The potato was domesticated together with sweet potato and other Andean crops, possibly up to 7000 years ago, although the natives of South America had already been eating the wild potatoes for four thousand years or more. The cause of domestication is not perfectly understood, but it was probably some kind of environmental adaptation and not the result of the plain invention.After the conquest of the Americas, it took several centuries (from the early 1500s to the 1800s) for Europeans to fully adopt the potato. The Irish Famine
Pope (1845-1859) had its cause in governmental neglect, as much as in late blight. French fries were invented in Belgium or Holland before 1680, while frozen and prefabricated potatoes for frying were created in the latter part of the 1940s.
The above is the summary of the article written by J. W. Bentley and published (in English) in the latest issue of the Revista Latinoamericana De La Papa. The full text is available on this page. The rest of the articles are available here.
