How Potato Changed The World Essay
How the Potato Changed the World
In today’s world the potato is the fifth most vital crop universal, it follows wheat, corn, rice and sugar cane. However in the 18th century the potato was an amazing novelty, part of a global environmental fit started by Christopher Columbus. Roughly 250 million years ago, the world consisted of a single giant landmass now known as Pangaea. Physical forces broke Pangaea separately, creating the continents and hemispheres well-known today. Over the eons, the separated corners of the earth urbanized wildly diverse suites of plants and animals. Columbus’ voyages brought together the seams of Pangaea. Alfred W. Crosby called the Columbian Exchange; the world’s long-separate ecosystems unexpectedly collided and varied in a biological mayhem that underlies much of the history we learn today.
The actual history of the European interaction with native people of the Pacific Northwest after the start of the European invasion of the Western Hemisphere is very …show more content…
interesting. Due to the Papal decree in 1493, the Spanish Empire was to embrace the complete western shore of the Pacific Ocean. English mariners, nevertheless, made landfall at different locations alongside the Pacific coast throughout the years after the decree. In addition to English privateers preyed upon Spanish shipping, attacking and taking precious trade supplies. The Manila route, which was used by the Spanish ships, they consisted of routes from the Pacific coast of modern day Mexico to Asia, with the comeback route to North America frequently being far north. Then a southward coastal route that then would be used to go back to Mexico. This route was allegedly a secret for the Spanish, except the English in time found out about this route and started waiting for the Spanish ships.
For thousands of years, the Makah Nation has made its home on the Northwest corner of the Olympic peninsula, bordered by the Pacific Ocean on the west, and by the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the north and northeast. Originally there were five distinct villages, but presently most Makah live in and around Neah Bay. The Makahs grow potatoes in their gardens that have unusual characteristics; they do not resemble modern day varieties of potatoes grown elsewhere in North America. Historical accounts indicate that these potatoes have probably been present in their gardens for many years; just how long is a subject of considerable interest.
The Spanish fort at Neah Bay was deserted because of the impracticality of keeping ships at anchor all through the year in the inadequately sheltered harbor.
In the year 1792, an environmentalist named Jose Mariano Moziño who was on the expedition of Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, listed the Latin binomial names of flora and fauna at quite a few points on Vancouver Island, just across the strait from the Olympic Peninsula. Moziño 's list incorporated Solanum tuberosum, the potato. James Swan, who lived with the Makah as a schoolteacher in the 1860s, talked about the potato being a staple of their diet that also included primarily fish and moderate portions of seal and whale oil. Evidence also exists for the early dissemination of the potato throughout the land bordering the Strait of Juan de Fuca. A Makah term qa wic initially referred to a native root, Sagittaria, and assorted forms of qa wic are instituted in additional native languages of the
area.
The Makah potato was composed and located in the Potato Introduction Station Collection at Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin in 1988. It was given the name "Swedish Colony" here because the collector understood it was a relic of Swedish immigrant homesteaders that had lived around Ozette Lake in the late nineteenth century. The potato was also acquired by a profitable seedsman in Idaho who put it for sale during the 1980s and 1990s as the "Ozette" potato. The Makah were actually uninformed of this commercialization of their potato until the year 2000. In a visit to the Makah in 1990, two USDA/ARS scientists Pavek and Brown composed the potato from two gardens in Neah Bay. They met with a few of the oldest members of the tribe and talked to them about their recollections of the potato from their childhoods, close to the turn of the century. These collections are currently kept in tissue culture at the USDA/ARS lab in Prosser. Employs of the Makah Nation have articulated awareness in gaining an improved perceptive of this potato, long a part of their diet, from the position of its probable origin. The employs desire is that members of their nation will play a major role in this exploration and that their own students may participate fully in this process. They have expressed their wish to collaborate in some way with historical, horticultural and genetic experts in the academic community, and in conjunction with the current National Science Foundation Grant.
The potato is initially from the Andes of South America where the Native Americans were farming the potatoes and other tubers 10,000 years ago in the high Andean mountains of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. The potato was vital as an elevated altitude crop that could be freeze-dried into a product that is known as “chuño”, it looks like a dried prune. There was about seven to ten cultivated species with thousands of options in color, size, taste, and shape. The people of the Andes cultivated maize, beans, and squash in lower altitudes, but urbanized a variety of plants that could produce in a high altitude plateau known as the “puna”. The majority of these high altitude plants were urbanized with distinctiveness to oppose the tremendous cold of altitudes between 5,000 and 14,000 ' over sea level. The peanut and potato are two well-known examples, but there were countless others that were more less known. Many of these native cultigens are roots or rhizomes that are sheltered underneath the ground, because nighttime temperatures can fall as much as 40-50 degrees fare height.
