Word: potatoes
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Take the simple act of eating a potato chip. In a series of experiments, Gilbert invited Harvard undergraduates to a lab stocked with potato chips, along with either sardines or chocolate. To compare expected versus actual enjoyment of the experience, one group of students was asked to predict how much they would enjoy the chips compared to the relatively better food (chocolate) or the worse food (sardines); this forecasting group was asked to imagine eating the chips before, after or instead of the alternatives. Students in another "experience" group were instructed to eat the chips and the other foods. Turns...
...designated 2008 as the Year of the Potato, exhorting food experts to examine "the potential contribution of the potato to defeating hunger." A worthy cause, indeed, but one to pursue with caution. The best efforts of breeders have failed to improve greatly the disease resistance of the potato, which is the world's most chemically dependent crop - the global cost of fungicides alone stands at over $2 billion a year. And although the potato may, as Reader puts it, be "the best-all round bundle of nutrition known," diet gurus regularly denounce it for raising blood sugar levels. Its record...
...Wherever the potato has been adopted populations have boomed. In 1798 pioneering demographer Thomas Malthus complained that more food brings more mouths, and warned that the potato would depress wages and living standards by pushing Europe's population far beyond the opportunities of employment. What Malthus didn't know was that Europe was already in the throes of a development that would quickly swallow any labor surplus: the Industrial Revolution...
...writes Reader, "one of those remarkable synergies [that] the potato arrived in Europe and established itself as a staple food ... precisely when Europe's burgeoning industries were beginning to cry out for workers." It would be stretching a point, Reader concedes, to claim that the potato set off the Industrial Revolution, but he makes a good case for its role in fuelling it. And what flowed from that revolution is, as they say, history - industrial Europe's global rise (and decline), the catastrophic Irish potato famine and the migrations that took Europe's population surpluses to the New World...
...Today Solanum tuberosum has gone global to become the world's fourth largest food crop after wheat, rice and maize - not bad for a tuber whose ancestor is the highly toxic wild potato and whose closest cousin is the deadly nightshade. And its popularity still has vast potential for growth: Asia has replaced Europe as the center of production as its populations begin to embrace French fries as well as rice...