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Technology and Culture 43.3 (2002) 620-622



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Book Review

Notes of a Potato Watcher


Notes of a Potato Watcher. By James Lang. College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press. 2001. Pp. xiv+365. $49.95/$24.95.

This book is not for the reader who is looking for a tightly focused study of the potato. This book is by a man who is deeply informed about said tuber and its role in the human story—he includes a delicious twenty-three page bibliography, a page and a half of websites, plus footnotes galore—but is also passionately and personally engaged, too much so to leave out anything that might be pertinent. Notes of a Potato Watcher includes a brief and excellent study of the sweet potato, plus worthwhile paragraphs on manioc, tomatoes, ulluco, uca, and other crops, most of them Andean in origin. The book is sometimes polemical, possibly too much so for some academics, but well worth their attention as citizens. It is a botanical declaration of faith in what the potato and wisdom might do to feed us all, and a prophesy of how ignorance, laziness, and market forces may render that faith farcical.

The potato, James Lang declares (p. xi), "is more efficient, more nutritious, and more profitable than any other staple crop. It is unparalleled as a [End Page 620] producer of food, jobs, and cash, and is ideally suited to places where land is limited and labor is abundant—conditions that characterized much of the developing world."

Lang can be too ambitious. He begins with the origins of humanity and of agriculture, and makes mistakes (Lucy is not the oldest humanoid fossil, archaeologists have not agreed that humans came to America before the last ice age, and so on). He could have saved himself some grief by starting with what he knows a lot about, which is the potato and the role it played, first in Andean societies, then in Europe's, and then in the rest of the world's, especially the Third World's, population explosion. He takes us through the Irish potato famine (about which he is angry enough to qualify as Irish) and on to the recent extraordinary increase in potato production in general and especially in the Third World—a loud echo of the opening chapter of the Irish experience.

Lang painlessly introduces us to what science is doing to multiply potato production and strengthen the plant's defenses against various pests, molds, bacteria, and viruses. Having paid the scientists their due, he goes on to emphasize the importance of learning from and cooperating with local farmers. They know their fields, the weather, and storage problems, and probably already possess strains of the tuber with valuable characteristics. Their knowledge is essential to increasing yields—not for a season but for decades, not via chemicals and imported fertilizers but via crop rotation, planting now and not then, harvesting in accordance with schedules set by the weather and pests and not by experts in capital cities, and planting clean and healthy tubers (and seeds, as well as tubers!). Lang's favorite organization is, as you might guess, not Monsanto but the International Potato Center (known by its Spanish acronym, CIP), a nongovernmental organization headquartered in the homeland of the potato, not far from Lima.

Lang takes us to potato fields in Bolivia, Ecuador, Tunisia, Egypt, Uganda, India, and China, to fields most of which he has personally visited. We meet the local plant scientists and farmers, and they teach us that it is dangerous to generalize about raising potatoes. Success is a matter of adjusting to local soils and seasons, local customs, local markets, local weevils. Winning at farming is not much like bench science.

Lang is no Luddite. He proposes to take full advantage of science, but not as a narcotic to lull us into believing that potato problems can be so thoroughly solved that we can turn our backs on them and go on to other matters. At the end of the book he tells us about Monsanto's "New...

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