Just as significant, the European and North American acceptance of the potato set the model for modern farming—the alleged “agro-industrial complex”. Not only did the Columbian Exchange take the potato across the Atlantic, it also brought the world’s first rigorous fertilizer: Peruvian guano. Competition to create more forceful arsenic blends brought forth the current pesticide business. During the 1940s and 1950s, improvement in crops, well powered fertilizers and chemical pesticides started the Green Revolution; this outburst of agricultural productivity that altered farms from Illinois all the way to Indonesia—and this set off a political disagreement about the food supply that grows stronger day by day. In 1853 an Alsatian sculptor, Andreas Friederich created a statue of Sir Francis Drake in Offenburg, which is located in southwest Germany. It showed the English explorer gazing off into the horizon in well-known thinker style. Friederich’s right hand was placed on the hilt of his sword; his left grasped a potato plant. “Sir Francis Drake,” the bottom stated: “disseminator of the potato in Europe in the Year of Our Lord 1586. Millions of people who cultivate the earth bless his immortal memory.”
Potatoes were unfamiliar to the world that was distant to the lofty elevations of the Andes prior to the coming of Columbus to the New World. The invasion of Europeans and Africans to the Americas that followed began a chain of actions that changed the face of the world. Countless of these changes linked to plants - corn, potatoes, tobacco, sweet potatoes, and rubber trees; these crops up to that time were unidentified to the rest of the world. When the Spanish explorers arrived in the Andes, they found the people that lived there were taming an extensive variety of potatoes modified to the exact conditions of altitude and soil of the land. Distinct to grains, potatoes are a good deal more beneficial on a given sum of ground, and in addition to distinct to grains, potatoes hold ample amounts of nutrients to supply by themselves as the root of a sensible healthy diet. Even though the approval of potatoes in Europe was slow to begin with, once it became routine, it played a vast function in ending the hunger and famines that had previously been a habit in Europe.
Naturally, potatoes went on to be of assistance to make the Great Hunger, the famine that ensued in the stir of the overwhelming coming of potato blight in the mid- 19th century, an extra trade in from the New World. This fungus-like organism is believed to have reached Europe in a shipment of guano, bird excrement that is mined to be used as fertilizer. Found on Pacific Islands off the coast of South America, guano had been used by Andean peoples to fertilize their potato fields. Europeans imported this agriculture system as well, the start of the use of high-intensity fertilizers to advance crop yields that helped to make the potato such a staple and support Europe 's climax in population.
Different in the Andes, the potatoes grown in Europe had slight genetic range half of the Irish potato crop consisted of one especially dynamic diversity. Add to these changes in farming techniques that permitted the disease to multiply without difficulty and the stage was set for an outbreak of catastrophic quantity. The distress that was brought upon was awful, particularly in Ireland, which endured one of the deadliest famines in history in terms of the proportion of the people that died. The hundreds of thousands who left Ireland to get away from the famine altered the route of history in this country. Towards the end of the 17th century potatoes had developed into the food staple of the Irish people. A scientist, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, dismissed the idea of French peasants that potatoes caused leprosy and fevers. Between the times of 1773 and 1789 he wrote books and pamphlets urging potato cultivation. Frederick the Great of Prussia prearranged his subjects to plant potatoes as food and cattle supply. By the end of the 18th century the potato was a major crop in Europe, mainly in Germany, and in the west of England. The Irish economy became reliant on the potato. Their agriculture continued to increase all through the world throughout the first four decades of the 19th century. In 1845 and 1846, late blight disease, caused by the oomycete, Phytophthora infestans, practically shattered the Irish potato crops. The consequent famine caused 1 million deaths out of 8 million residents and the migration of more than 1.5 million out of the country. Today, more than 85 million tons of potatoes are created yearly with more than a third coming from emergent countries.
The potato has a huge control all over the world. As the fifth biggest supplier to human caloric utilization, the potato holds its own in the farming field. As a part of the big “Solanaceae” family, the potato shares the attention with a whole lot of other inexpensively significant crops, as well as tomato, pepper, eggplant, and the ornamental petunia. Even though these crops may seem rather diverse from one another, genomic analysis has exposed a great comparison in terms of gene content and association. One researcher’s point of view is the similarity of the crops is fairly valuable for it means that genomic information and resources obtained from potato can be applied to other members of the family and the other way around.
Work Cited:
1. "How the Potato Changed the World." Smithsonian. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Nov. 2013.
2. "Potato Genome Project." Potato Genome Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2013.
3. "Economy in The Columbian Exchange." Shmoop. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.
4. "Further Findings." Further Findings RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.
5. "National Gardening Association." Regional Gardening Reports ::. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Nov. 2013.
