135 



I. H. BURKILL. 



IT NEEDS WANT TO MAKE PEOPLE CHANGE 



THEIR FOOD-HABITS. 



It needs want to make people change their food-habits; so 

 intensel}' conservative are we in such matters, with some reason, 

 hut also with all the prejudice that we can let play. The follow- 

 ing paragraphs from the Gardeners' Chronicle of February 3rd, 

 1917, p. 53, on the passing away of a now forgotten prejudice 

 against the potato, are quoted in illustration, and as being appro- 

 priate to the present time when the Malay Peninsula is faced with 

 .a shortage of rice which must compel a large part of the population 

 to eat something unusual; and that they will resist doing. This is 

 "vvhat is written in the Gardeners' Chronicle. 



'' Raleigh we are told at school, introduced the Potato from 

 Carolina : but Ealeigh never was in C'arolina, nor does the Potato 

 -grow wild there, being a native of Peru where it was found by 

 Pietro Cieza de Leon al)out 1532. This Spanish traveller follow- 

 ed Pizarro. whose conquest of Peru thus directly led to the in- 

 troduction of the Potato into Europe, f Its welcome in Spain was 

 not warm; for long it was but a curiosity; and it is said, with what 

 truth we dare not say, that the Church frowned upon it seeing in 

 it a competitor with the titheable wheat. In Italy its reception 

 was hardly less cold; and as a food plant its spread on the Con- 

 tinent was everywhere slow. 



Its introduction into Ireland is said \)}' many writers to be 

 •due to Hawkins,* and if this be established, it seems probable that 

 it was seized on one of his Spanish prizes. It soon became widely 

 grown there, and thence spread to Lancashire, the first part of 

 England to undertake its culture upon a large scale. 



t The potato of Falstaff, it should be said, refers to a different plant alto- 

 gether, a member of the Convolvulus family, whose edible tubers were grown 

 and used when candied as a sweetmeat. 



* John Hawkins. Elizabethan navigator, 1253 — 1595, born in the year of 

 the discovery of the potato by Cieza de Leon- 



