Potato (Solanum tuberosum)

Assembled from 18 blocks · 2 evidence · 27 related

1. Story
2. A tuber domesticated in the Andes, where hundreds of landraces are grown across a range of altitudes, and the crop with the strongest claim to have changed European demography. Its advantage was ecological rather than culinary: it yields heavily on cool, wet, acid, marginal ground where wheat and rye do poorly, it stores through a northern winter, and it produces far more calories per hectare than the cereals it supplemented. It also arrived as a botanical curiosity rather than a food — early European references are to gardens and herbals — and took the better part of two centuries to become a staple, held back by suspicion of a nightshade and by the poor adaptation of early Andean short-day varieties to European daylengths. Its eventual dominance in some regions produced a corresponding fragility: a crop propagated clonally from a narrow founding stock met Phytophthora infestans in the 1840s with almost no genetic defence, and the consequence in Ireland was catastrophic.
3. Knowledge
4. The Columbian Exchange
5. Potato (Solanum tuberosum)
6. Connections
7. The Columbian Exchange
8. A documented consignment of potatoes reaches Europe
9. Silver
10. The Atlantic crossing (Carrera de Indias)
11. Potato (Solanum tuberosum)
12. Maize (Zea mays)
13. The post-contact population collapse of the Americas
14. Maize appears in Chinese local records
15. A documented consignment of potatoes reaches Europe
16. Evidence
17. The documentary evidence for the earliest potato consignments to Europe, including the 1567 shipment from Gran Canaria to Antwerp. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session. The authors and the substance are given from the author's knowledge; the journal volume and pagination are NOT asserted because they could not be checked, and a curator should confirm which of the two related papers carries the 1567 evidence.
18. Establishes the biological framing of post-1492 contact — crops, livestock and pathogens moving between hemispheres — used throughout this pack. V55 verification basis: this session had no outbound network access (WebFetch blocked by egress policy, WebSearch budget exhausted), so the book was not consulted; the citation is given from the author's knowledge and the work is a standard, widely held title that a curator can verify in any research library catalogue.