Thank netgally, the author for an Advanced Copy of this book. I really enjoyed this book. It's well worth reading

My favorite kind of history book—and it doesn't hurt that I'm a sucker for food history. Delves into poetry, art, politics, labor, and philosophy, all connected by the potato. I learned several fascinating and provoking things. I'll be looking for more books in this series (Object Lessons).

The Objects series is always informative and interesting, and it caused me to care about a potato. The writing style is both academic and personal with Earle's own anecdotal stories surrounding potatoes adding something to the book. The way that a potato has changed status and has shifted from being undesired in food to being the most wanted part and back again is explored well with the historical and social information really adding to the narrative that Earle builds.

This book was received as an ARC from Bloomsbury Academic in exchange for an honest review. Opinions and thoughts expressed in this review are completely my own.

What really attracted me to this book was the simplicity of the cover just being the humble potato. The brilliant mind of Rebecca Earle described the potato like it was the meaning of life and she expressed how just a simple vegetable has many meanings to many people and is not just for eating. I also was really curious when I found out that this was a series and can't wait to see what concepts Earle describes throughout the series on my favorite vegetable. Brilliantly written and beautifully executed.

We will definitely consider adding this title to our Non-Fiction collection at our library. That is why we give this book 5 stars.

3.5 Stars. Potato is about exactly what you think it is, the potato. The history surrounding the potato is interesting in some ways, but a little vague.

Overall, I enjoyed this read and learning a bit more about the potato. I could not help but compare Potato to the one other nonfiction book I have read about potatoes, The Botany of Desire.

There were two small recipes in the back, without photos, and this left me disappointed. I was hoping that the information provided would frame more recipes and photos of recipes. I picked this up thinking it was more of a cookbook than a nonfiction work about potatoes and class.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free copy of this ebook in exchange for an unbiased review.

This book is a must read for all potato lovers out there. --> 5/5 stars

The book gives you a quick history lesson starting at where the potato came from up to what they mean to us, civilization, now. And of course, its significance and role at many points throughout that history.

It was an entertaining and very informative book to read. I am not much for history books but this one was interesting enough and I love the main subject, so it was an easy and fast read.

I will be recommending this book to all my fellow potato lovers.

I received an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Compared with most volumes in Bloomsbury’s generally excellent ‘Object Lessons’ series Rebecca Earle’s ‘Potato’ appears thin in both text and argument.

In the Acknowledgements Earle expresses the view that “Potatoes provide a way for us to speak about ourselves” and this she certainly does, with the ‘Family histories’ section of the book, written with her sister Susan and discussing, inter alia, family recipes for potato noodles and potato rolls, being allotted considerably more space than the discussion of the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1849.

The author shows how the potato has conquered the world since the Spanish conquered the Americas and along the way raises some important questions, such as the balance to be struck between the individual and the state in making decisions about healthy eating. Unfortunately, however, she also manages to contradict herself.

Thus when discussing the Great Famine, the rural Irish dependence upon the potato is represented as “an affront to modern capitalist practice” in the eyes of the British government, or at least those of Charles Trevelyan, the “chief administrator at the Treasury in London”, yet later in the book when Earle discusses the Captain Swing riots of agricultural labourers in England in 1830 the protesters’ slogan ‘We will not live upon potatoes’ is taken to demonstrate the fact that that upheaval “was essentially a protest against the transformation of English agriculture into a fully capitalist system”.

Thus in Chapter 1 the “collapse of the potato economy” in Ireland is wished for by the authorities as a means of propelling “Irish smallholders … into the ranks of the proletariat” but in Chapter 5 the potato is represented as having “been enlisted in the campaign of capitalism” as part of the process whereby England’s rural labourers had been proletarianised. Earle can’t really have it both ways, with the potato both an obstacle to the development of capitalism and a sign of capitalist development.

However good the family potato recipes may be I’m afraid they can’t compensate for this kind of half-baked mess.

It's official, for even one of the review quotes in these pages says this series is "wonderfully" uneven in quality. This, however, is one nearer the middle, for the simple reason it itself is "wonderfully" uneven. From cultural thinking of the potato as a semi-divine entity, and the alternative that it is a bog-standard spud for bog-standard people, to the science that makes it one of the better foodstuffs, to the poverty when monocultures of it die out, to how the potato even helped shape civilisation (or at least did in opposite ways to grains) – these pages convey a heck of a lot about something you wouldn't normally expect to get a whole non-fiction book dedicated to. Which encapsulates the series at its best. But then the writing turns into too hardcore sociology and philosophy, then meanders into family memoir – luckily enough there isn't too much of that, though, and the book has to be called a success. I'm surprised how the whole thing never gets as far as the crisp (potato chip) – that must of course be the sequel...

The humble, the delicious, the magical potato. The potato is so engrained into everyday life of so many cultures, that we hardly give it a passing thought anymore. And yet, it has not only found its way to drive our culinary scene, but has also shaped politics, economies, and culture for several centuries, and has the potential to do so for many more.

Potato provides a primer on each of these aspects in turn, and how the potato has played a role in them all. Most are familiar with the Irish potato famine and its repercussions on the farmers in Ireland and the death and emigration it caused. However, there are so many more levels of potato history to consider. For example, did you know that it was difficult to tax potatoes when they were first introduced to Europe? How about that two separate Nobel Prizes in Literature were awarded to poets who wrote about potatoes? And let’s not forget the photograph of a potato that sold for €1,000,000!

I absolutely love and adore potatoes, and relished the chance to learn its history. I had no idea there was so much to learn about the potato. If I had a complaint, I wish there had been more background and information building up the political importance of potatoes, so that the argument hit a little harder instead of feeling a little thin and disconnected. But the discussion lead to some fascinating thoughts and interpretations of policy, both to encourage independence and the well-being of citizens, and the control of citizens.

*I would like to thank the publisher, author, and NetGalley for providing an ARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest review*

This is the draft of the review that I plan to post on Amazon.co.uk once the book is released.

An engaging exploration of the potato as an object. Fascinating, though at times intellectually challenging - and vocabulary building.

The author considers images and representations of the potato, their nature and the reasons for them. She begins with the black and white photograph of an organic potato that sold for one million euros, and where the artist considers potatoes as our close cousins.

Origins, history and distribution are surveyed. Potatoes grew wild along the mountain chain running along the Western seaboard of the Americas. In the Andes, freeze dried potato predated 'Smash' by hundreds of years; used to sustain Inca soldiers, it is said to have contributed to the rise of the Incan Empire. The eventual global range of the potato is staggering.

The role of the potato in health and nutrition and in nation building is considered. Potatoes might or might not be favoured by those in power. They are efficient users of land and water towards nurturing a healthy population, yet might be perceived to enable idle subsistence and to be difficult to tax. Resulting interventions by influential members of society and by the state are discussed - or the lack of intervention in the case of the Irish potato famine.

In considering the potato as an object, the author postulates that if we try to consider potatoes and their meanings as one and the same, then we can think in new ways not only about potatoes but about the frameworks in which they feature - as opposed to them being mere illustrations of those frameworks. That is that potatoes are part of how we understand famine, survival or the experience of being governed.

The author's own family history is featured too, along with grandparents recipes for potato rolls and potato noodles. The author suggests that making their recipes is a form of conjuring them up or of remembering.

(For more potato recipes, I recommend 'In Praise of the Potato' by Lindsay Bareham. Out of print but available second hand via Amazon).

"Potato" is not the mere micro-history that I assumed it would be. This book ends up going through an unexpected but fascinating journey through many of the diverse collection of identities that the potato has held in both past and present - an unassuming new food source that almost near-silently worked its way through the Colombian Exchange and into the gardens of peasants, a hardy stable food capable of bringing joy alongside nourishment, a potential keystone in national food security, just to name several. This is an unexpectedly packed little work that will hold onto your attention and make you far more intrigued by and appreciative of its humble tuber subject matter than you'd think was ever possible, (and can successfully do this all in the space of a lazy afternoon).

I'm an avid reader of facts and information. This book is facts and information about the potato. How it's cultivation changed the world and the shape of mankind. Yes, most of us end up potato shaped! An entertaining look at potato history, it will keep you reading through the tuber's history. While not an exceptionally long or detailed book, I thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon I spent reading.

