Temperatures in the highlands can fluctuate from 75 degrees Fahrenheit to below freezing in a few hours-the air is too thin to hold the heat.įrom this unpromising terrain sprang one of the world’s great cultural traditions. Even when the land is seismically quiet, the Andean climate is active.
Active volcanoes scattered along its length are linked by geologic faults, which push against one another and trigger earthquakes, floods and landslides. The longest mountain range on the planet, it forms an icy barrier on the Pacific Coast of South America 5,500 miles long and in many places more than 22,000 feet high. Geographically, the Andes are an unlikely birthplace for a major staple crop. And even if he had, most of the credit for the potato surely belongs to the Andean peoples who domesticated it. Destroying the statue was a crime against art, not history: Drake almost certainly did not introduce the potato to Europe. The statue was pulled down by Nazis in early 1939, in the wave of anti-Semitic and anti-foreign measures that followed the violent frenzy known as Kristallnacht. “Sir Francis Drake,” the base proclaimed, His right hand rested on the hilt of his sword. It portrayed the English explorer staring into the horizon in familiar visionary fashion. In 1853 an Alsatian sculptor named Andreas Friederich erected a statue of Sir Francis Drake in Offenburg, in southwest Germany. In the 1940s and 1950s, improved crops, high-intensity fertilizers and chemical pesticides created the Green Revolution, the explosion of agricultural productivity that transformed farms from Illinois to Indonesia-and set off a political argument about the food supply that grows more intense by the day. Competition to produce ever-more-potent arsenic blends launched the modern pesticide industry. And when potatoes fell to the attack of another import, the Colorado potato beetle, panicked farmers turned to the first artificial pesticide: a form of arsenic. Not only did the Columbian Exchange carry the potato across the Atlantic, it also brought the world’s first intensive fertilizer: Peruvian guano. McNeill has argued, the potato led to empire: “By feeding rapidly growing populations, permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 17.” The potato, in other words, fueled the rise of the West.Įqually important, the European and North American adoption of the potato set the template for modern agriculture-the so-called agro-industrial complex. (Corn, another American crop, played a similar but smaller role in southern Europe.) More than that, as the historian William H. Many researchers believe that the potato’s arrival in northern Europe spelled an end to famine there. In 2008 a Lebanese farmer dug up a potato that weighed nearly 25 pounds. Growing underground, tubers are not limited by the rest of the plant. If the head of a wheat or rice plant grows too big, the plant will fall over, with fatal results. The potato flower in Louis XVI’s buttonhole, a species that had crossed the Atlantic from Peru, was both an emblem of the Columbian Exchange and one of its most important aspects.Ĭompared with grains, tubers are inherently more productive. In what Crosby called the Columbian Exchange, the world’s long-separate ecosystems abruptly collided and mixed in a biological bedlam that underlies much of the history we learn in school. Crosby, the historian who first described this process. Columbus’ voyages reknit the seams of Pangaea, to borrow a phrase from Alfred W. Over the eons, the separate corners of the earth developed wildly different suites of plants and animals. Geological forces broke Pangaea apart, creating the continents and hemispheres familiar today. But in the 18th century the tuber was a startling novelty, frightening to some, bewildering to others-part of a global ecological convulsion set off by Christopher Columbus.Ībout 250 million years ago, the world consisted of a single giant landmass now known as Pangaea. Today the potato is the fifth most important crop worldwide, after wheat, corn, rice and sugar cane.
The flowers were part of an attempt to persuade French farmers to plant and French diners to eat this strange new species. Her husband, Louis XVI, put one in his buttonhole, inspiring a brief vogue in which the French aristocracy swanned around with potato plants on their clothes. By some accounts, Marie Antoinette liked the blossoms so much that she put them in her hair. When potato plants bloom, they send up five-lobed flowers that spangle fields like fat purple stars.
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