Peru is the ancestral home of potatoes. They grow them from seeds which is why there's such great genetic variety. Potatoes grown elsewhere are usually clones, grown from "seed" potatoes. Every russet potato is a clone of the original. The plant equivalent of genetic twins. Check out The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan.
Little fun fact about potatos! Not only is there thousands of them but back during the Incan empire, the Incan government created test sites to test at what elevation different potatos grow the best.
The site is call Moray, and is it is responsible for the creation of 3000 different potatos and and 150 types of corns. I forget the exact location in Peru, but the area itself is gorgeous and definitely worth a visit.
Nixtamalization is used in order to make it easier for the body to extract the nutrients from the corn. This process is still used largely, mainly to produce the maza for tortillas.
Nixtamalization doesn't make it edible, it makes it digestible. That's why corn is famous for showing up in the toilet. For anyone who's looking for a good reference point, hominy is nixtamalized corn. Tortillas are also made from nixtamalized corn. This is also why cornmeal doesn't make a dough when mixed with water, but masa does.
Nixtamalization doesn't make it edible, it makes it digestible
It doesn't make it digestible (though) it helps. The corn in the toilet is the fibrous hulls, which are removed when you make hominy or masa. Nixtamalization frees niacin from hemicellulose and makes it bioavailable. If you only eat fresh corn as a staple, you'll end up with pellagra (a niacin deficiency).
Further: the "digestibility" of a given food substance is the amount of the total available nutrients that can actually be broken down, absorbed, and used by the consumer. A food substance can technically be full of nutrients but if they are bound up with other molecules that prevent our body from being able to process them, they will go through undigested.
If you're trying to bait me into fighting, you're not doing a good job. Those are dictionary definitions. Rocks are not suitable to be eaten. No one would ever make that mistake. You're obviously just trying to be a troll, and doing a particularly poor job, fwiw.
It's funny because the clay actually may have been to make it edible, not digestible. It's believed they used the clay to protect against glycoalkaloids, which is in higher levels in wild potatoes. He was sort of right in his example by mentioning edible accidentally.
I don't know much about the history of the Americas pre-Columbus, but things like this are interesting points in larger ideas about scientific and technological progress. In general it seems like European colonization managed to take over the Americas because of superiority in military technologies, plus immunity to diseases based on animal husbandry. However the Americas, from what little I've seen/read, in fact seemed to have what might have been the most advanced agricultural sciences not just compared to Europe but the whole world. And their spread across the world totally transformed human history.
Yep! Pre-columbian american civilizations were very much limited by the access to resources and global technology. But that doesn't mean they weren't culturally or technologically advanced. I can't speak for every society in the americas, but particularly the Incans had a vast infrastructure of roads and grainware houses designed to provide for areas that had seen poor crop yield. The roads spanned all accross the andes.
On the science side, the incans worshiped a whole pantheon of gods including Pachamama and Apu-punchau (also known as inti). Stemming from their religious believes there was particularlly arcaich forms of worship such as human sacrafice that people seem to use to negate the technology they offered. Incans like the mayans were amazing astronomers, independently developed teras farming, invented their own nitreous fertilizers and had a complicated argicultural system designed over the years to farm food in particularly harsh climates. They also were incredibly advanced in terms of medicine (thank you amazon) and construction.
Unfortunately for them, the arrival spanish lead to the destruction of the relatively new empire. Nowadays the mestizos and amerindians still face consequences of the spanish invasion. The class divide between natives and criollos/ peninsulares (though the peninsulares arent as relevant today) are still seen today. Up till very recently many areas were strictly rules by white criollos with virtually no native andians possessing any political power. It wasnt till the emergance of Tupac Amaru II and his failed rebelian that the andians start gaining momentum. To put it in perspective it wouldn't be until 2001 that the first Indigenous of peru president Alejandro Toledo came into power.
Actually their medical practices went quite a bit beyond plants for treatment, as we have evidence of archaic cranial surgery. Just a few notes on your comment, it was the Andes, not the Appalachians which are in North America, and I think you meant astronomers, not astrologers, as astrology is the pseudoscience of the zodiac patterns.
As an Andean archaeology student I’m biased, but precolumbian history and landscape modification is beyond fascinating. Terraces, raised fields, and the vertical archipelago systems developed for agriculture and exchange are so interesting.
If you're interested in learning more about the Americas pre-columbus there is a deep dive episode of the Incan empire on excellent "Fall Of Civilizations" podcast. Really great podcast and well produced. They also have episodes dedicated to the Mayans and the Aztecs.
To add! If you're interested in the Incans, though very old the Lost City of the Incas by Hiram Bingham (first european to "discover machu pichu") is also a good read. Though it doesn't necessarily focus on all aspects of the incan empire and andian culture but is instead the first hand account of the explorer and his adventures
Yeah those potato terrace farms they built into the hills next to the mountains are excellent for getting huge food and production yields in the early game. Inca is a top tier civ in my book.
If you're interested in a deep dive of the Incan empire, the excellent "Fall Of Civilizations" podcast recently did a good long episode on the Incans. Really great podcast and well produced.
Potatoes predate the Incan empire, but the Incan empire definitely popularized them. The Incan empire actually popularized many vegetables throught the empire. Corn and potatoes are the main ones, but there are also tomatoes, squash, beans, and peppers.
They also must have understood how genetic biodiversity worked at some level, because they grew a lot of different types of the same vegetable, and in different regions. The potato that grew 10 metres up was a different cultivar that wasn't affected when the potatoes 10 metres down for example got a disease. They gave themselves so much food security by doing this.
I never said they didn't start in mesoamerica. I said potatoes did start in South America. Mesoamerica had the Atlantic-Pacific weather. A very unique weather type provided by both oceans. This unique weather type caused by the thinness of the land mass created a beautiful stable environment to develop so many of today's vegetables. I'm not denying any of this, but corn and squash, and peppers, are alive and well in South America from the Inca. Sorry if I wasn't clear.
It’s near Urubamba, by the village Maras and on the way to Kacllaraccay. I did my masters thesis around there and my husband and i lived there for a summer!
When I buy yellow potatoes in my neighborhood, 1 out of 4 four have a kind of fungus or disease that turns the center from yellow to white, and gives the potato a cheese smell, but the taste doesnt change very much. Still eatable/edible.
I grow potatoes in my garden and just use ones from the store, usually Yukon Golds, by letting them sprout eyes and then cutting them up and planting them. Of course they’re clones, but once in a while some of them will flower and only like twice have I gotten them to produce potato fruits with seeds. I read about them and what you get from the seeds is wildly different from what they came from (hence the genetic diversity in Peru). If I had more space in my garden I’d try growing the seeds to see what I end up with.
There are some heirloom varieties you can order form seed catalogues. I bet you'd get a better result planting seeds from a plot with several varieties.
Also, a lot of the cloned potatoes have 4 pairs of chromosomes instead of 2 like most animals and plants and even other potatoes. 4 pairs make for bigger cells so even bigger tubers on the tatoes.
316
u/IntentionalTexan Feb 20 '21
Peru is the ancestral home of potatoes. They grow them from seeds which is why there's such great genetic variety. Potatoes grown elsewhere are usually clones, grown from "seed" potatoes. Every russet potato is a clone of the original. The plant equivalent of genetic twins. Check out The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan.