The Mighty Spud - Sandy Knapp, Glenn Bryan and Susan Calman

Introduction

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

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BBC Sounds

2:11BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. And I'm Robin Ince, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage. Now, Douglas Adams has been a great influence on many of us. And in fact, for instance, you'll rarely find Brian without a towel. He always has a towel, sometimes little more. As subscribers of his OnlyFans site will know.

2:35Quantums, quarks, quips, and sometimes nips. You didn't go for the obvious pun then. No, originally I was going to say OnlyFans site, where he answers the most difficult questions about physics, and it's known as hard... But anyway, so the art of flying is one of my favorite Douglas Adams philosophy. The art of flying is throwing yourself to the ground and missing. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way as bricks don't. And most importantly, it is a mistake to believe you can solve any problem just with potatoes.

3:11But tonight we're asking, is that really a mistake? Finally, at episode 204, we deal with the potato. I mean, more specific, the science of the potato. Well, they'll know it's going to be there. We don't know. It's going to be the science. We've been doing that for ages, haven't we? But it might get philosophical as well. You burnt yourself on a chip once, do you remember? We could talk about that. That's not philosophical. It's about your ability to understand the heat death of the universe, but not the speed of the cooling of a chip.

3:44It's actually related, because we have to ask yourself the question, what is temperature? It's a thing you can measure on a thermometer, but that doesn't tell you at a deep level what it is. You have to know that everything's made of atoms to really know what temperature is. It's a measure of the speed that things are jiggling around. The usefulness of...

Potato Science

3:58I'll stop. Yeah. When did we start eating potatoes? How and where did they evolve? Is it possible, and of course the answer will be yes, to fill an entire episode of the BBC's flagship radio science programme and podcast with a discussion of the science of the potato? So, to help us find out, we are joined by a Bannock Russet botanist, a Marist Piper molecular geneticist, and a Jersey Royal Jester, and they are... I'm Sandy Knapp. I'm a botanist from the Natural History Museum, and my favourite vegetable, besides a potato, of course, could be a tomato, but that's a fruit.

4:31It's the Jerusalem artichoke. That is the greatest artichoke response that has ever occurred. I'm Glenn Bryan, and I'm a molecular geneticist, and for 30 years I studied potato genetics at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland. A root vegetable that I'm very fond of is almost as good as the potato is the parsnip, because I'm really fond of the roast parsnip. I also love my wife's delicious curried parsnip soup. Not quite up there with artichokes, let's see what happens next.

5:03I'm Susan Kalman, and I have absolutely no scientific qualifications to be here at all, but I do love the potato in all of its glorious forms. My other favourite root vegetable is not as classy as the artichoke. It is the humble carrot, which I believe is versatile and beautiful, but I will never accept it in a cake. And this is our panel.

5:38I'd like to ask for a definition, actually, just because you mentioned you can't use tomato because it's a fruit. So what's the definition of a vegetable? A vegetable is something that's not a fruit. That doesn't... I'm not allowed. Fruits have seeds and vegetables don't. So an aubergine has seeds, or it used to before we did things to them to make them not have seeds. And tomatoes have seeds, but potatoes don't. So the aubergine is also a fruit? Yes. As is a cucumber and courgettes, but not carrots or parsnips or Jerusalem artichokes.

6:12But real artichokes... I'm still enjoying that. But real artichokes are a flower bud. I don't even know what she's seeing anymore. So what's the definition of a potato, then, just so we can... A potato is... Glenn's probably better at this than I am. Well, a potato is a growth from an underground root of a plant that's used to store starch. So potato plants use potatoes to store starch so that they can last through the long, cold winters in the Andes. So they're really... Potatoes are definitely not there for us, but we've really done quite a lot with them.

6:45And technically, the tuber forms on an underground stem. The main stem of the potato plant grows up, and the stolons come off of the stem below the ground, and the tubers form at the end of those stolons. So the stolon is really an underground stem, not strictly a root. So that's why when you plant potatoes in plastic bags, which is actually the tried-and-true way to plant potatoes in a small London garden, is you put potatoes in the bottom, and you put a bit of soil on, and you wait till they come up, and then you put more soil on, because that makes them make all those things, the underground stem to the side.

