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The Devil's Dirt.

I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leeb.

And this is Ghost Town. While most of us with pulses and mouths can appreciate the deliciousness of a potato,

it wasn't always like that. I know, I'm as shocked as you are. Like anything else with good or bad PR,

a food can change, become wonderfully appetizing or repulsive and

reviled. Taking that thought even further, a food, when advocated for, can change the course

of history, becoming the savior of the masses, or the mark of the devil. Today on Ghost Town, from glam dinner parties

to propaganda to mass thievery to satanic panic, the surprisingly tumultuous rise and fall

and rise again of the potato. Before it became, oh, I don't know my favorite food ever, I want to take us back

8,000 years to the Andes, where Inca's and their ancestors cultivated the nutrient dense,

cold-resistant crop in the rocky soil, where little else could be sustained. This was the first

time humans had grown and lived off of the

potato. They chopped it, cooked it, mashed it, or even froze it, pretty much like how we prepare it

now, except maybe for freezing it. Anyhow, the potato did its job. It was a modest, dirt-covered root

vegetable, feeding people so they could survive.

But when a bunch of Spanish conquistadors encountered a potato in 1537, they were not impressed.

...