Shortly after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, posters started to appear in British cities announcing that ‘Potatoes Are Immigrants’. A drawing of a cheerful heap of chips, together with one of those little takeaway forks, accompanied the text. Versions of the image were spotted in the United States shortly afterwards. The poster, by Mia Frostner and Rosalie Schweiker, reminds us that this most ‘British’ of foods is itself, originally, from somewhere very far away. As in almost every other place where it is eaten today, the Andean origins of the potato have been forgotten. The global story of the potato’s travels from the Andes to everywhere is a tale at once of colonisation, conflict and local innovation, condensed into a small, earthy mouthful.
POTATOES ARE IMMIGRANTS
M. Frostner and R. Schweiker, Potatoes Are Immigrants, 2016 (courtesy of Keep It Complex and M. Frostner).
Rebecca Earle
Further reading
- Earle, R. (2019) Potato (London: Bloomsbury). Harrison, R. (1989) Signs, Songs and Memory in the Andes (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press).
- International Year of the Potato (2008), ‘Why potato?’, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, http://www.fao.org/ potato-2008/en/aboutiyp/index.html (accessed on 25 May 2018).
- Lloyd, D. (2007) ‘The political economy of the potato’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 29 (2–3): 311–35.
- Murra, J. (1960) ‘Rite and crop in the Inca state’, in Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, edited by S. Diamond, 393–407 (New York, NY: Octagon).
- Petrie, H. (2013) Chefs of Industry: Maori Tribal Enterprise in Early Colonial New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press).
- van der Ploeg, J. D. (1993) ‘Potatoes and knowledge’, An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance, edited by Hobart (London: Routledge), 209–27. Reader, J. (2011) Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
- Salaman, R. (2000) History and Social Influence of the Potato [1949], edited by J.G. Hawkes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
- Zimmerer, K. (1996) Changing Fortunes: Biodiversity and Peasant Livelihood in the Peruvian Andes (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
