Why does the history of potato in Europe, from nobody to sweet cake, even affect the fate of a nation?

Baked or fried, boiled or baked, potato chips or potato chips, you should have eaten potatoes in your life. Needless to say, delicious potatoes have played a more important role in our history, not just the staple food we know and love now. Without potatoes, modern civilization might not exist.

Eight thousand years ago, at the top of the Andes in South America, ancient Peruvians became the first people to grow potatoes. It contains high protein and carbohydrates, as well as essential fatty acids, vitamins and minerals. Potatoes are a perfect food source, which provides Inca laborers with a lot of energy to build and plant terraces, excavate Rocky Mountain minerals and establish a great Inca imperial civilization.

Although potatoes were very important to the Incas, they became worthless when Spanish sailors came back from the Andes and introduced them to Europe for the first time. Europeans don't want to eat at all. They regard it as a strange product from a strange place and a deadly eggplant? Belladonna is too similar. Europeans don't eat potatoes, but use them as ornamental plants.

Two hundred years later, potatoes became the staple food in Europe. Even then, potatoes were at best food for the lower classes. But from about 1750, to some extent, because cheap and nutritious potatoes began to spread, European farmers had food security and found that they no longer had to suffer from frequent food famines, and the population began to rise steadily.

In this way, Britain, the Netherlands and the German Empire rose under the growth of farmers, laborers and soldiers, and promoted the western rulers in the world. However, not all European countries developed into empires. After planting potatoes in Ireland, the population has risen sharply, and they are too dependent on this staple food. However, disaster broke out.

From 1845 to 1852, potato blight ravaged most potato crops in Ireland, causing potato famine in Ireland, which was one of the deadly famines in the world history. /kloc-More than 0/100,000 Irish people starved to death, and more than 2 million people fled their homes. Of course, potatoes did not disappear because of this, and crops finally returned to normal.

The population of Europe, especially the working class, continues to increase. As Irish immigrants flooded into Europe. Let Africa have a huge, growing and well-fed population, which is enough to cope with the labor force needed by emerging industries. As a result, the industrial revolution has also brought people into the modern world.

Therefore, it is almost impossible to imagine whether there will be an industrial revolution in the world without potatoes. Will the Allies be defeated in World War II if they don't have easy-to-grow potatoes to feed their hunger? Will World War II happen? If you think so, many important milestones in world history are attributed to ordinary potatoes on the top of the mountain in Peru.