Bibliographic record
Abstract
Today the potato (Solanum tuberosum esculentum) is a quintessential global food, enjoyed from Canada to Kazakhstan. Algeria and Bangladesh are among the world’s largest producers. Rwanda has the seventh-highest per capita consumption. The potato did not always enjoy this global presence, however. Before the 1530s the only people to consume potatoes lived in the Americas, where it was first eaten and domesticated. Although it served as a basic foodstuff to many people living along the slopes of the American Cordillera, it was unknown to the rest of the world. The European invasion of South America in the early sixteenth century brought the potato to the attention of Europeans, and, subsequently, the rest of the world. Globally it has proved popular with peasant farmers, who appreciate its productivity and adaptability. Its status in its American homeland was and to some extent remains influenced by its close association with the indigenous people who first consumed it. During the colonial era, it was often dismissed by elites as a banal “food of the Indians,” even as they celebrated its nutritive powers. This history reveals the close connections between eating, colonialism, nationalism, and the forces of cultural pride and racial prejudice. It demonstrates the powerful agency of indigenous farmers, and also the influence of international intellectual trends and exchange. This entry reviews the potato’s Latin American early modern history, while also touching on the broader story of how it became the world’s fourth most important food crop. Today the potato is considered a key resource in efforts to ensure global food security, and it is also a source of cultural capital for Andean countries such as Peru, which have sought to “nationalize” the potato as a distinctive heritage food.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".