Why Age?

Keep Your Hands Off My Potatoes!

May 4, 2009 – 7:55 pm | by admin

When the Spanish brought the potato from Peru to Europe in 1570 it met with little fanfare. Whoever slipped that lumpy tuber into a pocket of his doublet did not know the value of the New World  novelty would be greater than all the silver and gold plundered from the Aztec and Inca empires. It would take two centuries for the “root of the wretched” to overcome the suspicion that surrounded it and take its place as Europe’s premier famine-proofing staple, population booster, and human fuel of the Industrial Revolution.

By contrast, the sweet potato gained instant acceptance and royal patronage. King and Queen Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain welcomed it into their court, Henry VIII gorged on sugary, spicy sweet potato pies, and when Sir John Falstaff in Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives Of Windsor” anticipates bedding two women at once, implores the sky to rain (sweet) potatoes.

Perhaps it was the sweet potato’s putative aphrodisiac qualities that created this culinary class distinction. It wasn’t until the ordinary potato’s French champion, Antoine Augustine Parmentier, convinced Louis XVI and Marie Antoinnette to wear its distinctive blue flower that it achieved some measure of social respectability.

The sweet potato was from the lush tropics of the Caribbean and Central America, not the arid, windswept Andean altiplano  of the ordinary potato. It’s taste suited the palate of Europe’s elite, high on the excitement of new flavours like chocolate, vanilla and sugar; its courts awash with marzipan, jellies and gingerbread.

European taxonomy tainted the potato by its consignment to the diabolic nightshade family. The solanaceae include the tomato, eggplant, capsicum, tobacco, mandrake, henbane and deadly nightshade. While the first four of this group found acceptance, the potato took a long time to throw off its image as, in the words of nineteenth century social theorist John Ruskin, a “scarcely innocent underground stem of a tribe set aside for evil.”

The potato plant was a savage-looking thing. The tuber, of grotesque appearance, had a strangely satanic underground growth habit and reproduced from a piece of itself. Surely the Devil’s magic.

By the time of Catherine the Great’s Russia, European pundits thought the potato corrupted the blood and promoted lust, peasants feared it would spread diseases like scrofula,tuberculosis and leprosy, and upper classes saw it as the food of livestock, the poor, the downtrodden and the lazy. After all, an acre planted with potatoes and manured needed little attention until harvest when it met the protein and energy needs of more than ten people for a year.

The potato is a low-cost, quickly-prepared food, requiring little fuel to convert it to a filling snack that can be eaten in its own packaging. It supplies all nutrients except Vitamins A and D and calcium, easily supplied by milk. One fresh potato contains about 30milligrams of Vitamin C and kept the Irish peasantry scurvy-free. If ever there was a food designed for human consumption it is the humble potato.

Yet, it is under attack again, in the guise of over zealous application of the Glycemic Index.

I dabbled in the GI last post, and follow up on its absurdly contradictory and complex irrelevance here, captured in the prism of its prime enemy, the ordinary potato.

If you’ve followed my articles you’ll see how I emphasize healthy diet as one of the pillars of anti-ageing. Keeping body fat levels to a healthy minimum is also an important strategy as we age, and many of us turn to the latest diet advice to achieve this. It’s my argument that foods have to be seen in a cultural and historical perspective as well. It seems today’s labs-eye view of foods consigns the potato to the dustbin it has taken centuries to crawl out of.

The same potato prejudice that is reflected in perjoratives like “couch potato”, “potato head”, and “sack of potatoes” underpins the GI’s modern appraisal of the spud, and goes further, warning of its disease-causing potential.

Eating lots of bread, rice and potatoes, all “high GI” foods can predispose one to diabetes, obesity and heart disease, according to GI experts.

To recap, the GI, originally intended to research carbohydrate foods for diabetics in 1980, measures the amount a food raises blood glucose over two hours against a standard of 50g of pure glucose or white bread. When glucose enters the blood, insulin follows to put that glucose away in cells for energy use. It’s the argument of the GI diet that too much insulin too soon is a dangerous precusor to disease.

Many studies show that when traditional foods are replaced by high-sugar, refined foods health deteriorates and I have no argument with that. To elevate the potato to the top of the GI hit parade, however is an absurdity that shows the whole approach to be faulty. Potatoes rate at 85, or 105, or 132, or whatever, depending on cooking times, crop variation and individual metabolic variation, while white, refined table sugar is a “moderate” GI food at 58 and presumably more healthy and less disease-preventing than the potato. How can this be true?

Worse still, the sweet potato retains its aristocratic aura and is an acceptably “moderate” G I food. Depending of course on which part of the world your sweet potato is from. GI values vary from 48 (Canada) to 78 (New Zealand).

White potato varieties show a large variation too, but most, like Russet (111) and Pontiac (85) are relegated to the no-no category.

Now this food phobia is just crazy and has to stop. Embrace the potato of all varieties for the low-fat, high-fibre nutritious package it is and always has been. At least for the 7000 years of its cultivation that we know about.

There is no evidence that the potato made anybody sick. Unless they ate green ones. Solanine is the toxic steroidal alkaloid potatoes produce when exposed to sunlight, probably to protect them against predation. It makes potatoes taste bitter, so who would eat them in that state?

The Incas operated a sort of proto-welfare state in which stone storehouses held food reserves for the population in times of famine. They chose to store chuno, or freeze-dried potato, prepared by letting moisture-rich potatoes freeze, then crushing them underfoot. They kept in a sealed room for ten years. Andean peoples were noted for their vigour at high altitudes and were neither fat nor diabetic.

When Arthur Young was sent from England to Ireland for an agricultural survey in 1770 he found the hard-working Irish labourer eating up to five or six kilos of potatoes a day, and little else, apart from some skim milk and perhaps some green vegetable. He found the Irish attractive, energetic and fertile and could not agree with his contemporaries that the potato was “unwholesome food.”

“I will not assert,” he said, “that potatoes are a better food than bread and cheese, but a bellyfull of one was much better than a half a bellyfull of the other.” Not only did he stick up for the potato, he implied that the Irish poor ate better than the English poor did.

My advice is to ignore the scaremongering of the GI and similar diets that warn people off time-proven plant foods forming the basis of a healthy anti-ageing diet.

It’s what goes on those potatoes that really makes the difference.

Avoid drenching potatoes in butter, oil or fat from roasting meat (yes, it tastes good). Eat as many potaoes as you like as long as you prepare them in the following way and make them part of a balanced meal. Their fibre and starch content will make it hard to eat too many.

Greg’s roast potatoes

Wash and chop potatoes (of any variety). Leave skins on for more nutrients and flavour. Spray lightly with olive oil and pop on a sheet of baking paper on a tray in a 200 degree oven for 45 minutes. Add golden, roasted chunks to salads and frittatas.

Greg’s “Smashed” potatoes

Wash and chop potatoes and add to boiling water. Allow two medium potatoes per person. Boil until tender (the skins will start to separate). Drain, add one teaspoon of chopped capers, one tablespoon of olive oil,  and one tablespoon of yoghurt per serve. Squeeze over the juice of half a lemon, add a couple of twists of black pepper and “smash” the potatoes with a large spoon as you blend the mixture.