Potatoes

When potato plants blooms, they send up five-lobed flowers that spangle fields . By some accounts, Marie Antoinette likes the blossoms so much that she adjust them in her hair. Her husband, Louis XVI, adjust one in his buttonhole, inspiring a brief vogue in which the French aristocracy swanned around with potato plants on their clothes. The flowers were part of an attempt t

Today the potato is the fifth much important crop in the world, after wheat, corn, rice and sugar cane. But in the 18th century the tuber was a startling novelty, frigh to some, bewildering to others—part of a ecological convulsion set off by Christopher Columbus.