arracacha

The Andes, where the wild species most like it are known from Peru and above all Ecuador; Arracacia xanthorrhiza, the only umbellifer domesticated in South America, spread through most of its Andean range in pre-Columbian times, and in the account of Peru's national agricultural research institute represented in Moche and Nazca ceramics

Grown along the Andes from Mérida in Venezuela to southern Bolivia; a regular item in the city markets of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela, traded over long distances to the lowlands and high mountains where it cannot grow; in Peru grown mostly for the household and little known in Lima; carried to Brazil early in the twentieth century, by the account Embrapa gathered from growers as a Colombian mission's gift, first planted on a baron's land in the Swiss colony of Friburgo, where it probably covers more ground than in any Andean country, and where more than half the harvest of 2017, most of it from Minas Gerais and Paraná, passed through São Paulo's wholesale market; highly perishable for a root, which limits its trade, and never established as a crop outside the Americas

Arracacha is old in the Andes in a way its names record: racacha in Quechua, lacachu in Aymara, and words of their own in the Muzo and Ayomán languages of Colombia and Venezuela, while outside South America its names were coined by European immigrants from apio, zanahoria, cenoura and salsa, celery, carrot and parsley. In Ecuador it is zanahoria blanca, and in Loja the carrot itself is the foreign one, zanahoria extranjera. Brazil folded it into the name of another Indigenous root, mandioquinha-salsa, little cassava with parsley, or called it batata-baroa, the baron's potato. Hermann and Heller count some thirty million users in the Andes and more than as many again outside them, mostly in Brazil, for a food eaten beside the staples rather than as one. Nor is it grown only for the household: Brazil's crop was worth an estimated 55 million dollars off the farm in 1996, and the root is a regular item in every major city of the south. Yet in Peru, the country richest in its varieties, most people in Lima do not know it, restaurants do not serve it and national cookbooks ignore it, and in highland towns it carries the prejudice against foods associated with Indigenous Andeans. This means that visibility was never the measure of a food's importance: the root Lima does not see is on sale in every city of southern Brazil.