7:16I chit my potatoes in... I take my chitting very seriously. And I'm saying the word chit, by the way, before anyone writes in. Very, very good, Susan. I chit my potatoes in old egg boxes until they are ready to put in. Ready to go. And chitting is... Well, chitting is the process, but listen to me. So you chit them so they're ready to plant, because when you buy the potatoes, if you're going to grow your own potatoes, you don't just put the potatoes on the ground, you have to let them, you know, chit. And so if you put them in egg cups, it's perfect, and then all the things...

7:47I mean, I'm surmising what he's about to say more. Until the bits come out, and then when the bits come out, they're ready to go in, and you put the earth on it. Yeah, that's good. And then, eventually, when you take it all out, there's more potatoes. Just one more clarification, because, Glenn, you said something, that you said it's not technically a root. No. So the question is, what is the difference between a stem and a root? How is the potato not technically on... Because it looks like it's on a root, doesn't it? But isn't it your saying it's not a root? It's different from, say, a sweet potato.

8:19A sweet potato is also a tuber, but it forms on a root. It's part of the root. You know, the root swells and forms a sweet potato. But with a potato, they have roots, which are like normal roots, and they have these underground stolons, which come off of the main stem, and they're like a rhizome. And then, at the end of those stolons, the tubers, you know, they swell, and then the tubers form. So they're separate from the roots. So a stolon is an underground stem? It's an underground stem, and it usually runs kind of parallel to the substrate,

8:50you know, so it grows kind of outwards, just under the ground. And they will come out of the ground sometimes. If you put them in pots, for example, the stolons will wander, so they'll come out of the pot, and then they will start to grow a new plant. So instead of growing a tuber, they'll grow a new plant once they get into the light, and they will wander into the next pot. So you have to be very careful when you're growing potatoes for research that you don't get these wandering stolons, because you might end up with tubers in the next pot that come from the pot next door. But what's great is you can have wandering stolons in the garden.

9:20Susan, do you have wandering stolons? But you can also cut through. Yes, I think I probably do. You can cut through the stems and the roots, and they look different. So it's pretty easy. What I love is, I thought, I wonder if we'll be able to fill 43 minutes with this. I'm wondering if we'll even get to the potato out of the ground. I mean, did you put that down in the sand? Well, out of the egg box. And also, the roots have very specific functions. You know, they absorb all the nutrients and the water out of the soil, whereas the stolons don't really do that, although they do have small roots of their own, so the stolons will form little, small roots.

9:51This is complicated. Yeah. It's quite complicated. You thought physics was hard. Well, no, you didn't, but I did. The first question we had written down here, we should get to the first question. No, let's not worry about things like that. I want to know from you, because you said 30 years, you know, you've been studying genetics and potato, and when you first started that, did you think you would be doing it for three decades? I mean, what was your... When you first approached the subject? Well, I'd worked on wheat for a while at a place called the John Innes Centre in Norwich, and I'd heard that there was going to be a permanent position coming up in Scotland

10:23to do genetics on crops. And then when I saw that it was a potato job, I was kind of crestfallen. A potato job? Potato genetics is notoriously complicated, because cultivated potato, the potatoes we buy, are tetraploid, tetraploid, so they have four sets of chromosomes instead of two, like we do. Now, we have two of each chromosome, and potatoes have four, and that makes doing genetics very complicated. Breeding is much more complicated for potatoes, so it takes longer to breed a new potato variety

10:55than it does to breed, say, a variety of wheat or rice. So is that uncommon, to have the four sets of chromosomes? It's not that uncommon, no. I mean, you tend to get bigger, more vigorous plants when they're polyploid, but it does make the genetics much more complicated. So, no, I didn't think I'd be doing it for 30 years, because I thought, you know, I'm going to do this for a few years and see how it goes. But then it just got... It's kind of a vocation, working on potatoes. Well, they draw you in, the potatoes. It draws you in, yeah, and it's very interesting, and the history of potatoes is very interesting,

11:26and it's a real challenge to do potato genetics. And also, the advances in the last sort of 15 years in genomics, you know, sequencing and all that sort of thing has actually made the genetics much easier than it used to be, you know, so it's possible to do things now that you could not think about doing 20 years ago. Before I ask what those things are, Sandy, you wanted to come in on that? I think we think of potatoes as being quite variable, right? There's red ones and white ones and little pink fur apples and stuff. But those are all the same species.

