Starches That We Eat

        When we eat potatoes we are eating the food that the growing potato plant had set aside as starch for its own future use. The potatoes we eat are the plant's swollen stems, which we call tubers. From water, air, certain minerals, and sunlight, the leaves of the growing plant manufacture sugar. During the growing season extra sugar is made. This extra sugar is moved to a storage place where most of it is changed into starch and some of it into fats and proteins. When the plant needs to use this stored food it will be changed back to sugar and taken wherever needed.
       Starch is perhaps the most widely distributed substance in the plant kingdom and occurs, often in great abundance, in almost every plant. Plants usually store starch in stems (as in the white potato), roots (as in the sweet potato), bulbs, or seeds. Cereal grains have much starch, but there are also other important starches that are staple foods of many people of the world.
       When the Spanish explorers went into Peru and Chile four hundred years ago, they found the natives cultivating and eating potatoes. These Spaniards introduced the potato into Europe and, later, settlers from Europe brought it to North America. Thus it came to us the long way around rather than directly from the South American countries.

A Papuan woman extract starch sago from the spongy center of the palm stems.

       Everywhere the potato went its popularity grew rapidly. It has even played important roles in history, for the quick-growing potato often came to the rescue when the staple cereal crops were slow to reach the harvest or when they failed entirely. In overpopulated Ireland the soil and cool climate were ideal for potato raising, and potatoes became the Irish staple. When the potato crop of 1845 failed, a terrible famine occurred, resulting in a great Irish immigration to the United States. The white potato is now popularly known as the Irish potato. In planting a new crop, potatoes themselves are used, for new plants grow from the eyes of the potato, which are really the buds of the plant.

       The potato of warm climates is the sweet potato, which belongs to a different family than the Irish potato. It stores up more sugars and fats along with the starch. In the South some varieties are called yams, but the true yam represents still another plant family, which is seldom grown in the United States.

       The cassava is an important source of staple starch food in South America. Its milky roots may grow to be three feet long and over half a foot across. Tapioca is the starch that has been separated from the cassava plant and heated until the granules burst into pellets.

       The Pacific islands have several unique staple starch foods. Among them are taro, sago, and breadfruit. Taro, like the potato and cassava, is a tuberous plant. Sago comes from a palm tree. The pith in the center of the tree trunk supplies the edible starch from which is made the fine pearly grains known as pearl sago. Sago is eaten in the form of cakes or soup by the natives, to whom it is an important article of everyday diet. The sago tree blooms just once, when it is fifteen years old, at which time it uses up its starchy pith and then dies. Natives cut the tree just as it is ready to flower and therefore just in time to collect the pith, which may amount to seven hundred pounds in a single tree. The large pulpy fruit of the breadfruit tree is prepared in a variety of ways. Boiled, baked, dried, crushed, or in bread or pudding, breadfruit is relished throughout the tropics. by Winona Cosner.

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History through the eyes of the potato 

by Leo Bear-McGuinness.