Impact of Potato in Europe

The potato’s introduction into Europe proves to be one of the most significant examples of a foreign food crop being able to extensively affect the lives of a an Old World Population. Before the assimilation of the potato crop into the majority of Europe’s agricultural landscape, peasant populations constantly faced famines while current food sources provided little nutritional value and were not efficient sources of energy. As Europe adopted the brown tuber, people were provided with a far more beneficial food source capable of instigating and sustaining massive population expansion. This in turn allowed for further technological and political advancements that would have been nearly impossible if European populations had continued to depend on the unreliable wheat and grains that previously capitalized European agriculture.1 The potato’s essential supply of sustenance as well as the superior nutritional content and energy provided by the starchy tuber, allowed for the development of a large and growing workforce during the18th century. This exponential growth in population enabled Europe to rapidly industrialize and helped establish Europe as a dominant world superpower. Europe’s primary reliance on grains such as wheat, barley, and oats prior to the potatoes introduction was insufficient towards maintaining healthy populations and unreliable in providing a constant food source. Populations who cultivated grains as staple crops in the 15th and 16th centuries were often plagued by famine due to the large fallow period that followed each harvest as well as the large amount of work and land required by the dominant food crops. The incompetent amount of labor needed to cultivate, plant, and harvest plots of grain combined with the crops insufficient calories and lack of nutrition resulted in high mortality rates of roughly 30% across Europe.3 Furthermore, without the caloric intake or nourishment needed to bear children, fertility and birth rates remained