Professor Rebecca Earle and Dr Serin Quinn on the histories of the potato and the tomato
An international research team has uncovered that natural interbreeding in the wild between tomato plants and potato-like species from South America about 9 million years ago gave rise to the modern-day potato.
Food historians from the University of Warwick have responded with reflections on the history of these two plants.
"Recent research published in Cell explores the origins of 'tuberization', the ability of plants to form tubers. This development was important. Tubers such as potatoes or cassava came to provide an important food source for people in many parts of the world, as they are nutritious and can be grown in a variety of conditions.
"In addition, tubers have an interesting political history. The US political scientist James C. Scott described tubers as anarchists, because they helped communities resist control by more powerful political entities such as states. Scott pointed out that grains such as wheat are very easy to tax, because they grow above ground and so everyone can easily see when they are ready for harvest, and once they are harvested and dried they are easy to store. This all makes them easy to tax.
"Tubers, on the other hand, grow underground, and often don't need to be harvested at any particular time. Once dug up, they are bulky and difficult to store. They're really not a great thing to tax - states in ancient times were not interested in having warehouses of potatoes. So, Scott argued, communities that subsisted on tubers were not very attractive from a fiscal perspective, and states (and their tax collectors) tended to leave them alone to get on with things. He referred to tubers as 'state evading'.
"So tubers are important as a food source, and also have a surprising political dimension as well."
Professor Rebecca Earle FBA, FRSA, FRHS
Professor of Food History | University of Warwick
"This new research published in Cell reveals an eye-opening new dimension to historical studies of both the potato and the tomato.
"Despite the importance of the tomato to cultures across the globe, surprisingly little is known about its evolutionary history due to limited surviving genetic samples. The close relationship between the two plants, as members of the Solanaceae family, has been known since the 17th century. In fact, English botanists in the 18th century even briefly created a separate genus including only the tomato and potato, calling them Lycopersicon esculentum and Lycopersicon tuberosum respectively, due to the similarity in their berries. The resemblance between the two plants was so strong that since the 19th century horticulturalists have experimented with grafting tomato plants onto potatoes to create what is today called the ‘pomato’, a single plant producing two important crops.
"Little did anyone realise that nature had beaten them to it with this genetic experiment some 9 million years ago."
Dr Serin Quinn
University of Warwick | Department of History