Potato

Ah, the lowly spud! Most of us are pretty familiar with potatoes and have eaten them baked or as mash, chips, or crisps. Tasty and nutritious (they're surprisingly high in vitamin C), they form a part of the staple diet of people around the world. But did you know that in medieval times no one outside of South America had ever heard of a potato? No chips for you, Robin Hood! I suppose he ate his egg and beans on toast instead.

They were first grown high in the Andes mountains, along the west coast of South America. The ancient Incas cultivated hundreds of types in their gardens, which gave rise to all the potatoes, sweet potatoes, and yams we know today. Spanish Conquistadors returning from the New World first carried them back to Europe, and our word for them in English comes from their name in Spanish, patata. In the eighteenth century a nutritionist named Antoine-Augustin Parmentier helped set up potato farms in France and began to promote them as a cheap, healthy food. A hundred years later parts of Europe were so dependent on them that when a parasitic mold began destroying potato crops in the 1840s, millions of people in Ireland and Scotland starved to death (or were forced to emigrate) during what are known as the Potato Famines.

On a lighter note, the Belgians claim to have invented chips! They started deep-frying potatoes almost as soon as the tubers reached Europe, and the first chips in the UK were probably frites sold by Belgian immigrants in the nineteenth century.