The Impact of the Potato and Tomato on European Demographics and Culture
Introduction
When you think of European cuisine what comes to mind?
If you’re thinking of the United Kingdom, dishes like bangers and mash, mashed potatoes, and Shepard’s pie might come to the forefront of your memory.
If you head across the channel to France, dishes like gratin dauphinois and ratatouille are rather famous.
In Spain, you have dishes like pa amb tomaquet, gazpacho, and pisto.
Then of course there is Italy where you have pasta with a Marinara or Bolognese sauce, and of course the world-famous pizza.
If one where to travel into the eastern European, you’d see a cuisine which includes cabbage rolls (often coated with tomato sauce), perogies, and olivier salad.
While these items might only be a small selection of European cuisine, it is likely that you’ve at least heard of some of these dishes, if not all of them. However, these dishes also tell a very different story. It would seem that the tomato and potato hold a very important role within European cuisine. This is especially fascinating considering that both of these foods are indigenous to the American continents, meaning that they did not come to Europe’s attention until 1492. In fact, it wasn’t until the late 17th/early 18th century that these foods, along with other new world crops such as corn, chilis, bell peppers, cacao, sunflowers, and sweet potatoes, were widely consumed.
This means that prior to 1700, European cuisine was radically different than what we are used to today with many dishes, we classify as traditionally European, either not existing or existing in a radically altered form.
The goal of this article is to examine how the potato and tomato entered into Europe and how it spread throughout the continent to hold dominance within its culture and cuisine.
To do this, this article will be divided into four sections. The first, will examine how the potato entered into Europe and how it spread after initial contact. The second, will examine how the tomato entered and spread through Europe. The third, will examine the impact of the potato upon European diet and society. And the fourth, will do the same for the tomato.
How the Potato Reached Europe
As mentioned, the potato is indigenous to the Americas, more specifically South America being grown in a region that is currently split between modern day Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. It had been grown here for quite sometime with archeology evidence pointing towards controlled cultivation since between the 8th and 5th millennia BCE.
Europeans first came in contact with the potatoes in 1532 when Spaniard Francisco Pizarro landed in Peru, learning of it from local Amerindians. Within three decades, the vegetable had spread throughout Spain’s American holdings, and by 1573 we have the first evidence of the potato in Europe, when a hospital in Seville, Spain bought some for their garden. From Spain it then migrated to the Spanish controlled regions of Italy by 1586, England by 1596, and Germany by 1601.
It’s important to mention here that the early adoption of the potato was not as a food staple but rather as an object of curiosity for botanists and the earliest use of the potato was for decoration rather than cuisine.
There were three key factors which led to a general unease towards the potato as a food item.
First, was that the potato was miscategorized as a species related to the nightshade family which was notoriously poisonous. This misconception was made due to the dominate school of botanist thought in the period, which was deeply rooted in the old (Roman and Greek) ways of thinking. This meant that there was a lot of issues when trying to reconcile new-world plant species into the old systems of thinking, with many being wrongfully compared to old-world species.
Second, the appearance of the potato created an unfortunate association between the plant and the skin of lepers.
Lastly, the newness and foreignness of the species create a general suspicion and apprehension towards the plant. One trait which was met with a great degree of suspicion was the fact that potatoes didn’t require seeds to been grown, a first for European agriculture.
This suspicion was eventually overcome towards the end of the 17th century, but even into the 18th century there was a great deal of controversy and criticism leveled at the potato.
In Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedias (1751–65), he describes the potato as something that… “cannot be regarded as an enjoyable food, but it provides abundant, reasonably healthy food for men wo want noting but sustenance.”
While this does display a dislike for the taste, it also shows that the misconception of it being poisonous had been overcome by this point.
Another critic of the potato was England, where it was denounced as an agent of Roman Catholicism, with the slogan “No Potatoes, No Popery!” being used in 1765.
However, even with its critics, the adoption of the potato as a food item could not be stopped. As early as the late 17th century, there is evidence of widespread cultivation and eating of potatoes in Ireland, Spanish Netherlands, and the Alsace region of France.
By the early 18th century it had been adopted within England and Scotland, and by the mid-18th century had arrived in Scandinavia.
By 1744, we have the first widespread adoption of the potato in Germany, when Frederick the Great of Prussia ordered his peasantry to eat it in order to alleviate a famine at the time.
In France, the adoption of the potato was spearheaded by a single gentleman by the name of Antoine-Augustin Parmentier. Parmentier was a veteran of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and during the conflict was captured by the Prussians, who fed him little beside potatoes. After the war he dedicated his life to the vegetable, doing everything in his power to promote it. Some of his most high-profile publicity stunts included:
· An all potato banquet for an international gathering of high society;
· Persuading the king and queen of France to wear potato blossoms on their outfits; and
· Planting 40 acres of potatoes on the edge of Paris in order to encourage the poor to steal them and plant them for themselves.
