The Evil Root

The root of all evil, says the Bible, is the love of money. The root of most evil, says Dr. Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, topflight British geneticist, is the potato.

Presiding last week in Birmingham at a meeting of the learned British Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Salaman dragged the potato right out where the world could see it in all its iniquity. "An easily grown, cheaply produced, substantially efficient and pleasantly tasting food," Britain's top potato authority told his fellow scientist's, "can, under certain political and economical conditions, fatally menace the social well-being of the people who adopt it."

Within 200 years after the Spanish conquistadors found it growing on the slopes of the Andes in 1531--too late for Biblical writers--the common white potato* grew from a botanical novelty into one of the world's largest food crops. Fantastically easy to raise, rich in starch, protein and vitamins, requiring little or no tillage and irrigation, it seemed the perfect poor man's fodder. Yet the very ease with which the potato flourished, cried Dr. Salaman, encouraged idleness, greed, complacency and even drunkenness.

The Lazybeds. "What need they to work," wrote a traveler to Ireland in 1670, "who can content themselves with potatoes, whereof the labour of one man can feed forty."

Ireland's oppressed tenant farmers took eagerly to the "lazybed" method of potato culture by which the tubers were simply laid on the ground, covered with earth and left to grow by themselves. Many Irishmen were happy enough to restrict their diet to these easily grown roots and to spend their free time lying on hillsides thinking dark thoughts on the British and nipping poteen, which, as any schoolboy knows, is made from a potato mash. By the end of the 19th Century, said Dr. Salaman, the average Irishman was eating 14 Ibs. of spuds a day, his wife 7 Ibs.

In other lands, where bread-eating peasants took a dimmer view of spuds, the rich and powerful attempted to overcome their prejudices. Frederick the Great sat on a balcony in Breslau and ate a mess of boiled potatoes in public, to prove to his Prussians that they were not poisonous. At the French court, Marie Antoinette, in the best 20th Century pressagent style, attended a potato banquet with potato blossoms decking her hair, to get Frenchmen to eat potatoes.

Consider the Artichoke. Lulled into a sense of false security by the wholesome potato, runs Dr. Salaman's argument, the underprivileged of the world succumbed to the will of the rich; the Irish in particular let their living habits fall to a standard as low as that of rooting pigs. The great blow fell in Ireland in 1845 when a dismal blight turned the entire potato crop to dust almost overnight, killing a million Irishmen and sending a million more to sow in the U.S. "The seeds of Anglophobia which, after 100 years, is still alive."**

"Compare," Dr. Salaman urged his colleagues, "the fate of the potato with that of the Jerusalem artichoke, a physiologically unsatisfactory food which reached France a decade later. After a short spell of popularity, it faded out of the picture without leaving a mark on the structure of society in France or anywhere else." The few gourmands who still fancy that pulpy, parsnippy root, which is no kin to the conelike epicurean artichoke (Cynara scolymus), claim that the Jerusalem artichoke tastes best after it has been frozen m the ground. Most of society will doubtless remain content to leave it there, and take a chance with the subversive spud.

*Solanum Tuberosum. The word "potato" is an old misnomer derived from the Spanish word batata, meaning sweet potato, which is not a true potato at all but a cousin of the morning glory.

**Dr. Salaman does not mention the fact that British landlords were selling Irish-grown grain in world markets while a million Irishmen Starved.

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