This chapter presents the paradoxical history of the potato (Solanum tuberosum) in human food systems. It is now the fourth most important world food crop, surpassed only by wheat, rice, and maize. In five centuries, this diverse and adaptable tuber has spread from its original South American heartland in the high Andes to all elevation zones in temperate regions of all the continents, and, lately, its production has been increasing most rapidly in the warm, humid, tropical Asian lowlands during the dry season (Vander Zaag 1984).

In the course of its history, the potato adapted, and was adopted, as a highland subsistence crop on all continents. In Europe, it was originally an antifamine food but then became a staple. In Africa and Asia, it has been a vegetable or costaple crop. The potato has been credited with fueling the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century Europe but blamed for the mid–nineteenth-century Irish famine. Over three centuries, it also became a central and distinctive element of European regional, and then national, cuisines. Although “late blight” has continued to plague those dependent on potatoes for sustenance (CIP 1994), the potato’s popularity has nevertheless grown since the end of World War II, particularly in its forms of standardized industrially produced potato fries, chips, and other frozen and processed “convenience” foods. Acceptance of standard fries (with burgers) and packaged chips symbolizes the “globalization of diet,” as McDonald’s, Pepsico, and other transnational food firms move potatoes around the world yet another time in their successful creation and marketing of a universal taste for these products.