The Propitious Esculent
John Reader
 Reader divides his exploration of the potato into three sections: South America, Europe, The World. The first section describes the environments, The Andes Mountains and the altiplano, in which the potato developed. In the past, at least 3,000 years ago, people living in these environments began to take advantage of a naturally occurring plant. Over time human interaction developed a flowering plant with a nutritionally valuable, and good tasting, tuber that then became an important component of the human diet. Reader spends several pages describing the way in which the Spanish set up colonies and an empire in South America to mine mineral resources and exploit available manpower. He lays out the time line of events and shows that it took several decades for the value of the potato to become obvious to any of the Europeans. Interspersed in this discussion, Reader describes current conditions of potato growing through the Andean region. In the second section of the book, Reader traces the potato’s path across the Atlantic Ocean. The many stops on Atlantic islands gave the plant time to adjust to different environments and day lengths. Reader devotes many pages to the process of determining who had the potato first and where they were growing it and for what scale of consumption. This seems like a Western concern rooted in basic competition. However, tracing this particular time line illustrates commodity chains, economic development, culture change (including scientific theory and method), and biological change. In Europe, the potato was not immediately well received. Reader discusses how it was accused of causing leprosy or other ailments and then how cultural groups’ perception of the potato flipped and it became something entirely healthful. The potato also is at the center of demographic and cultural change and this is most clear in the case of Ireland. Reader’s explanation of what happened during the great Potato Famine of 1845 to 1850 discusses the biosocial and biopolitical processes of the period. The Propitious Esculent proposes that the fate of Ireland was not solely the fault of a fungus but the result of a chain of governmental decisions that were set into motion because of the properties of the potato. In the final portion of the book, Reader outlines the worldwide spread of the potato and how people around the globe have set out to study the potato to protect its genetic health. The potato spread successfully in part due to the lessons learned after Irish Potato Famine in which biologists and farmers created methods to prevent fungus induced blight. The second point, protecting genetic health, is especially important since such a large part of the global population is dependent on the potato for a stable diet. Since there has been such a long period of human intervention in the development of the potato, it has genetic properties that have become rare as well as weaknesses in the genetic code that lead to defects in different parts of the plant. Pooling global knowledge and resources, biologists, ecologists, and anthropologists at CIP (International Potato Center) are securing the varieties of the potato.