11:57Those are all the species that's called selenum tuberosum. They're the common cultivated potato. But there are 104 wild species of potatoes which grow in the Andes. So the diversity of potatoes is enormous, and it's exciting. And that's the kind of potato work that I do, is collecting things in the field and looking at wild species. And they do their tubers in lots of different ways. Some of them are like little pearls on a string. There are all kinds of variations. So when we think of the potatoes that most of us would be eating,

12:28you know, what percentage of that, you know, if we go to the supermarket and there's normally, what, I don't know, six, seven, eight different kind of forms of potato to buy sometimes, how much of that is a percentage in terms of representative of... It's one species. Just one species? One of 104. In the Andes, there's three other potatoes which are cultivated. They're cultivated way high up in very high elevations, and they're used to make freeze-dried potatoes, which are called chunyo, which what you do to make chunyo is you put straw on the ground. You can do this at home.

13:00You put straw on the ground. You leave the potatoes out overnight. They freeze. And then the next morning, you tread on them and make all the water come out. And you do that several nights in a row, and you end up with chunyo, which looks like this. And is it right you said they're disgusting? They're not... Well, they're not... They're an acquired taste, Robin. Right. It looks like a pebble to me. The chunyo looks like little brown pebbles, and that you use in stews and stuff. And then this white one, this is a white one, which looks like a bit of chalk. It's called tunta,

13:30and it's made in Bolivia, and they basically just wipe the skin off. But it's very light. It's like a piece of styrofoam. Can I try that? Do you want to try one? Yeah. Okay, here, you can have this one, Robin. Here we go. I'd love to try some. What's going to happen when... Well, we'll find out. You're going to get polyploidal before you know it. I mean, there's been a lot of discussion about chromosomes and genetic stuff, so I'm just slightly concerned as to... It's very, very difficult and incredibly hard, Susan. It's very hard. Yeah, it's very hard. It's potato.

14:00It's not that dissimilar to Edinburgh Rock, as if Edinburgh Rock wasn't made of anything. Don't you start robbing it. So the thing is that you're supposed to cook it. Oh, right. Oh.

14:12Well, we look like a couple of fools now. But it's fascinating. Yeah, you're right. As you said, the kind of polystyrene quality, the kind of, you know, again, literally everything that we think of in terms of the moisture of, you know, when you have a lovely baked potato or mashed potato, this is like removing everything. Because that's the other thing. Now that we've got this weird thing, can you explain something to me, which is why, when we used to have mashed potato at school, was it hairy?

14:40That's about the cooking of the potato, because I want... Because there's the starchiness of the potato, which is part of the joy, yet part of the danger. My wife is very much in charge of the soup in the house. I don't know if you've got a similar thing. She does the soup. I don't do the soup because I can't do the soup. Soup, whilst a simple thing, can be easily ruined. So, but for some reason, I don't know what had happened to me. I thought, I'll do the soup. You know, you just, when you get to a certain age, you just lose your mind a bit. So I thought I'd make potato and leek soup, which I don't know where that came from, because I don't like it.

15:12But you like potatoes? You like potatoes, so... I like potatoes, that's the thing, because I love potatoes. I thought, well, I'll make potato and leek soup, because the point of potatoes, the reason I love potatoes, is they're omnipresent, and they fill you up, and they're cheap, and they're affordable, and they're brilliant. And as far back as I can remember, potatoes were with every single meal. And when I was at university, I lived on an entirely potato-based diet. So I made this potato and leek soup. I mean, you could have papered the house with this. It was the most disgusting.

15:44And I remember my better half sitting there, you know that way you have to go, mmm, this is lovely. You've got to make it with the right kind of potatoes. So they kind of come in two sorts. I thought you said they were all the same potatoes. They are all the same. They are all the same. They're all the same species. But what people do to their crops is we modify them. This was the kind of whole point of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. He started out with how people modify domesticated animals. And what we do is we change them to suit our purposes.

16:15And so in the Andes, I mean, we have maybe six or eight. Well, actually, my supermarket only has four kinds of potatoes. But in the Andes, I once met a man who had a rug about the size that this is in front of us, so maybe kind of three meters by three meters. And he and his wife had more than a thousand different kinds of potatoes on this rug. And I asked him what they were called, and he started reeling off names, you know, this one and this one and this one. And they all had a different name, and they all have different uses.

