The SWEET history of a sweet potato - RBL

The sweet history of the sweet potato

Hello there viewers my name is Rbl and in this blog I'm going to tell you all about sweet potato's. This blog is for my class called food for thought. In it we've been learning about food culture, foods from older   civilizations. We've also been learning more about our families cultural history by making family trees like mine here:

We also learn about food production and how food is developed in different ways and how we can develop them ourselves. For on of our field experiences we even got to go to metropolis coffee, a coffee company that roasts and sells their own coffee, sells and bags it for others to use in their daily lives. 

From that F.E I learned how coffee is made, packed and sold to others who like to drink coffee. Here's a picture of one of their coffee roasters:

So now that you know the specifics about my class it's time to show my sweet potato video so you can see it for yourself, thanks for visiting my blog and I hope you enjoy the video!

Here's my script:

Hello there I am a sweet potato. According to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research on me the Sweet Potato, I was born 5,000 years ago in Polynesia in 1050 A.D. I’m sometimes called a yam but people don’t know that we are different in many ways. Sweet potatoes and yams aren't the same. According to Michaeleen Doucleff,The difference is that yams are bigger and browner than we are. Their insides are purple, white, or orange. While we are more red and our insides are orange. They also started in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, while we started in PolynesiaAlyse Whitney. Farmers saw that I grew more pounds of food per acre than any other cultivated plant. This allowed farmers to grow a lot more sweet potatoes compared to growing other things. According to Dan Charles, My journey across the world started in many different places. We began in Polynesia We also existed in Africa during this same time frame. Specifically in Uganda and Mozambique.Subsistence farmers grew a lot of us sweet potatoes between 1000 A.D and 1100 A.D.

The Polynesians brought us from their islands to South and Central America before Columbus was even a thought. When Columbus got to the Americas, he found the members of my sweet potato family that the Polynesians carried Gerard Paul. Europeans in South and Central America really started to enjoy our taste around 1492 when Christopher Columbus colonized the Americas. He liked us so much that on his fourth trip, he took some of us to Europe to plant. This led me to be well accepted in Spain, so much that Spanish conquerors took me on some of their journeys . From there I was brought to Italy, after that I spread all the way to Austria, Germany, Belgium and England before Irish potatoes came to Europe. It took 200 years for the English to accept Irish potatoes as being fit for human food, but I immediately became a rare and expensive delicacy from the very start. 

In 2021, we sweet potatoes are very popular. In the United States we are primarily grown in North Carolina, California, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In today's era, I’m often bought from grocery stores like Aldi, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Target, and Marianos. I’m used in things like flours, dried chips, juices, bread, noodles, and even candy. I’m also cut out and used to make many other foods. People also use me to create several other delicious foods like sweet potato fries, biscuits, cookies, muffins, pancakes, crepes, cakes, doughnuts, and pies. I’m also used in the Lansana home in Chicago, Illinois where I’m used in their amazing sweet potato pie. They also just eat me as a cooked sweet potato because my taste is sweet and flavorful. RBL’S grandmother Earline Hooper, “loves to have a house full of people sharing good food and fellowship.” Her mother, his great grandmother, was also an incredible cook. They both made really good sweet potato pie and even his Grandma on his Dad's side did the same. Now his brother Nile carries on the sweet potato pie tradition. Thank you for listening to my very sweet history and I hope you learned something from it. 

  My sources: 

• https://www.nature.com/news/dna-shows-how-the-sweet-potato-crossed-the-sea-1.12257#:~:text=First%2C%20between%201000%20and%201100,waves%20from%20the%20sixteenth%20century
• https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/01/22/169980441/how-the-sweet-potato-crossed-the-pacific-before-columbus#:~:text=Sweet%20potatoes%20originated%20in%20Central,western%20coast%20of%20South%20America.
• https://manyeats.com/history-of-the-sweet-potato/
• https://www.bonappetit.com/story/difference-between-sweet-potato-and-yam
• https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/18/british-farmers-crack-the-sweet-potato