potato

Andean highlands around Lake Titicaca (Peru/Bolivia); domesticated between roughly 8000 and 5000 BCE by Indigenous Andean peoples, who developed thousands of varieties

Inca cultivation, Spanish colonial extraction, Europe (initially resisted), Irish economic dependency, global staple

The Irish Famine killed over a million people and drove another million out. What failed was a crop propagated from cuttings, so every Lumper was a clone of every other Lumper, and Cormac Ó Gráda puts the Lumper and the Cup between them at most of what Ireland planted. Two clonal varieties feeding a country. Phytophthora infestans had to beat each of them once. Royal Dublin Society testing in the 1830s had already ranked the Lumper last on specific gravity, and it was planted anyway because it yielded on bad ground and poor people were farming bad ground. Andean growers kept thousands of varieties across altitudes and seasons, which is what a potato crop looks like when the people growing it are the people eating it. Colonial agriculture did not inherit a fragile crop. It manufactured one.