16:46So there's potatoes to make soup with. There's potatoes to make chunho and tunta out of. There's potatoes to roast. There's potatoes to... And it kind of depends on whether they're starchy. You know, like the lovely... It was a very starchy potato. It's sort of the ones that kind of explode when you roast them and you put a knife in them and they go poof. Or there's the waxy ones, which turn into kind of wallpaper paste if you try to make soup with soup. That might have been what happened. You get very high dry matter potatoes, which, you know, have a lot of starch. And they're used for more for, like, baking and roasting. And then you get your salad potatoes.

17:17And they tend to have a particular type of starch called a myelopectin. You know, so the salad potatoes have more water in them and less starch overall. But the starch tends to be a starch called a myelopectin, whereas the other ones have a myelopectin and amylose. So what is the history? So you mentioned the Andes. So these are native to South America. They're native to South America. And there's the great myth that Walter Raleigh brought the potato to England, which is, of course, totally false. It was the Spanish. But what was amazing is potatoes, when they first came to Europe,

17:48didn't tuberise properly. Because in the Andes, where it's near the equator, the days and the nights are the same length all year long. Whereas here in the Northern Hemisphere, we have very long days in the summer and very short days in the winter. And potatoes don't tuberise well in long days. So the very first drawings of potatoes from Europe had these little teeny-weeny tubers. They looked pathetic, little pea-shaped things. And very soon after coming to Europe, a mutation occurred that allowed them to tuberise

18:19in our long-day growing environment. As you described it, so you said that there were hundreds of different potatoes in this village that you found and this couple selling them. So does that imply that they were, there's quite a sophisticated cuisine around them? Very sophisticated. An incredibly sophisticated knowledge of the different varieties of potatoes and what you use them for and how to propagate them and what climates to grow them in. Potato agriculture is very, very sophisticated in the Andes. And one of the sad things is that a lot of times,

18:51which is true with indigenous crops, is that as mechanized agriculture comes and improved crop varieties come, the indigenous varieties, which are perhaps not as disease-resistant or don't have as high a yield, they disappear. And it's like a species disappearing. It's like a language disappearing. It's part of the culture disappearing. And they're incredible names as well, very descriptive names of potatoes in the Andes. My favorite one is called kakchun wataki,

19:22and it means potato that makes the young bride weep. And it basically, this potato looks like a grenade, you know a grenade, but with really big bubbles on it. And so your test before you got married was you were supposed to peel the potato without wasting anything. So I would have never ended up married in the Andes because I would have just cut all those bubbles off. This is genuinely mind-blowing because potatoes have been such a part of my life

19:52for such a long period of time. And I had no idea any of the things that you were saying to me, either of you, regarding the species, how many of them there were. It's, in a way, I think we take them for granted because they are so important and they're always there. I actually become quite upset if there aren't potatoes in the house because, you know, when you've got a potato in the house, you know you can always have something to eat. If there's a potato in the house, you can always eat something with it

20:24because they're just so important to us. But when you talk about it, it's really quite poignant talking about losing a species of the potato is like losing a language. But sitting and going to a supermarket in Glasgow, I don't even know anything about this. It's been, this is, when you said come and talk about potatoes, I thought, well, all right then. But this is completely unexpected. They are wonderful. They are wonderful. People in the supermarket in Glasgow who go, I can't get the potatoes. There's some bloody woman who won't get out of the way. And she's just talking and talking about them.

20:56Sorry, before I buy those potatoes, yes. And it's wonderful. And you do see variety. So next time you go to the supermarket, have a look at all those different ones. Sorry, I don't mean to, pardon me. So when I go to the supermarket and I'm in front of the potato section... Speak to them.

21:15Tell me what I should be, because I want to appreciate the potatoes now. This is changing me as a person. And I want to go to my local supermarket and I want to appreciate them. How do I appreciate a potato more than I'm currently appreciating potatoes? Well, think about the difference in the colour of the skin and the colour of the flesh and the deepness of the eyes. And there's a wonderful thing in London. Sounds quite romantic. It is quite romantic. It is romantic. But there's a wonderful thing. On the third Sunday in January, there's a South London potato fair.

