Interesting Potato Facts

10 interesting potato facts you never heard about it.

1. In order to popularize potatoes in France, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier placed armed guards around his potato fields, instructing the guards to accept all bribes and allow people to “steal” the crop.


2. Potatoes have almost all nutrients humans need to survive. To prove this, the Executive Director of the Washington State Potato Commission ate nothing but potatoes for 60 days.


3. If a potato is exposed to light while growing, it will turn green and become poisonous.


4. The potato has been studied by NASA as an important food source for long space voyages, and that the number of potato plants (grown on board a spaceship) needed to sustain one astronaut is also the amount of potato plant required to process the air breathed by one astronaut.


5. It is possible to combine a potato plant and a tomato plant into a “tomtato”, a hybrid that yields both potatoes and tomatoes.


6. China leads the world in potato production with 25% of the world’s total.


7. The introduction of the potato was responsible for a quarter of the population growth in Europe from 1750 to 1900.


8. 2008 was the UN approved International Year of the Potato.


9. The Inca people had a goddess of potatoes. Villages would have one particularly odd-shaped potato that would be worshiped in hopes of a bountiful harvest.


10. There is an American Journal of Potato Research.