It subsequently transferred over to a variety of digging tools. The word spud traces back to the 16th century. Spanish "espada", English "spade" and "spadroon". 1440) used as a term for a short knife or dagger, probably related to Dutch spyd and/or the Latin "spad-" root meaning "sword" cf. The word has an unknown origin and was originally (c. The name spud for a small potato comes from the digging of soil (or a hole) prior to the planting of potatoes. Potatoes are occasionally referred to as "Irish potatoes" or "white potatoes" in the United States, to distinguish them from sweet potatoes. The 16th-century English herbalist John Gerard used the terms "bastard potatoes" and "Virginia potatoes" for this species, and referred to sweet potatoes as "common potatoes". In many of the chronicles detailing agriculture and plants, no distinction is made between the two. The English confused the two plants one for the other. The name potato originally referred to a type of sweet potato rather than the other way around, although there is actually no close relationship between the two plants. The Spanish Royal Academy says the Spanish word is a compound of the Taino batata ( sweet potato) and the Quechua papa (potato). The English word potato comes from Spanish patata (the name used in Spain). For other uses, see Spud (disambiguation). China is now the world's largest potato-producing country, and nearly a third of the world's potatoes are harvested in China and India. It remains an essential crop in Europe (especially eastern and central Europe), where per capita production is still the highest in the world, but the most rapid expansion over the past few decades has occurred in southern and eastern Asia. However, the local importance of potato is extremely variable and rapidly changing. The annual diet of an average global citizen in the first decade of the 21st century included about 33 kg (73 lb) of potato. Nonetheless, thousands of varieties persist in the Andes, where over 100 cultivars might be found in a single valley, and a dozen or more might be maintained by a single agricultural household. In 1845, a plant disease known as late blight, caused by the fungus-like oomycete Phytophthora infestans, spread rapidly through the poorer communities of western Ireland, resulting in the crop failures that led to the Great Irish Famine. However, lack of genetic diversity, due to the very limited number of varieties initially introduced, left the crop vulnerable to disease. The potato was slow to be adopted by distrustful European farmers, but soon enough it became an important food staple and field crop that played a major role in the European 19th century population boom. The staple was subsequently conveyed by European mariners to territories and ports throughout the world. įollowing the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, the Spanish introduced the potato to Europe in the second half of the 16th century. Of these subspecies, a variety that at one point grew in the Chiloé Archipelago (the potato's south-central Chilean sub-center of origin) left its germplasm on over 99% of the cultivated potatoes worldwide. Following centuries of selective breeding, there are now over a thousand different types of potatoes. The potato was originally believed to have been domesticated independently in multiple locations, but later genetic testing of the wide variety of cultivars and wild species proved a single origin for potatoes in the area of present-day southern Peru (from a species in the Solanum brevicaule complex), where they were domesticated 7,000–10,000 years ago. Wild potato species occur throughout the Americas, from the United States to Uruguay. Long-term storage of potatoes requires specialised care in cold warehouses. It is the world's fourth-largest food crop, following rice, wheat, and maize. Potatoes were first introduced outside the Andes region four centuries ago, and have become an integral part of much of the world's cuisine. In the region of the Andes, there are some other closely related cultivated potato species. The word potato may refer to the plant itself as well as the edible tuber. The potato is a starchy, tuberous crop from the perennial Solanum tuberosum of the Solanaceae family (also known as the nightshades). Potato cultivars appear in a huge variety of colors, shapes, and sizes
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