By Joel Denker
Vendors in 16th century London enticed their customers with candied slices of sweet potato, a popular snack among the wealthy and titled classes. Today, by contrast, the once-luxurious root vegetable is now a basic foodstuff on which many of the Third World poor rely for sustenance and nourishment.
Not at all related to the common white potato, the sweet potato is a member of the morning glory family. The only food plant in this group, the vegetable is actually a swollen storage root, a storehouse of nutrients. The ordinary potato, on the other hand, is not technically a root, but a subterranean tuber.
The sweet potato, like its twining, climbing kin, spreads its vines over the ground within a few weeks of planting. (The Latin name for the morning glory family comes from convolvulus or “twine around.”) They look like “spinach,” Las Casas, an early Spanish chronicler of the Americas, remarked of the New World plants. In the Philippines and in other countries, the stems and heart-shaped leaves are eaten like greens. To the Filipino, the sweet potato vine is a godsend because it is one of the few leafy vegetables to survive during floods and monsoons.
An ancient crop, possibly the oldest in the New World, the sweet potato grew wild in what is now Peru by 8000 B.C. at the latest.
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To learn more about sweet potatoes, see The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, coming in October from Rowman & Littlefield: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442248861/The-Carrot-Purple-and-Other-Curious-Stories-of-the-Food-We-Eat.
