Today I thought I would spin a little yarn about one of my favorite plans to grow and

really to eat of all time the humble and epic potato.

Potatoes where do you think about when you think of potatoes?

Well, at least for me as a kid I would have thought of Ireland and the potato famine.

That's what we learned in our history books, but potatoes were domesticated well before the dawn of modern history.

We're talking about 8,000 and 5,000 BC, somewhere in that range.

Cultivation of potatoes in their native area,

which is South America, specifically Peru,

might even go back 10,000 years.

So it's a crazy plant with a crazy history.

So let's talk a little bit about it.

They've actually found potato tubers in Peru dating to 2,500 BC

and the, like I said the estimation is that they were cultivated

and domesticated even further back in the historical record but tubers apparently

don't really store well or preserve well in fossil remains or whatever the case may be and so it's hard to actually verify that.

What's also interesting is that potatoes show up in the ceramic pottery of the people of that time

suggesting that it was an exceptionally important crop because why would you

embed it into your artwork and your pottery if it wasn't, right?

You wouldn't do that with something you didn't care about.

And so, potato, it was a staple food in that area for many, many hundreds, even thousands of years.

Now, it's spread across the world.

So when sailors returned from the Andes to Spain with silver,

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