Smithsonian magazine, November 2011. By Charles C. Mann
Brought to Europe from the New World by Spanish explorers, the lowly potato gave rise to modern industrial agriculture.
Today the potato is the fifth most important crop worldwide, after wheat, corn, rice and sugar cane. But in the 18th century the tuber was a startling novelty, frightening to some, bewildering to others—part of a global ecological convulsion set off by Christopher Columbus.
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