The extraordinary lives of potatoes: Following Peru's food heritage

The potato is one of those foods that seems to have no story at all. It is boiled, mashed, fried and forgotten. It sits in a sack in the corner of the kitchen and rarely gets a second thought. In the Peruvian Andes, it is something else entirely.

Here, the potato is closer to an archive.

Where the potato still has its full history

The potato was first domesticated thousands of years ago in the high country around Lake Titicaca, on the border of present-day Peru and Bolivia. From there it eventually reached Europe in the 16th century, then the rest of the world. What travelled, though, was only a small fraction of what the Andes had. Peru alone grows around 3,000 varieties, and the wider Andean region more than 4,000. They come in purple, red, yellow, black and speckled skins, in shapes ranging from tiny knobbly balls to long twisted fingers.

That variety is not an accident. Andean farmers have long planted several types together in the same field, on slopes at different altitudes, so that a frost, a drought or a disease would never wipe out the whole harvest. Some varieties are good for boiling, others for drying and some only grow well above a certain height.

In the hills above Pisac, in the Sacred Valley near Cusco, this way of farming has been formalised. The Potato Park is run by five Indigenous communities who together grow more than 1,300 native varieties, many found nowhere else. The communities manage the land, keep seed and share their knowledge, and visitors can join walks, meals and farm visits organised by the residents themselves.

Nearby, the circular terraces of Moray offer a clue to how long people have been thinking about altitude and crops. Each ring sits at a slightly different height and temperature, and many believe the Inca used the site to study how plants behaved in different conditions.

The Andes also solved the problem of storage long before refrigerators. Chuño is made by leaving potatoes out on freezing nights, then thawing them in the sun and trampling them to press out the water. Repeated over several days, the process produces a light, dried potato that can keep for years. A white version, often called tunta, is soaked in running water before drying. It is not the most glamorous food, but it made life possible in a landscape where harvests could fail.

In Peru's kitchens, the potato is anything but plain. Papa a la huancaína covers boiled potatoes in a creamy sauce of yellow chilli and fresh cheese. Causa layers mashed yellow potato, seasoned with lime and chilli, around fillings of chicken, tuna or vegetables. In the highlands, pachamanca cooks potatoes and meat underground with hot stones, and after the harvest some families build a huatia, a small earth oven made from clods of soil.

The potato's importance is now recognised well beyond the mountains. Peru celebrates its National Potato Day on 30 May, which the United Nations has since adopted as the International Day of Potato. In Lima, the International Potato Center keeps a genebank of thousands of potato samples, a safeguard for varieties that could one day matter far beyond the Andes.

The best way to understand it is to visit a highland market. Look at how many kinds are on sale, ask what each one is for and notice how few of them resemble what you buy at home.

A potato can contain quite a lot of history. In Peru, it is still being grown, cooked and passed down in the place where it all began.

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