Spud History

I’ve been reading the comprehensive work of Luther Burbank, the early twentieth-century plant breeder, it’s a vivid reminder of how, as the subtitle of Plant Breeding puts it, How Plants are Trained to Work for Man. The potato, which used have seeds on the outside of it, is a classic example. Burbank writes, “Years of cultivation have removed from the potato the necessity of bearing seeds for the preservation of its race.” In other words, once humans took over the task of preservation, the tater became for us a ball of clay. “The potato plant,” Burbank goes on, “so certain now to reproduce itself through subdivision of its tuber, so reliant on man for its propagation, has little use for the seed upon which its ancestors mostly depended for perpetuation before man relieved it of its burden.” This simple observation should give us pause when we claim that we want our food today to be “all natural.”