By 1775, France was in the perfect position to adopt the potato, as this was the year where the price controls on grain were lifted, leading to the rapid increase of bread prices, leaving room for the potato to really shine as an alternative staple in French diets.
From Europe, the potato was then spread across the rest of the old world via colonial trade networks and mariners. It arrived in China by the 17th century via the Dutch, it was introduced to India by the 17th century by the Portuguese and British, and had reached Ethiopia by 1858 via the Germans.
By the end of the 18th century, the potato was a well-established staple of European diets with anywhere between 10–30% of the population solely consisting on them within the Netherlands, Belgium, Prussia, and Poland, and 40% of the population in Ireland.
How the Tomato Reached Europe
Much like the potato, the tomato originated in Peru and Ecuador, before spreading outwards across the Inca, Aztec, and Mayan empires. Prior to the Columbian exchange it had become a very important part of the Aztec diet and was grown extensively throughout Mexico.
It is in Mexico where Europeans first come in contact with the fruit. This was once again led by the Spanish when Hernan Cortes captured the city of Tenochtitlan in 1521, noting the importance of the tomato within the local Nahua diet and culture.
The tomato was eagerly adopted by the local Spanish settlers, and by 1571 it was well documented that the tomato, along with chilis, were being used extensively by the Spanish population in Mesoamerica.
The first tomatoes to enter the old world did so in the mid-sixteenth century, when they entered through the port of Seville in Spain. From here the Spanish then moved it across the globe via their colonial system, moving them first to the Caribbean, then their European holdings (Southern Italy and Flanders), and eventually into the Philippines and Asia.
However, much like the potato, the early adoption of the tomato in Europe saw it used primarily as a botanist curiosity and not as a source of food. This is once again because of the botanist mindset of the period. In 1544, Italian Scholar Pietro Andrea Mattiolo compared the fruit to aubergine, a toxic member of the nightshade family. This perception was reinforced by the works of Italian, Ulisse Aldrovandi in 1572, and English surgeon and herbalist, John Gerard in 1597.
Along with this, the tomato was burdened by 5 key characteristics which made it difficult to adopt into European diets. These were, its foreignness in appearance and taste, strange consistency and texture, acidic taste when green, soft texture when ripe, and its tendency to disintegrate during the lengthy cooking times of Renaissance cuisine.
On top of this, there was also the problems of 16th century medical literature, which viewed vegetables as bad for someone’s health.
One quote comes from 16th century Castilian Doctor, Nunez de Oria.
“However, let us not quote examples from distant lands, but look instead at our own country, where we see from experience that those who eat salads and vegetables have all the colours of the rainbow in their complexions and faces. I do not say this to stop people having salads, but so that they do so in moderation, and make them from hot and cold vegetables, so that they temper each other.”
While this was a general warning against the danger of vegetables there was also direct criticism leveled at the tomato.
For example, Flemish physician, Rembert Dodoens made this warning in 1583, “Some eat the fruits prepared and cooked with pepper, salt and oil. However, they provide little bodily sustenance, and this is itself noxious and pernicious.”
However, even against the overwhelming warnings of the 16th century medical community, there is evidence of the consumption and cultivation of the tomato during this time. The first evidence of it being consumed dates back to 1608 in Spain when the Hospital de la Sangre, in Seville, ordered some for their kitchen.
By the early 18th century, the tomato had overcome its stigma and was being widely consumed and cultivated across the Mediterranean. This claim can be supported by the account book for the college of Corpus Christi in Valencia which started the cultivation and consumption of tomatoes in 1746 and by physiocrat, Jose Antonio Valcarcel who reported the widespread cultivation within the region by 1765.
By the end of the 18th century, the tomato was being widely grown and eaten throughout the Mediterranean, while it maintained its status as a botanist curiosity in Central and Northern European.
The Potato’s Impact Upon Europe
In 1853, Andreas Friederich erected a statue of Sir Francis Drake in the town of Offenburg, Germany. In one hand Drake wields a sword, in the other he grips a potato plant. At the base of the statue is a motto which reads, “disseminator of the potato in Europe, in the year of Our Lord 1586. Millions of people, who cultivate the earth, bless his immortal memory.”
Now, it’s important to note that Sir Francis Drake had absolutely nothing to do with the movement of potatoes into Europe. However, his statue does show us how important the potato was to the continent.
