POTATO TRAVELS 🎑
Starting out in Southern Peru and Northern Bolivia, where potatoes have been cultivated for thousands of years, these versatile tubers gradually spread across South America and became the staple crop of the Incan Empire, where they were known as papas.
But, despite being a staple of modern meals, they were met with suspicion when they first arrived in Europe in the 16thcentury. Some people even called them “Devil’s Apples” because they were strange-looking, grew underground (no part of the potato growing above ground was edible) and belonged to the same family as the deadly nightshade.
Gradually however, their usefulness overcame people’s reservations and potato crops were slowly adopted by farmers all over Europe, eventually spreading all over the world, reaching India, Southeast Asia and even China within a couple of centuries.
Like all foreign imports, the potato has experienced its fair share of linguistic confusion. The first potatoes that were encountered by Europeans were sweet potatoes. In fact, the word “potato” derived from the Taino (an extinct language once spoken in the Caribbean) word batata meaning “sweet potato”! Batataquickly evolved into “potato”. Later, English-speakers were introduced to the potato proper, known as papas in Quechua, by Spaniards importing exotic foods from Peru. By that time, the English were already familiar with the sweet potato (known simply as “potatoes”) so they called this white, non-sweet variety “Virginia potatoes”.
Nice bit of information.
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DeleteIt travelled a lot ☺️
ReplyDeleteYea ...a lot to 😉
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ReplyDeleteThank you💗
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