From the same publisher as the 33 1/3 series, Object Lessons are a similarly pocket-sized range of short, detailed studies, but instead of music they're about stuff, in the widest sense – everything from golf balls to hashtags. I'd hitherto avoided them, because they looked vaguely kin to the short books on narrow but deep themes that the School of Life were doing, and even a vague similarity to anything those numpties produce is enough that I back slowly away in a defensive stance. But this one overcame my reluctance, because come on, the potato. Queen of vegetables. The original superfood. The reason by its absence that all classical and mediaeval banquets, however lavish they may sound, are less appealing to me qua dinners than a trip to the chippy at the top of our road (which isn't even a particularly good chippy). I was already a big fan before I read my first book on them, a study by the excellent John Reader (which isn't referenced here, though there's due reverence paid to Redcliffe Salaman's The History and Social Influence of the Potato, the sort of towering work I'm saving for a rainy day like some people save Ulysses). And to be honest, if I were only to have one potato book I'd probably still go for Reader's – but thank heavens we do not yet live in the sort of nightmarish world where a man must choose only a single book on spuds, for this still has plenty to recommend it. Earle has less of a general survey of the potato's history than Reader, but considerably more politics, including an appearance by French theory's very own Mr Potato Head*, Foucault. The suggestion is that the potato has played a double-edged role in the history of class struggle; on the one hand the 'anarchist tuber' which enables self-sufficiency, and sneaks under the noses of the church and state authorities who can't tithe and tax it as readily as grain or livestock; this is the vegetable which enabled the small Irish farmer to subsist on his own plot, outside the life of wage slavery, and thus whose blight was welcomed by certain of the colonial administrators as a spur to active economic participation well worth the lives lost in the short term (isn't it funny how left accelerationists never seem to notice they're aping the absolute worst capitalists?). But against that is the idea that the sheer efficiency of spuds at converting space and sunlight to calories was as crucial to the evolution of modern capitalism as grain was to the beginnings of urban culture. A study is quoted suggesting potatoes can be blamed for a quarter of the population growth since the wider world found them, which...I mean, ever since I read The World Without Us, I've been cheered by the notion that if humanity does end, we'll at least take the cabbage with us. But to think that the wonderful spud can be held accountable for our teeming overpopulation...I know the fault is ours, and they are but too helpful servants to foolish masters, and yet still it saddens me.

There's plenty more, though, for saying this book is only a hundred or so pages. The history of potato evangelists, some of whose condescensions seem painfully familiar – consider William Buchan in 1797, blaming the poor for their bad diet, and then think that at least he was promoting spuds, not bloody aspartame, so what's this 'progress' business again? The potato's etymology in various languages is considered, as are the various ways in which cultures have considered its relationship to such kindred veg as the sweet potato and Jerusalem artichoke. Falstaff's rain of potatoes is sadly absent, despite Earle having on her desk a postcard with the wise words "Happiness is regular sex and potatoes", but the poetic potato of Heaney and Neruda is considered. The resemblance of the Venus of Willendorf to a vegetable her makers could not have known is the sort of thing from which myths of Atlantis take sustenance, but Earle contents herself with wondering why no myth has ever seen the world created from a cosmic spud; alas, even to the Inca, the vegetable never had the flashy cult status of maize. And finally, co-written with her sister, a chapter musing on the ways in which potatoes are threaded through the history of one immigrant family, her own – and the ways in which the vegetable found it far easier to adapt to new lands than the people did. A book almost worthy of its subject, and when the subject is as magnificent as the potato, I suspect that's all that heaven allows.

*Not that I'll ever hear that name again without a shudder, not after reading certain speculations Earle quotes from Salaman about the rituals surrounding potato cultivation in the tuber's South American cradle.

(Netgalley ARC)

Good smells exude from crumbled earth.
The rough bark of humus erupts
knots of potatoes (a clean birth)
whose solid feel, whose wet inside
promises taste of ground and root.
To be piled in pits; live skulls, blind-eyed.
~Seamus Heaney, "At a Potato Digging"



The potato is probably the world's most underappreciated food. In South America, it did not get the ceremony of corn, but it did travel the world and quickly after they were discovered. According to the United Nations, the potato is grown in every country of the world (five nations, however, provided no information). Potatoes thrived in South America but failed catastrophically in Ireland due to a blight. South American's crops, however, were not monocultures like the Irish, several varieties were grown together. Just about every culture has potato dishes from the Americas, through Africa, the Middle East, and China. China now is the largest producer of potatoes in the world together with India they account for 1/3 of the worlds potato production. Even Saudi Arabia produces close to half a million tons of potatoes. 

Potatoes have been credited with growing community, self-sufficiency, tax evasion, evil (since they are not in the Bible), and hypertension, Rebecca Earle's Potato shows the potato in its historic role in the west and now around the world. The potato proves to be a staple with little fanfare, except for a few poets and painters, despite its worldwide popularity.



Available Mich 21, 2019

A wonderful series of books each one a gem each one about inanimate objects that are brought to life.From High Heels Blankets and many more you will never look at them in the same way.The latest addition is about Potatoes the humble food we all eat.A photograph of the potato sold for over a million dollars shocking right.We are introduced to the potatoes history how it saved people from famine.The author includes family recipes. Suggestions for cooking with potatoes.Another gem in this lovely group of books.# netgalley #bloomburyacademic #potato