during a year-long trial period. However, if the trial had continued, problems would have arisen.

Moreover, the danger of living on pasta alone has been documented from western Sweden as late as just over ten years ago. Two students lived on such a one-sided pasta diet that they developed scabies, a disease that is due to vitamin C deficiency.

It is the vitamin C content of the potato and other nutrients that stood behind the population growth in Europe in the 19th century. Another important fact was that the potato could be grown on most soils.

Significant tuber loses ground

The importance of potatoes in Swedish food culture is high. With the wood stove's various hotplates in the 19th century, the combination of meat, sauce and potatoes was born. The introduction of the potato flour is also behind the popularity of the Swedish cream dessert, both as a daily favorite in the 1970s and a children’s snack in our time.

During the 20th century, before we entered the European Union and the great price drop of food, we ate a lot of potatoes. Almost 87 kilos per person in 1960. Today, we eat an average of 47 kilos per year. Changes in the food-cultural ideals mean that consumption has moved towards french fries and chips. On average, we eat almost seven bags of chips each year. The sour cream'n onion taste is the most popular. The taste is close to the Swedish basic flavor scheme, which is found in other classic dishes.

Today's potato research

Today's potato research is done on a wide front. Professor Erik Andreasson at the Department of Plant Protection Biology at SLU in Alnarp, together with colleagues, tries to make the potato more resistant to disease, not least against potato late blight. The work is done with both traditional plant breeding and with modern gene scissors. The research idea now is that the potato should contain several resistance mechanisms in order to be able to successfully handle attacks from pests.

The researchers are also trying to boost the potato plants' own immune system. A problem if you only use a single resistance system is that within a few years after a new resistance has been introduced, the system no longer works.

At SLU, there is also ongoing research on starch potatoes, as potato starch is a significant texturizer, for example in fruit yoghurt, ketchup or cakes with filling.

How to introduce new foods?

The historical doubt for the potato as something to eat is an important lesson for all those today working on introducing unknown plants and animals as food. How do we to get people to eat insects in the future if it took almost a hundred years for the potato to be accepted?

The difficulties in introducing new foods can also be seen if we consider the horse meat. Propaganda to eat it has been going on since the late 1700s, but today there is no horse meat in the stores. Today, we have more horses than cows and about 10,000 horses die every year. Many horses have residues from medicines in them that make them unsuitable for human consumption, but that is far from every horse. Maybe we can learn from the tuber what to do with the horse?

Richard Tellström, meal researcher