Comedy Open Mic Entry #2, Round 27: Fun Facts About Potatoes: Slavery, The Potato King, and the guano Wars.

“Potato” comes from the Spanish word “Patata,” which means “potato.” The humble, yet mighty potato came to the United States from Ireland somewhere around 1719. The Spaniards discovered it back in the 1500’s when they were "exploring" the new world, I.E. stabbing the natives and taking all their shiny shit. The conquistadors were amazed how effectively potatoes kept their new Peruvians friends nourished while they forced them to work the silver mines.

" Spanish Potato"

The potato wasn’t immediately embraced in the West though. It didn’t help that potatoes at the time looked like gnarled up chicken fingers and needed a bit more preparation to eat than modern potatoes due to it’s relation to deadly nightshade making it a little toxic. Snobby Europeans called the potato “Devil’s Apples.” However, the potato eventually became popular with Spanish peasants because:

A) It kept them fed
B) When brigands came around to steal their food they were more likely to just grab the wheat and run instead of taking the time to dig a bunch of shit out the ground.
C) They were sick and fucking tired of eating turnips

French physician Antoine-Augustin Parmentier got turned on to spuds after being forced to eat them in a Prussian prison camp during the Seven Years War. Once he got back to France he launched a campaign to put Potatoes on the menu. It was an uphill battle because, well people are fucking stupid. He gifted royalty with potato flowers to make them fashionable. He also hosted lavish dinner parties for the aristocracy where he served potatoes in as many tasty ways as he could. One notable dinner guest was a fat man with a fetish for banging grandmas and chugging opium cough syrup while chillin’ naked on his back porch. That man’s name was Benjamin Franklin. Parmentier’s most gangster ass move was planting about 40 acres of potatoes and hiring royal guards to protect the crop. Once peasants saw people guarding the fields, Parmentier instructed the guards to accept any and all bribes from shady peasants who wanted to sample the goods, as well as had them regularly abandon their posts so people could steal the crops. Shit worked like a charm.

Frederik the Great of Prussia was an early adopter of the potato on account of how much easier it made keeping his armies fed. It might seem silly now, but back then, keeping your soldier’s bellies full was often the difference between defeat and victory. Unfortunately, people thought potatoes caused everything from sterility to leprosy. So in 1756, he issued the Kartoffelbefehl (potato order), which was basically a law that said, “You’re gonna eat these goddamn potatoes whether you like it or not,” Earning him the nickname Kartoffelkönig, or, ("the potato king").

If you’ve ever been to Europe you quickly noticed that in many regions, it’s fucking cold up there. That ain’t a great state of affairs for growing food. Since potatoes grow underground, it makes them more tolerant of the weather than crops like Wheat. Once Europeans noticed potatoes were great for not starving to death when the wheat wasn’t growing, potatoes gained widespread acceptance, effectively doubling Europe’s food production. This allowed the population to grow, as well as be more productive, helping “feed” the industrial revolution.

"Typical Irish Summer"

In 1840 Justus von Liebig published a paper about how fucking cool nitrogen was for making plants grow. Inthe paper he mentioned how bat shit was a great source of nitrogen. It just so happens the islands around Peru are covered in bat shit. A trade war kicked off to get as much guano as everyone could. As demand grew, so did the profits from selling guano, along with the price. This didn’t sit well with a young country called The United States, who were keen to jump on the agricultural stability bandwagon, so they issued the Guano Islands Act of 1856. Which basically said, Ya’ll look like you could use some freedom over there. Let me just take all your shit...literally. The United States brought "Freedom" to over 100 islands in the Carribean and the Pacific. Thus, the age of industrial fertilizers was born.

In 1845 Ireland was famously brought to its knees by the potato killing mold Phytophthora infestans. The ensuing famine killed a million people and displaced countless more. Less famously, in the 1860’s American potato farmers felt the wrath of a vicious little beetle called Leptinotarsa decemlineata A.K.A. the Colorado Potato Beetle (Not actually from Colorado). These insidious little fuckers hitched rides on horses and buffalo coming up from Mexico. Once they got a foothold in the potato fields around the Missouri river they spread like wildfire. The infestation spread all the way to the West Coast. There were so many potato beetles that they’d cover train tracks for miles, making them so slippery with beetle guts that the tracks were impassable.

People tried everything they could to kill the orange army but nothing worked. That is until some yokel got so desperate that he started throwing paint on his plants. One particular color “Paris Green” actually worked to get rid of the beetles. Paris green is jam-packed with Arsenic, which living things aren’t too keen on. People started wondering what other kinds of poison shit we could spray on our food. In 1880 a French Chemist found out after you sprayed your garden with Arsenic to get rid of the beetles, you could also hit it with some copper sulfate and lime and that would take care of the mold too. The age of industrial pesticides was off and running.

Potatoes made their way to Russia in the 1800’s, where peasants took one look at the bulbous root and said, “Ivan, bet me ten rubles I can’t make vodka out of that.”

I nominate cathi-xx and cheapchuckles to enter the contest.