Potato across Countries The cultivation of Potato has increased in the last fifty years all around

The conquistadors eventually used potatoes as rations on their ships and took it back to Spain (Chapman, n.d.). From there, the potato spread to other countries. Unfortunately, the potato was “regarded with suspicion, distaste and fear.” (Chapman, n.d.) Only animals were fed the potatoes at first but as time went on, the aristocracy of Europe began to encourage the lower classes to begin cultivating potatoes. Potatoes, however, did not become a staple until roughly 1795 and the food shortages that came during the time of the Revolutionary Wars in England. (Chapman, n.d.)

Before 1500, potatoes were not become outside of South America. By the 1840s, Ireland was so subject to the potato that the proximate reason for the Incomparable Starvation was a potato malady. Potatoes in the long run turned into an imperative staple of the eating regimen in quite a bit of Europe. Numerous European rulers, including Frederick the Incomparable of Prussia and Catherine the Incomparable of Russia, supported the development of the potato. Maize and cassava, acquainted with the Portuguese from South America in the sixteenth century, have supplanted sorghum and millet as Africa's most essential sustenance crops. sixteenth century Spanish colonizers acquainted new staple yields with Asia from the Americas, including maize and sweet potatoes, and along these lines added to populace development in Asia. Tomatoes, which came to Europe from the New World by means of Spain, were at first prized in Italy basically for their decorative esteem . From the nineteenth century tomato sauces wound up run of the mill of Neapolitan food and, eventually, Italian cooking when all is said in done. Espresso from Africa and the Center East and sugarcane from the Spanish West Independents turned into the fundamental fare product harvests of broad Latin American manors. Acquainted with India by the Portuguese, bean stew and potatoes from South America have turned into a basic piece of Indian

Potatoes became a staple in the diet of many as they were discovered around the world. They are still an important part of the diet of many today. ("International year of," 2008)

Introduced to Europe in the mid 1500s, potatoes were able to strongly impact European lives. They originally grew in Peru but spread throughout South America and later in Europe. Potatoes were able to thrive in Ireland, Scandinavia, Germany, and Poland. Potatoes were able to feed many people and improve food supply. The potato was able to supply a steady amount of calories and nutrients which was able to provide a better life for people of the Old World. Potatoes quickly spread throughout Europe and became an important crop. Today people still use the potato for food and other uses such as making stamps and soothing headaches. When growing potatoes today, many diseases can occur. Some include early and late blight, potato scab, and bacterial ring rot.

Potatoes began prospering with the Incan people in the Andes in the form of polyculture. The environment surrounding the Andes was harsh and unforgiving and where one type of potato would thrive, another would perish. The Incan people then changed their needs in order to satisfy the potato and began growing different types of each in different areas of the mountains. This method was extremely successful and resulted in massive genetic diversity for the potato. On the other hand, once potatoes were transported to Ireland, they underwent a change subject to human desires where only one type of potato was grown excessively, otherwise known as monoculture. The Irish had discovered that a single type of potato prospered in their soil and provided substantial nutritional support for the masses, resulting in the cultivation of a single genetic strand. The consequences of this endeavor would come later with the blight, but in this case, the potato had succumbed to the needs of humans. Lastly and more presently in the United States, potatoes have altogether lost their say in evolution by being grown only based on their requirement to feed the many. Certain strains of potatoes have become prevalent due to their need for food purposes, such as “perfect” French fries provided for restaurant chains. Besides

Potatoes have been one of mankind 's most important food staples for the past millennium. First cultivated on the Titicaca Plateau in the Andes Mountains of Peru and Bolivia where they formed the basis of both the Inca and Aymara Indian diet. The Aymara Indians developed more than two hundred varietes of the potato at elevations higher than 10,000 feet.

As the historical legend goes: in 1744, Frederick the Great of Prussia strived to cultivate the potato in an effort to lower the price of bread and rid the nation of a severe famine. His people were quick to oppose this proposition, though, believing the vegetable was a poisonous nightshade and the spawn of the Devil (as it is not mentioned in the Bible), or at the very least, tasteless and utterly disgusting that “not even the dogs will eat them” (Chapman). At first, the king carried out his Potato Edict with an iron fist, strictly requiring every peasant in the kingdom to grow the crop in their homes. Town records even show people being executed for their civil disobedience against this decree. Seeing little progress, Frederick the Great

The benefits of potatoes include originally allowing for populations that were once starving to now have an easy to grow and abundant food source. This lead to birth rates and population rates doubling in Ireland and Europe when it was first introduced. However, since potatoes were susceptible to disease they also lead to famine and death. People became so dependent on this one food source that when the supply ran dry many people starved, such as the famous Irish potato famine. The use of pesticides and fertilizers can be accredited to the cultivation of the potato in the United States. The Colorado potato beetle threatened the supply of potatoes, leading farmers to use the first pesticide on their crops to help protect them. From here the Green Revolution was born in the 1940’s, which further encouraged the development of pesticides and fertilizers in order to increase the yield of any crop that they could. Another benefit of potatoes is that it can take the carbon dioxide we exhale and convert it into oxygen. This is one reason astronaut’s carry them to space as one source of their food

Since the potatoes R & G provides are supposedly all unnatural, this means that they use any chemicals or pesticides on the potatoes. In substitute of this, the farmers rely on “filter strips, crop rotations and other pest prevention” according to the official R & G potato company website. Crop rotation is a process used to make sure pests do not remain habitual in the soil and the filter strips catch nutrients, deposits and infectious bacteria in the exterior runoff that appears from grassy areas before the polluted runoff gets into any of the surface water.

From my research on how potatoes are graded in America, I have learned that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) established and enforce the grading. The USDA has been enforcing and updating the quality grading system for all foods since 1862. The last time the quality grading system for potatoes was updated was in June of 2011. The system in place currently grades potatoes on the following information: shape, firmness, appearance, size, color, and being free from: soft rot, wet breakdown, blackheart, freezing, blight, scabs, rhizoctonia, and physical damage or foreign matter. Although there are three grades for potatoes available for purchase due to the USDA’s grading scale, all potatoes sold in the US must fall into this scale.

The potato is highly nutritious, providing forty-five percent of a person’s Vitamin C needs, which was hard to come by in diets of the time. Being starchy, it provided many two to four times more calories than the Old World grains like oat, wheat, and barley per acre of farmland (McNeill, 1999). The potato was also an ergot-free alternative to rye, which if ingested, led to psychosis, death and reduced birth rates (Matossian, 1989). While requiring more labour to dig up the tubers from below the ground, the potato more than made up for it by being easier to prepare (no need for threshing), and by doubling Europe’s food supply (Mann, 2011).

In the summer of 1845 a potato disease struck Ireland. A fungus Photophthora Infestans turned the potato harvest into decaying blackish masses of rottenness, unfit for human or animal consumption. Potato diseases had

The potato seems to us today to be such a staple food that it is hard to believe that it has only been accepted as edible by most of the Western world for the past 200 years. Our story begins thousands of years ago, in South America—Peru,

New farming methods came to use during late 16th century. Farmers in many parts of Europe, including Ireland, France, started to raise potatoes. A plant from the “New World”, that for a long tome was seen with a big suspiciousness. A higher rate of potato

There is huge demand of Potato Chips (Snacks Food Industry) in and outside Pakistan; therefore a sizeable production is required. The production capacity of is 150 kg per plant hour of finished