In today’s world the potato is the fifth most vital crop universal, it follows wheat, corn, rice and sugar cane. However in the 18th century the potato was an amazing novelty, part of a global environmental fit started by Christopher Columbus. Roughly 250 million years ago, the world consisted of a single giant landmass now known as Pangaea. Physical forces broke Pangaea separately, creating the continents and hemispheres well-known today. Over the eons, the separated corners of the earth urbanized wildly diverse suites of plants and animals. Columbus’ voyages brought together the seams of Pangaea. Alfred W. Crosby called the Columbian Exchange; the world’s long-separate ecosystems unexpectedly collided and varied in a biological mayhem that underlies much of the history we learn today.
The actual history of the European interaction with native people of the Pacific Northwest after the start of the European invasion of the Western Hemisphere is very …show more content…
interesting. Due to the Papal decree in 1493, the Spanish Empire was to embrace the complete western shore of the Pacific Ocean. English mariners, nevertheless, made landfall at different locations alongside the Pacific coast throughout the years after the decree. In addition to English privateers preyed upon Spanish shipping, attacking and taking precious trade supplies. The Manila route, which was used by the Spanish ships, they consisted of routes from the Pacific coast of modern day Mexico to Asia, with the comeback route to North America frequently being far north. Then a southward coastal route that then would be used to go back to Mexico. This route was allegedly a secret for the Spanish, except the English in time found out about this route and started waiting for the Spanish ships.
For thousands of years, the Makah Nation has made its home on the Northwest corner of the Olympic peninsula, bordered by the Pacific Ocean on the west, and by the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the north and northeast. Originally there were five distinct villages, but presently most Makah live in and around Neah Bay. The Makahs grow potatoes in their gardens that have unusual characteristics; they do not resemble modern day varieties of potatoes grown elsewhere in North America. Historical accounts indicate that these potatoes have probably been present in their gardens for many years; just how long is a subject of considerable interest.
The Spanish fort at Neah Bay was deserted because of the impracticality of keeping ships at anchor all through the year in the inadequately sheltered harbor.
In the year 1792, an environmentalist named Jose Mariano Moziño who was on the expedition of Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, listed the Latin binomial names of flora and fauna at quite a few points on Vancouver Island, just across the strait from the Olympic Peninsula. Moziño 's list incorporated Solanum tuberosum, the potato. James Swan, who lived with the Makah as a schoolteacher in the 1860s, talked about the potato being a staple of their diet that also included primarily fish and moderate portions of seal and whale oil. Evidence also exists for the early dissemination of the potato throughout the land bordering the Strait of Juan de Fuca. A Makah term qa wic initially referred to a native root, Sagittaria, and assorted forms of qa wic are instituted in additional native languages of the
area.
The Makah potato was composed and located in the Potato Introduction Station Collection at Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin in 1988. It was given the name "Swedish Colony" here because the collector understood it was a relic of Swedish immigrant homesteaders that had lived around Ozette Lake in the late nineteenth century. The potato was also acquired by a profitable seedsman in Idaho who put it for sale during the 1980s and 1990s as the "Ozette" potato. The Makah were actually uninformed of this commercialization of their potato until the year 2000. In a visit to the Makah in 1990, two USDA/ARS scientists Pavek and Brown composed the potato from two gardens in Neah Bay. They met with a few of the oldest members of the tribe and talked to them about their recollections of the potato from their childhoods, close to the turn of the century. These collections are currently kept in tissue culture at the USDA/ARS lab in Prosser. Employs of the Makah Nation have articulated awareness in gaining an improved perceptive of this potato, long a part of their diet, from the position of its probable origin. The employs desire is that members of their nation will play a major role in this exploration and that their own students may participate fully in this process. They have expressed their wish to collaborate in some way with historical, horticultural and genetic experts in the academic community, and in conjunction with the current National Science Foundation Grant.
The potato is initially from the Andes of South America where the Native Americans were farming the potatoes and other tubers 10,000 years ago in the high Andean mountains of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. The potato was vital as an elevated altitude crop that could be freeze-dried into a product that is known as “chuño”, it looks like a dried prune. There was about seven to ten cultivated species with thousands of options in color, size, taste, and shape. The people of the Andes cultivated maize, beans, and squash in lower altitudes, but urbanized a variety of plants that could produce in a high altitude plateau known as the “puna”. The majority of these high altitude plants were urbanized with distinctiveness to oppose the tremendous cold of altitudes between 5,000 and 14,000 ' over sea level. The peanut and potato are two well-known examples, but there were countless others that were more less known. Many of these native cultigens are roots or rhizomes that are sheltered underneath the ground, because nighttime temperatures can fall as much as 40-50 degrees fare height.