The potato effectively doubled the food supply of Europe, producing more calories, vitamins, and nutrients per acre than any other staple crop. It also contained vitamins which could not be easily found in any foods indigenous to Europe, such as vitamin C.
A family of 6–8 individuals could consist off the potato yields of a single acre and the diary of a single cow for their annual needs. In comparison, that same family would require 2.8 acres of barley, 3.2 acres of oats, or 3.4 acres of wheat just to make up the same caloric intake, and that’s not even factoring in the crops needed to make up the missing vitamins these other staples failed to provide.
The potato could also be used as an animal feed, which helped increase the population of cattle, pigs, and chickens across Europe, contributing to increased meat production and far greater quantities of fertilizer.
Between the year 1000–1700, the population of the world grew from 300–600 million people while the urban population stayed stable, making up about 2% of this figure. Between 1700–1900, the population then exploded from 600–1600 million, while the urban population grew from 2–8%. Of these second figures (1700–1900), 25–26% of the population growth, and 27–34% of the urban growth can be directly contributed to the widespread adoption of the potato. Just think about that for a moment, the adoption of a single crop was responsible for a quarter of the Industrial Revolution’s population growth and a third of its urbanization.
London, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, Moscow, these cities would be a shadow of their current shelves if it were not for the potato.
And while the potato did revolutionize food across the entire old world, Europe proved to have the ideal soil and climate for the species, blowing away the rest of the world in potential yields.
Prior to the introduction of the potato, the traditional food systems of Europe could not reliably feed it. Between 1500–1800 there were 40 famines in France, and between 1523–1623 there were 17 national famines in England. Yet, the potato offered a solution. To quote Belgian historian Christian Vandenbroeke, “for the first time in the history of western Europe, a definitive solution had been found to the food problem.”
That is…until 1845.
To begin to understand what happened in 1845, we must first understand two things, P. infestans and guano.
P. infestans, also known as potato blight, is a fungus native to Peru which prays upon the potato and tomato. Prior to 1845, it had remained in Peru where a natural genetic resistance had mostly limited the impact of the fungus upon crops.
Guano is bird shit. To put it more kindly, it’s the dried remains of bird urine. While an absolutely revolting substance, guano has the very important characteristic of having incredibly high nitrogen content, one of the macronutrients vital to the growth of all plants, potatoes included. So, prior to the advent of artificial fertilizer, guano was imported into Europe to help fertilize crops, something that was becoming increasingly important as the heavy cultivation of potatoes absolutely devastated the nitrogen content of European soils.
Now where did Guano come from? Well a wide variety of places, however the chief producer was Peru.
So, we have both the killer of the potato and the fertilizer needed for potatoes within close proximity to one another, and every day more and more ships were making the voyage to ferry guano to Europe.
In 1845, P. infestans came along for the ride.
It landed in Antwerp in the summer, before hopscotching to Paris by August, and doing a tour of the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and England in the coming weeks.
Finally, it reached Ireland.
As mentioned, the Irish diet was heavily dependant upon the potato with 40% of the population subsisting on nothing but potatoes for every meal.
Within 2 months, 0.5–0.75 million acres of Ireland’s 2.1 million acres of potatoes were gone. In 1846, this figure worsened, as it did in 1847, 1848, 1849, 1850, 1851, and 1852. For 7 straight years the situation worsened and the impact upon Ireland was devastating. Due to the famine, the British government’s unwillingness to combat the famine, and the enclosure of lands used to cultivate alterative crops by the English aristocracy (who shipped their products to England) 1 million Irish people died with another 2 million fleeing the country.
To put this into perspective, it took until the 1960s for Ireland to recover half of its pre-famine population, and modern Ireland is the only country to have a smaller population today than it did 150 years ago.
The horrors of P. infestan and later Leptinotarsa decemlineata (the Colorado potato beetle) birthed the modern petrochemical industry, as scientists and industrialists raced to find a way to profit from the protection of the potato. In the 1880s, it was discovered that a combination of copper sulfate and lime would kill P. infestans, while a combo of arsenic and copper would do the same for L. decemlineata.
However, the battle against parasites is still with us to this very day. For example, in 2009, nearly the entire potato crop of the American East Coast was destroyed by parasites.
The Tomato’s Impact Upon European Cuisine:
While the tomato’s impact on European demographics is nowhere near as great, the introduction of this fruit radically altered European cuisine.
Nowhere is this more pronounced than within Italy.
For example, prior to the 19th century most Italian staple dishes did not exist. Pasta and pizza were very different, being topped with a combination of olive oil, anchovies, and cheese. It wasn’t until 1889 that the dish we call pizza really came into existence, when Raffaele Esposito invented the Margherita pizza in honour of the queen of Savoy. To put that into context, the country of Canada is older than pizza.
