When the English dramatist Sir William Gilbert delivered to one of his Pirates of Penzance characters these very words - ‘An attachment a la Plato for a bashful young potato, or a not-too-French French bean’ - he encapsulated the world’s affection for this ubiquitous food. As the BBC’s cookery website reads: ‘…he single-handedly grabbed this starchy tuber from the ground and hoiked it up in to the lofty heights of poetry and philosophy. And it is here we feel that this magnificent tuber rightfully belongs, such is its history and versatility. From chips to vodka, latkes to gratin, the influence of the potato is felt everywhere. They are such a joy to eat and there are so many different ways to eat them..’ The United Nations has named 2008 as the International Year of the Potato in recognition of its potential to feed the world’s growing population. One of the reasons for the choice of this vegetable was to raise awareness of agriculture in general. Pauline Tresise reports:

IN Peru where the potato is said to have originated, there are recorded 5000 different varieties. From the Spanish conquest the potato has spread throughout the world and is now grown in over 130 countries.

It is ideally suited to growing in places where land is limited and labour is abundant. It is the most important crop after rice wheat and maize. With the advent of the Green Revolution the number of potato varieties declined in the very place where it had originated, the high plains of the Andes. Where once there were dozens of varieties growing, the local farmers had cut back to only a handful of varieties.

One farmer’s son, Zenon Gomel Apaza, returned to the Andes after studying agronomy at University and realized that his professional education didn’t match the reality of the land where originally the potato was farmed - 4000 metres high in the Peruvian Andes. He listened to the local farmers and became aware that much of what was needed to improve crop yields was present in their ancient culture and traditional knowledge. For a decade Gomel and his neighbours demonstrated that by diversifying seeds and tuber, along with reviving their traditional methods of farming rather than using the chemicals and modern technology, the farmers could re-establish the potato as an important food source and produce enough food to feed their families. By encouraging a diversity of plants he says, there is more possibility of these plants surviving adverse environmental conditions.

Gomel is convinced that by embracing these lessons of the past they will produce more potatoes which will help to transform how the communities are governed and the local farmers will relearn respect for the earth and the importance of their local culture.

Potatoes are the most commonly used vegetable in Australia. The potato landed in Australia on board Captain Cook’s fleet in 1770 and cultivation started not long after. They are commercially grown throughout the country from Tasmania to the tropics in northern Queensland. Potato growing in Western Australia has had an interesting history. Over a hundred years ago it was decided that potatoes grew best in the southern regions however with the development of irrigation they were planted in areas closer to Perth. To support the local potato production in the 1940s the Western Australian Government developed the Marketing of Potato Act which led to the formation of the Potato Marketing Board whose role was ‘to ensure a continuous and adequate supply, a reasonable return to all growers and a reasonable cost to consumers’.

Today the board, now known as Western Potato, still controls the Western Australian potato growers. The farmers are told how many potatoes they can grow, what types they can plant and what price they can sell them for. Western Australia is the only state with such rigid laws and regulations. It must be said that all growers are not completely happy with the tightly controlled situation. Previously local consumers had only one variety to consider with the choice being old or new, washed or brushed.

The Royal Blue is considered the cream of the crop and is available all year around; it is the most versatile, has an exceptional taste and can be used in all methods of cooking from boiling to frying. Besides the Royal Blue (and amongst the many varieties grown throughout Australia) these are the other varieties grown in Western Australian, the Friar, Desiree, Kipfler, Shepody, Southern Pearl, Super Red, Nadine, Ruby Lou, Kestrel, and Delaware

Slow Food Convivia in Western Australia are planning to hold an event honouring the potato and to highlight the most important root vegetable in the world.

The dedicated website of the International Year of the Potato has a very comprehensive story about the history and facts of the potato around the world.

Barbequed salmon with potato and onion salad
Preparation: 10 minutes
Cooking: 1 hour 10 minutes
Ingredients
8 white onions, sliced
2 tablespoons water
100ml olive oil
50ml balsamic vinegar
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
350g gourmet potatoes, boiled
4 medallions salmon fillet
1 handful curly endive, per person

Place onions into a pan with water and allow to cook very slowly, for about an hour until the natural sugar from the onions start to caramelise and brown. Combine olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. Shake well. Slice warm potatoes and sprinkle liberally with vinaigrette. Add onions and keep warm.Cook salmon fillets on a hot barbeque grill for 3-4 minutes each side (time may vary depending upon thickness of the fillet). Spoon potato and onion onto centre of a plate, sit some dressed endive on the potato and place salmon fillet on top. Drizzle over vinaigrette and serve immediately

Thanks to Nola Kennett, Slow Food Perth committee public officer, for the above recipe. The BBC cookery website also has a raft of potato recipes.

On Tuesday 15th April 2008 I had a phone call from Justin Wearne Retails Sales and Development Manager of Western Potatoes who advised that information in our article was not correct. Western Potatoes is a grower shareholder company and the Potato Marketing Corporation acts as a regulator which mainly entails them controlling supply and setting pricing of potatoes in Western Australia. For further information see
International Potato Centre

Inspiration from the United States comes in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. Trudy Park reviews this book.

WHEN I returned from the Slow Food Congress in Mexico in November 2007, I was inspired by the many wonderful things that Slow Food members are doing around the world, including the USA. At the same time I was also troubled by the gargantuan task that Slow Food USA has before it to turn around the appalling industrialisation of food production, processing and distribution that applies there.

A large part of my concern is that Australia has followed a similar path, and is still headed in the direction of the industrial model, even when we can observe the disastrous consequences on health and the environment of doing so. Therefore, it is with great pleasure that I am now reading a book I was given for Christmas by Barbara Kingsolver called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

On the surface it could just be the story of her family’s year producing and eating almost exclusively, their own food, on a small hobby farm in South Carolina, but it is in fact a great deal more than that. Barbara is a novelist and biologist, and writes with a light and entertaining style, with interpolations by her husband, an environmental academic, and older daughter, making it very informative as well. There are extensive contact and resource lists at the end, including Slow Food, of course, and Barbara’s family naturally has its own website.

While the practicalities of what Barbara and her family and neighbours are not available to all of us, and of course her land and climate are not to be found anywhere in WA, we can all be inspired to support good, clean and fair producers by buying directly from them at producer markets, and to grow our own to the degree that we can.

Pauline Tresise reviews Michael Pollan’s important book - In defence of food: an eater’s manifesto - and considers is powerful insights into what have become ‘foodlike substances’ in the twenty-first century world.

FOOD. There’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?

Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating. Instead of food, we’re consuming ‘edible foodlike substances’ - no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion.

The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become. But if real food - the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food - stands in need of defence, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other!. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalisation of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals. Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

By urging us once again to eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach — what he calls nutritionism — and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part. In defence of food shows us how, despite the daunting dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern supermarket, we can escape the Western diet and, by doing so, most of the chronic diseases that diet causes. We can relearn which foods are healthy, develop simple ways to moderate our appetites, and return eating to its proper context — out of the car and back to the table. Michael Pollan’s bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.