Events, including the encouragement to eat potatoes, are best understood when they are seen as part of larger sets of ideas, rather than as singularities. The pan-European potato vogue reflected the new political importance that eating acquired during the Enlightenment, as politicians and philosophers began to link individual diets to the strength and wealth of nations. They framed this debate within a language of choice and the individual pursuit of happiness. The connections between everyday life, individualism and the state forged in the late eighteenth century, of which the history of the potato’s emergence as an Enlightenment super-food forms a part, continue to shape today’s debates about how to balance personal dietary freedom with the health of the body politic. The potato’s history also reminds us not to overlook the contributions of small-scale agriculture to the larger history of innovation and change. Recognising peasant contributions to the history of the potato is not simply a matter of historical justice. It is also relevant for our future. Biodiversity is today identified as an essential component of both long-term environmental sustainability and global food security.

From 1900 the potato began to regain its lustre as a political instrument. Developments within nutritional science led dieticians to reverse their earlier condemnations. This reversal coincided with an increase in the capacity of modern states to influence everyday eating habits. The First and Second World Wars were particularly important in developing the technologies and institutions that made this possible. Concerned to provide for the wartime needs of their populations, European governments actively encouraged potato consumption. Nonetheless, the economic development models that emerged in the post-war years paid little attention to potatoes. Only recently has smallholder agriculture been incorporated into international models of food security. Just as the peasant know-how that spread potato cultivation across early modern Europe remained largely invisible, so the smallholder expertise that allowed the potato to preserve its genetic diversity has only begun to be appreciated by international development organisations. Potatoes have also become a source of gastronomic pride; many countries have registered specific varieties as part of their national patrimony. The contemporary history of the potato recapitulates both the eighteenth-century conviction that potatoes could play a role in national security, and also the reality that small farmers, as well as agronomists, possess expertise relevant to building a viable food system.

What we eat is our business, or so we generally believe. We also acknowledge that our individual failures to eat properly have a broader social impact, even if we’re not sure what to do about it. These tensions between individual choice, public well-being, and the wealth and strength of the nation were born in the Enlightenment. While states have always worried about the political implications of famine, only in the eighteenth century did the particularities of what ordinary people ate attract the attention of political theorists: it was in the eighteenth century that everyday eating habits became a matter of state concern. New theories about how to build economically successful states led to new ideas about the relationship between individual diets and national resilience—what we might call food security. Concerned to build healthy populations, eighteenth-century political and economic writers increasingly recommended potatoes as an ideal foodstuff. Potatoes had reached Europe in the sixteenth century, when Spanish colonists introduced this Andean tuber. In the Americas the potato has nourished ordinary people for millennia, and it was ordinary people in Europe and elsewhere who were largely responsible for transforming the potato into the global status that it has today.

The expansion of trade and colonial conquest in the early modern era propelled the potato around the world, but the processes that made it a global staple reflect not only these forces but also the varied circumstances that it encountered on its travels. European colonisers congratulated themselves on bringing the nutritious potato to the supposedly backward inhabitants of Bengal and Botany Bay, and viewed its adoption as an index of the overall level of civilisation attained by locals. For gardeners in Tehran, Māori entrepreneurs in New Zealand, and Bengali villagers, potatoes served other purposes. The transformation of eating habits that followed the global dissemination of American foodstuffs after 1492 reveals the complex interactions between local environments, patterns of agriculture and landholding, commercial structures and existing foodways. The potato’s changing status in China demonstrates this well. For centuries the potato provided an important resource for villagers in peripheral regions, yet was almost invisible to the state. Now it is part of a state strategy to increase food security. This transformation in the potato’s political role coincides with the Chinese state’s embrace of the market economy; vigorous state promotion of potatoes has accordingly emphasised individual choice and personal benefit. In China, as in Europe, capitalism, individualism and personal eating practices are closely intertwined with modern forms of statecraft.

The Enlightenment’s promotion of the potato reflect the close relationship between new ideas about the political importance of everyday eating habits, and new ways of thinking about the economy. Just as Adam Smith recommended that allowing individuals to pursue their own interests would ultimately result in a flourishing economy, so potato-enthusiasts (Smith included) argued that the best way to build a robust population was to empower individuals to make sound dietary choices through campaigns of information and exhortation. Rarely did they suggest that people be obliged to grow or eat potatoes. Such suggestions would have run counter to the entire philosophy that underpinned much enlightened interest in food supply: the new discipline of political economy. This history reveals the eighteenth-century origins of the current, neoliberal, insistence that healthy eating is best understood as a form of individual consumer empowerment that at the same time builds a stronger economy and body politic. Potatoes offer a concrete, everyday example of how this confluence of private interest and public benefit was imagined to occur, at the very moment when these ideas were first theorised.

The potato has nourished ordinary people in the Americas for millennia. Villagers along the Andes grew a great variety of potatoes, which were used in diverse ways to provide year-round nourishment. The Europeans who reached South America’s Pacific coast in the 1530s introduced potatoes to Europe, thereby initiating its global spread. Once in Europe, the potato attracted little attention from representatives of the state. Uninterested as they were in the everyday eating habits of European labourers, few learned writers assessed the novel plant’s potential as a foodstuff for Europeans. Those who did complained that the potato was excessively nourishing and so facilitated laziness. Ordinary people, in contrast, embraced the potato, which possessed a number of advantages over existing foodstuffs. Potatoes can produce a prolific harvest even in poor soil, and make a sustaining meal. Moreover, precisely because states were not interested in the everyday eating habits of poorer folk, it took many decades for the potato to attract the attention of tax-collectors. Potatoes thus allowed peasants and labourers to evade some of the less welcome aspects of state control. It is they who are responsible for the potato’s entry into the European diet.