"When conquistadors subjugated Peru in 1534, the Inca civilization was only their first victim. Spain too would eventually pay a heavy price. The Spaniards discovered a veritable mountain of silver at Potosí, but it was only thanks to the potato — domesticated in Peru's uplands some 8,000 years earlier — that Spanish slave drivers could feed the army of conscripted miners they deployed to dig up the silver. As John Reader recounts in Propitious Esculent: The Potato in World History, the flood of bullion proved more than the Old World could absorb. The unintended result: inflation that shredded Europe's social fabric, disrupted its monetary system and debased the precious metal itself. Blame it on the potato.
How or when the humble tuber followed the silver to Europe is unclear, but by the early 17th century the stage was set there for a vast expansionary phase in the potato's history. Despite being regularly denounced from pulpits because it was not mentioned in the Bible, this imported esculent (foodstuff) soon became a peasant favorite. Not only did it yield four times more calories per acre than grain, making it an essential insurance policy against famine; it also, as an underground crop, was less likely than stored grain to be looted by armies living off the land in those war-torn times.
Wherever the potato has been adopted populations have boomed. In 1798 pioneering demographer Thomas Malthus complained that more food brings more mouths, and warned that the potato would depress wages and living standards by pushing Europe's population far beyond the opportunities of employment. What Malthus didn't know was that Europe was already in the throes of a development that would quickly swallow any labor surplus: the Industrial Revolution.
It was, writes Reader, "one of those remarkable synergies [that] the potato arrived in Europe and established itself as a staple food ... precisely when Europe's burgeoning industries were beginning to cry out for workers." It would be stretching a point, Reader concedes, to claim that the potato set off the Industrial Revolution, but he makes a good case for its role in fuelling it. And what flowed from that revolution is, as they say, history — industrial Europe's global rise (and decline), the catastrophic Irish potato famine and the migrations that took Europe's population surpluses to the New World.
Today Solanum tuberosum has gone global to become the world's fourth largest food crop after wheat, rice and maize — not bad for a tuber whose ancestor is the highly toxic wild potato and whose closest cousin is the deadly nightshade. And its popularity still has vast potential for growth: Asia has replaced Europe as the center of production as its populations begin to embrace French fries as well as rice.
The UN has designated 2008 as the Year of the Potato, exhorting food experts to examine "the potential contribution of the potato to defeating hunger." A worthy cause, indeed, but one to pursue with caution. The best efforts of breeders have failed to improve greatly the disease resistance of the potato, which is the world's most chemically dependent crop — the global cost of fungicides alone stands at over $2 billion a year. And although the potato may, as Reader puts it, be "the best-all round bundle of nutrition known," diet gurus regularly denounce it for raising blood sugar levels. Its record for lifting people out of poverty is patchy at best. "It is very good at feeding hungry people, but not so good at improving their economic status," is Reader's stark conclusion. As in Spain's Golden Age, so too today: the potato's legacy is a decidedly mixed bag. "
Source: Time
2/06/2008
在莫哈韦沙漠上你可以打高爾夫球还是为什么美国的上帝叫悪魔
source: National Geographic在美国的莫哈韦沙漠上，可以打高爾夫球，真聪明 ;(
The real God of the United States of America is called Mammon。The Americans are still engulfed in a 19th century political rhetoric whereas the real problem is the ecological threat...
在香港有一个公司叫Mammon。http://www.mammonhk.com/car/en/Aboutus.asp?Title=Company%20Profile好像中国人不太知道Mammon的意思。
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