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With the scare of contaminated lettuce, many people have cut down on salads and are eating servings of cooked and raw vegetables. Have you ever wondered what the favorite vegetable is worldwide? Perhaps your answer would be the tomato. However, the tomato is a fruit.
My vote is for the potato. While working in the yard and garden on the hot and humid days, we often find it easier to go to McDonalds for lunch. McDonalds' french fries are the reason the potato gets my vote. However the fries have to be served hot, with a lot of salt.
Mary Alice's mother made the best french fries, even better than McDonalds. I remember watching her when putting the potatoes into the hot grease and the scary sizzling noise it made. Many batches of fries would be made for the family sitting around the table.
The potato is possibly man's best friend. It grows in almost any type of soil and in every climate except the extreme tropics. The potato produces quite well, with an average of 200 bushels of potatoes per acre. They also store well, and after an entire winter in storage, there will be little change in their taste.
The potato has a good nutritional rating and is one of our cheapest foods. On top of all of this, people seldom tire of eating potatoes.
The potato was originally found in the mountains of Chile and Peru. The Aymara Indians of the Andes were growing over 200 varieties of potatoes in the second century. The Spanish took the potato to Europe, and Sir Walter Raleigh was given the credit of growing the first potatoes in England.
At first, they were not a staple food and for a time in the 17th century, the potato was thought to be the cause of the dreaded disease: leprosy.While others thought the plant contained a deadly poison. The reason for this is that the potato is a member of the nightshade family, and certain varieties of nightshade are poisonous.
Due to this, the potato did not become a staple crop in Europe until the 18th century. During 1772 when the grain crop failed in Germany, the potato was used as a substitute. By 1880 in Ireland, the potato replaced all other food crops and the Irish had come to depend heavily on the potato.
This dependence became disastrous in 1846-47 when the potato crop was attacked by a fungus. The green leafy growth turned black, the stalks withered and the potatoes turned black and rotted. Even those potatoes that were quickly dug and put in storage spoiled.
The great potato famine followed with an estimated 600,000 people dying in Ireland during the two years when the famine was at its height. It took six months after the potato crop failed for the famine to begin. By then, every scrap of food and every piece of potato were gone. When the people began starving, they ate everything at hand -- even rotten potatoes that they knew had killed pigs and cattle.
As the blight hung on, year after year, the grip of hunger tightened. Dead bodies lay by the rural roadsides and the towns had too many dead to bury. The British Government tried to give some relief but the problem was so huge they failed.
The Irish potato famine caused boat loads of starving emigrants to flee to America. At least 100,000 had already entered North American colonies before the American Revolution. In the early 1800s, more came seeking a better life. Of the 100,000 Irish who sailed for North America during the famine of 1847, 17,000 died at sea and another 20,000 died of disease soon after arriving in North America.
Life was not easy for the Irish immigrants.
They were unskilled workers and had to take low-paying jobs that others did not want. The men worked on construction and the women worked mostly as domestic servants, working 16 hours a day for as little as 75 cents a week plus room and board. They were not well received and signs in windows advertising for jobs read "No Irish need to apply."
This forced large families to live together in slum areas. Here cholera and other diseases thrived. Children paid the biggest price. The average age of Irish Catholics buried in Boston at that time was only 13. An anti-Irish feeling became widespread but this did not stop the flow of Irish immigrants to this country.
In the 1890s, nearly 400,000 Irish immigrants immigrated to the United States. Altogether 4.5 million Irish moved to the United States between 1820 and 1930. Today, 40 million Americans can trace their ancestry to Ireland.
The fungus that ravaged Ireland's potato crop came to be known as late blight. Today, the blight still does damage to the potato crop, however farmers have learned how to keep it in check.
The potato made it to the United States in 1719 when Irish immigrants brought and planted it in Londonderry, New Hampshire. Today, potatoes grow in every state, however in one book I read that all but seven counties in the nation plant potatoes. The state which grows the most potatoes is Idaho.
While the United States produces 14.5 million tons of potatoes each year, this is only 5% of the world's harvest, which is 291 million tons. In 1990, Americans ate 120 pounds of potatoes per person. During a one day period, over 8,000 of the McDonalds' restaurants across the nation serve millions of pounds of potatoes via french fries.
The potato is scientifically known as a tuber. A main characteristic of the tuber is that the plant develops from buds in the fleshy underground stem, which is the potato. These buds appearing on the potatoes are called eyes. There are usually about 15 eyes on each potato, arranged in a spiral pattern. To grow a new potato crop, a farmer cuts the potatoes into pieces, which are called seed pieces.
Each piece must have at least one eye, with the eye in the center. The starch in the piece feeds the young plant as it begins to grow. Potatoes can also be grown from true seeds. The potato plant produces a green berry, which has about 200 small seeds in the pulp. However, it takes a much longer time for tubers to generate from seeds than seed pieces. So, seeds are seldom used.
This vegetable can be prepared in many ways -- baked, mashed, scalloped, fried (with onions), french fries and don't forget potato stuffing.
Recently, I was surprised when reading to learn that the sweet potato is not a potato but a member of the morning glory family. This book also noted that China produces 80% of the world's sweet potatoes. The sweet potato is often mistakenly called a yam, however the yam is another form of vegetable.
Bill Bower is a retired Pennsylvania Game Commission Wildlife Officer. Read his blog and listen to his podcasts on the outdoors at www.onemaningreen.com.