You can actually see the impacts of Spanish colonialization upon Italian cuisine, with the southern half of the country having a rich history with the fruit. This is due to Naples being a part of the Spanish crown from between 1504–1714, meaning that it had better access to Spanish colonial goods, and by 1548, the first tomatoes entered Italy.
The first tomato sauce originated in Italy in 1692 and was described as being done in a “Spanish style”, showing the Spanish influence of this period.
Meanwhile, in Northern Italy there was a wariness towards the fruit, which stems from many of the reasons stated earlier in this paper. However, along with this, the tomato also had a reputation for poisoning the aristocracy and wealthy echelons of society. This happened due to the use of pewtar plates by the wealthy elite, which had a very high lead content. The acidity of the tomato would erode the pewtar and mix lead into the food, giving the people unfortunate enough to eat off these plates a bad case of lead poisoning.
In Spain, the tomato was being consumed by the colonial populace all the way back to the 16th century, when Spanish cuisine was blended together with the local Amerindian foods. This mostly took the form of blending chilis and tomatoes together to create a sauce, which was described as having the ability to “enhance the flavour of almost all dishes and foods” by naturalist Francisco Hernadez.
Beyond Spain’s colonial holdings, the adoption of the tomato was a bit slower in uptake. Yet even in Europe the tomato was being eaten as early as 1583, when it was combined with pepper, salt, and oil. More complex dishes came out of this and by the 18th century the tomato was being consumed rather commonly throughout much of Spain.
By the 18th and 19th centuries the tomato had exerted it dominance on southern European cuisine, being cultivated and consumed throughout the entire Mediterranean. The tomato’s impact upon local foods can not be understated as this fruit managed to completely alter a major aspect of the region’s cultural image (food) within a relatively short period of time.
Conclusion
In Marialuz Lopez-Terrada’s paper, The History of the Arrival of the Tomato in Europe, he discusses how the introduction of American plants radically altered European cooking and eating habits, medical products, drugs, poisons, gardens, wood types, pigments, solvents, and greatly expanded the catalogue of other useful materials. In other words, the Columbian Exchange greatly benefited Europe. Nowhere is that more pronounced than with the adoption of the potato and tomato.
The potato originated in the Andes of South America, before arriving in Europe by 1573 when the Spanish introduced it to the continent. Throughout the next few centuries the plant spread throughout Europe, though largely in a gardening and ornamental role. The adoption of it as a food was hindered by its exoticness, lumpiness, and misconception that it was poisonous. However, throughout the 17th and 18th century, widespread culinary adoption began to blossom and by the end of the 18th century somewhere between 10–30% of the population was living off a diet of just potatoes within Germany, Poland, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
The tomato also originated within the Andes, before migrating to the Mesoamerican region of the Americas via pre-European trade networks. Like the potato, it was introduced to Europe via the Spanish and was largely kept as an ornamental plant, and had to battle its own stigmas related to its unhealthiness, poisonous, and ill-fitted nature for European diets.
The potato revolutionized the European food supply. For the first time ever, Europeans had a staple crop which provided the entire macro and micro nutrient needs of the population, including a desperately needed and easily accessible source of vitamin C. At the same time, the potato allowed for farmers to produce three times as many calories per acre compared to more traditional staples such as barley, oats, and rye. These two characteristics allowed the potato to effectively end famine within Europe for a nearly a hundred years, and was responsible for 25–26% of population growth and 27–34% of urban growth between 1700–1900. However, the potato eventually ran into pests and disease which shattered its stability, and in an effort to protect it, the modern petrochemical and fertilizer industries were invented.
Meanwhile, the tomato completely changed southern European cuisine. Pasta and tomato sauce, pizza, salsa. None of these would exist to a European palate if it were not for the Columbian exchange and the introduction of the tomato into Spain and Italy. While the impact on demographics from this are nowhere near as pronounced, the impact of the tomato was massive upon the region’s culture and cuisine.
In closing, the potato and tomato might be common nowadays, to our diets, but its important to examine where these foods came from and how they spread to hold such an important role within our society. Three hundred years ago, Ireland didn’t have potatoes, Italy didn’t have tomatoes, Switzerland didn’t have chocolate, and Spain didn’t have chilis.
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Bibliography
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Lopez-Terrada, M. (NA). The History of the Tomato in Europe: An Initial Overview. Traditom. Retrieved from: http://traditom.eu/fileadmin/traditom/downloads/TRADITOM_History_of_the_arrival_of_the_tomato_in_Europe.pdf
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