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Mmm ... Purple Disease-Resistant Potatoes
the_ph0x` writes: "An article on Reuters describes a new breed of potato as being resistant to disease, able to grow in low nutrient soil and ... purple. Not all that interesting unless you're from an area where blight is a problem. At least we'll know we can always live on potatos, which who doesn't anyway ... mmm purple tater-tots." Combine it with the hideous green ketchup Heinz is making, and eating can be like a Kadinsky ? painting!
Them's good eatin'.
Till you grow a third nipple.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
My dad made some purple potato stuff for a church dinner. Even though they tasted identical to regular potatos, but few people tried them.
As much as the purple potato is resistant to disease, people are more resistant to change.
Mmmmm.... purple Vodka.
Absolut Barney!
{god damn lameness filter}
Potato Association of America Handbook: Potato Varieties.
Off-colour vegetables.
Who says watermelon must be red?
Potatoes of note. (Potatos or potatoes, either is acceptable. Just not potatoe).
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
They're just an odd variety - although as some other posters have mentioned, purple potatoes are not completely unknown. These purple potatoes are special because of their disease resistance, that's all.
I'm not sure if it's the skin, though, or the entire potato that's purple. The article wasn't very clear.
But in any case, the article is talking about how these will be a boon for ORGANIC farmers. I've not heard of a real organic farmer that used GM species, they tend to hate that more than pesticides!
This made me wonder if any serious and long term studies have been done on the concept of "cues" in the food chain. The way I understand it, evolution has decided that colour is closely tied into our abilities to determine edibility and such. That's one of the reasons why we know for example, that a ripe tomato is the red one.
Using this example of purple potatoes; I see a real problem with the colour from the health aspect. Most normal potatoes get an off-white blotch when mold sets in and this is a fairly obvious cue that it's gone bad. Other vegetables have similar behaviour signaling their end. Taking this to the logical extreme suggested by this article, what happens when designer-coloured veggies are the norm? Are we going to have to relearn, and relearn again the signs of *bad* for each new vegetable-of-the-day?
The responses here show how much we've become factory farm zombies. Carrots are orange, potatoes are white, apples and tomatoes are red, etc.
In fact, what we're used to is what's convenient to ship or grow. If people were more concious of genetic diversity, we'd already have much more color on our plates. Orange carrots date from the last few hundred years, originally they were white or yellow or red. Apples came in various shades an combinations of yellow, red, and green. Corn can be blue, as well as potatoes. Tomatoes have a fantastically varied set of colors.
Some of these are now becoming known as "heirloom" varieties as people begin to understand how bland and overprocessed our diets have become.
I used to work for an organization that sponsored antropological research in S. America. I saw an interesting paper given on potatoes, which I'll try to remember here.
Potatoes are native to S. America, where there are thousands of varieties. People native to that region grow and eat a much greater variety of potatoes than we do, with different shapes (running from round to finger shaped) and colors. This is partly due to the fact that their potatoes tend to hybridize with wild "weedy" strains, and partly because they encourage hybridization. Since potatoes are a big part of their diet,different shapes, colors and tastes add variety. This strategy probably also protects them from poor harvests and pests by spreading their bets across many strains that do better in different circumstances.
There are probably a hundred or so cultivars we grow in the 1st world which tend to be large, roundish, and have white or yellow flesh. Most importantly they have been selected to have low concentrations of poisionous alkaloids in the tuber. Potatoes are closely related to jimson weed and deadly nightshade and are normally poisonous. Where they eat many more primitive and diverse varieties of pototatoes, the potatoes must be treated specially to remove the alkaloids. They are spread on a blanket or a tarp, trod upon to break their skins and left outside several days to freeze and thaw. Apparently this reduces the concentrations of alkaloids to where they can be consumed safely, although you might still get sick if you aren't used to eating native potatoes.
I don't know if the flesh or the skin of this particular potato is purple -- probably just the skin, although I suppose it is possible that the flesh might be colored. Yellow flesh is not uncommon; green is a sign that a potato wasn't properly handled and may be poisonous. The interesting thing is that it apprently this strain came from European gardens. They could probably develop a number of useful new strains by hybridizing with wild potatoes.
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What I think that everyone here is missing is the obvious application of this on extra-planetary colonies. Yes, I know that we don't have any now and that we aren't likely to have any in the next hundred years. There are two reasons that this is very exciting: there aren't likely to be very many nutrients in the soil of, say, mars and diseases will mutate faster because of the increased radiation on other planets without an atmosphere. Also, as was recently hypothesized, there may be microbes in places other than earth and they are likely to not be very healthy for the plants and vegetables that we are going to eat..
rJames.org - illustration
Yams are also a variety of potato. We North Americans tend to get confused by the color. If you want to try the various styles and colors of potatoes available, skip the Safeway next time you go out to shop, and try some of the (South American) ethnic stores.
In fact, I'd say just try ethnic stores in general! There is a small Vietnamese grocery near my place. They have all sorts of interesting things that I have yet to try. I've been experimenting, lately with different varieties of rice. I've come to texture the texture of brown rice over plain white, and have started experimenting with sticky rice (wow, incredible!). Never would have tried it if I hadn't gotten curious walking through the store, and asked how to cook these things.
People are so willing to share their culture and food with us if we only ask. It's incredible what you can learn by asking someone in a store what to do with a 'strange' plant that they seem to know about.
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