Just as significant, the European and North American acceptance of the potato set the model for modern farming—the alleged “agro-industrial complex”. Not only did the Columbian Exchange take the potato across the Atlantic, it also brought the world’s first rigorous fertilizer: Peruvian guano. Competition to create more forceful arsenic blends brought forth the current pesticide business. During the 1940s and 1950s, improvement in crops, well powered fertilizers and chemical pesticides started the Green Revolution; this outburst of agricultural productivity that altered farms from Illinois all the way to Indonesia—and this set off a political disagreement about the food supply that grows stronger day by day. In 1853 an Alsatian sculptor, Andreas Friederich created a statue of Sir Francis Drake in Offenburg, which is located in southwest Germany. It showed the English explorer gazing off into the horizon in well-known thinker style. Friederich’s right hand was placed on the hilt of his sword; his left grasped a potato plant. “Sir Francis Drake,” the bottom stated: “disseminator of the potato in Europe in the Year of Our Lord 1586. Millions of people who cultivate the earth bless his immortal memory.”
Potatoes were unfamiliar to the world that was distant to the lofty elevations of the Andes prior to the coming of Columbus to the New World. The invasion of Europeans and Africans to the Americas that followed began a chain of actions that changed the face of the world. Countless of these changes linked to plants - corn, potatoes, tobacco, sweet potatoes, and rubber trees; these crops up to that time were unidentified to the rest of the world. When the Spanish explorers arrived in the Andes, they found the people that lived there were taming an extensive variety of potatoes modified to the exact conditions of altitude and soil of the land. Distinct to grains, potatoes are a good deal more beneficial on a given sum of ground, and in addition to distinct to grains, potatoes hold ample amounts of nutrients to supply by themselves as the root of a sensible healthy diet. Even though the approval of potatoes in Europe was slow to begin with, once it became routine, it played a vast function in ending the hunger and famines that had previously been a habit in Europe.
Naturally, potatoes went on to be of assistance to make the Great Hunger, the famine that ensued in the stir of the overwhelming coming of potato blight in the mid- 19th century, an extra trade in from the New World. This fungus-like organism is believed to have reached Europe in a shipment of guano, bird excrement that is mined to be used as fertilizer. Found on Pacific Islands off the coast of South America, guano had been used by Andean peoples to fertilize their potato fields. Europeans imported this agriculture system as well, the start of the use of high-intensity fertilizers to advance crop yields that helped to make the potato such a staple and support Europe 's climax in population.
Different in the Andes, the potatoes grown in Europe had slight genetic range half of the Irish potato crop consisted of one especially dynamic diversity. Add to these changes in farming techniques that permitted the disease to multiply without difficulty and the stage was set for an outbreak of catastrophic quantity. The distress that was brought upon was awful, particularly in Ireland, which endured one of the deadliest famines in history in terms of the proportion of the people that died. The hundreds of thousands who left Ireland to get away from the famine altered the route of history in this country. Towards the end of the 17th century potatoes had developed into the food staple of the Irish people. A scientist, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, dismissed the idea of French peasants that potatoes caused leprosy and fevers. Between the times of 1773 and 1789 he wrote books and pamphlets urging potato cultivation. Frederick the Great of Prussia prearranged his subjects to plant potatoes as food and cattle supply. By the end of the 18th century the potato was a major crop in Europe, mainly in Germany, and in the west of England. The Irish economy became reliant on the potato. Their agriculture continued to increase all through the world throughout the first four decades of the 19th century. In 1845 and 1846, late blight disease, caused by the oomycete, Phytophthora infestans, practically shattered the Irish potato crops. The consequent famine caused 1 million deaths out of 8 million residents and the migration of more than 1.5 million out of the country. Today, more than 85 million tons of potatoes are created yearly with more than a third coming from emergent countries.
The potato has a huge control all over the world. As the fifth biggest supplier to human caloric utilization, the potato holds its own in the farming field. As a part of the big “Solanaceae” family, the potato shares the attention with a whole lot of other inexpensively significant crops, as well as tomato, pepper, eggplant, and the ornamental petunia. Even though these crops may seem rather diverse from one another, genomic analysis has exposed a great comparison in terms of gene content and association. One researcher’s point of view is the similarity of the crops is fairly valuable for it means that genomic information and resources obtained from potato can be applied to other members of the family and the other way around.
Work Cited:
1. "How the Potato Changed the World." Smithsonian. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Nov. 2013.
2. "Potato Genome Project." Potato Genome Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2013.
3. "Economy in The Columbian Exchange." Shmoop. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.
4. "Further Findings." Further Findings RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.
5. "National Gardening Association." Regional Gardening Reports ::. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Nov. 2013.