Home of the potato

On Thanksgiving Day, we’re asking you to ponder the origins of those potatoes in your holiday meal. No, we’re not interested in where Aunt Gladys or Cousin Mike picked up those potatoes to mash and bring over to your feast. We want to know where the potato was first grown for food.

Here are a few hints. It’s a mountainous area, in a chain of peaks that stretches more than 4, 000 miles. These mountains rise above a coastal desert on one side. On the other side of the mountains is the world’s largest tropical forest.

For the Geo Quiz, we want you to identify the mountain chain and the continent where the potato was first farmed thousands of years ago.

The answer is South America, in the Andes Mountains, in an area now occupied by the nations of Peru and Bolivia. That region remains home to the greatest diversity of potatoes on earth.

And it’s a place where scientists are trying to preserve those potatoes, and to help the people who depend on them.

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Pamela Anderson is the director general of the International Potato Center in Lima, Peru. In this audio slideshow she provides a brief and colorful history of the potato in South America.

>>> Click here to start the audio slideshow

Click here to view a photo gallery of Andean potato varieties>>>

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MARCO WERMAN:  For today’s Geo Quiz we wanted to know where in the world potatoes originated.  We asked for the continent and more specifically, the mountain range.  The answer is South America, the continent and the mountain range, the Andes Mountains in an area now occupied by Peru and Bolivia.  The region remains home to the greatest diversity of potatoes on earth and it’s a place where scientists are trying to preserve that diversity.  Here’s one of them.

PAMELA ANDERSON:  My name is Pamela Anderson.  I’m the Director General of the International Potato Center which is headquartered here in Lima, Peru.  In North America and Europe, most of us, when we think of potatoes, think of what we call the white improved potato.  But we estimate that there are five thousand varieties of native potatoes currently grown in farmers’ fields in the Andean chain.  And many of these are so diverse that you wouldn’t recognize them as potatoes if I showed them to you.  They come in all kinds of colors. Yellow, pink, purple, blue, orange, I mean rainbow colors.  Beautiful patterns.  You cut one of them open and it looks like a butterfly on the inside.  They come in all kinds of shapes. They look like little pineapples, eagles’ claws, snakes.  All of these potatoes have names that are [SOUNDS LIKE] Ketchua.  This potato is actually the shape of a puma’s hand and that’s what the Ketchua says, [SOUNDS LIKE] Yama Puka Makin, the hand that belongs to the puma.  So our primary mission here in the Andes is to protect this biodiversity but also to work with the populations in the highlands who continue to grow and utilize these and make sure that as they protect the conservation in the field, they also benefit from these potatoes.  So as an example, last year, Pepsi Co/Frito-Lay who does Lay’s potato chips, came up with a brand new product which was their Lay’s Andeans potatoes.  Those are potato chips made out of the native potatoes from the highlands of Peru. The sales have really shot up exponentially.  They are in all of the major supermarket chains in Lima and moving out into other parts of the country.  This is what it looks like.  You can just see how beautiful the packaging is and that, would you like to taste?  Oh, look at that.  They’re purple, they’re pink, they’re yellow.  They’re lovely.  These are the only potato chips I eat anymore, seriously.  They’re good.

WERMAN:  You can see a slideshow of the unusual potato varieties Pamela Anderson mentioned, including that uncanny puma hand.  The slideshow is at TheWorld.org.  Our interview was produced by The World’s David Barren, with assistance from The International Reporting Project.

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