21:46And potato fanciers from all over the south of England come and exchange potato varieties. And you can get some really interesting potatoes. Ones that cook blue or purple, ones that cook bright red. They're fantastic. I'm just wondering about becoming a potato fan so that my time of life... I think it's probably right. Many of those interesting coloured ones come from Scotland. You know, there's things like Shetland blue and Congo... I've used a blue potato before. Quite a few varieties that were bred in Scotland that had these nice colours. So can we, as you can with an animal, for example,

22:20can we trace the genetics back? Can we see from what the species, the initial species was from which all this diversity emerged? Yeah, we published some work some years ago using molecular data showing that the main sort of domestication event happened about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago somewhere near Lake Titicaca, you know, southern Peru, northern Bolivia. But, you know, that's been challenged quite a few times by other people. And there was originally a group of species, about 30 species, the Brevicali group, which I think has been collapsed down now

22:50to just a couple. So the idea was it was domesticated from that group of wild species. They're related to the nightshade. So the indigenous species here related to them? They are related. They're like distant cousins. So we don't have any native potatoes, although there are lots of kinds of potatoes in Scotland. But we have no native potatoes in Europe. The only native potatoes are found from the southern United States down through Mexico into the Andes, into Brazil. So they're only in the Americas.

23:22So what is this relationship to things like the nightshade family, which you find here? When did that split away? Are we talking about hundreds of thousands of years ago? Millions of years. So 20 million maybe? But now we're revising all those dates because we've just submitted. So everybody cross your fingers that this paper will get accepted. We're just describing a whole bunch of new seed fossils of Solanum, of Solanaceae, of nightshades, which are from various parts of Europe and also from the United States. Seed fossils. That's fascinating. I've never thought of seed fossils really before.

23:53Well, you get... I mean, they're quite hard seeds, really, and they fossilise quite well. So we're revising the dates of when all of this happened. Watch that space. So we could have a kind of Jurassic Park that's more potato-based eventually, kind of, that is... We could, but we could. We could, but the interesting thing is that the nightshades, the genus to which the potato belongs, the plants don't all look like potatoes. They're extraordinarily different. There are huge spiny trees and tiny plants about this big that grow way high up in the Andes.

24:25So they're hugely diverse. Potatoes are just one part of the family tree. I always get the terminology wrong. Is it the genus? What is the...? Solanum. Or solanum. It comes from... Well, nobody knows where it comes from, but we can make it up. I've made it up many times. That's fantastic. The way that you very confidently went, it comes from... No, no-one knows. That's... Solanum. But then why do we end up, though, as we keep saying about the fact that we've only got one species? Why has it remained...? Because it's the cultivated one. I mean, at one point,

24:56there were more cultivated species, but they've been reduced in number, you know, to four now. So would we have seen, if we went back even a few hundred years, would we have seen that some of the potatoes that were coming over here, some of the potatoes that were being eaten, some of the potatoes that are there... Or we basically were still talking about that one species? No, that one species is the one that was brought to Europe. Just wait. Can I just ask a question? Again, I'm in the supermarket. You're saying... Talking to the potatoes. ...that there is one species of potato. Yep. But they're all called different things

25:28because you've got your Maris Pipers and you've got all the other ones. They're different varieties. Right. So breeders... Or cultivars. Or cultivars. So they've been bred by breeders and then they get a name. People made them. And then they become a variety. But they're the same species? Yeah. So genetically, they're all the same? Yeah. Kind of. I mean, we're genetically not all the same, right? And we're all the same species. So it's like dogs, really? Yeah. Yeah, basically. I think potatoes and humans in some ways are quite similar because...

25:59LAUGHTER This is when there's going to be a twist now. Twist in the show. No, because, you know, most crops, like seed crops, most seed crops are inbreeders. You know, like wheat, rice, barley, you know, these crops, they're what we call homozygous genetically. So if you grow a wheat plant and click the seeds and grow them up, they'll all be the same as the plant that you got them from. If you take a potato plant, in fact, that's how early potato breeding worked because they didn't have the ability to cross one variety with another the way that normal breeding works. They just collected seeds from a potato plant

26:30and because it's highly heterozygous and tetraploid, all the seeds are completely different from the original plant that you got them from. So, and then what they would do is they'd grow them up and see what the tubers look like and say, oh, this one looks nice. We'll call this Victoria. There was one called Patterson's Victoria in Scotland. And, you know, he liked the look of this particular tuber. And then that became a variety. But then from that point on, if you want to keep that variety, you have to grow it as tubers. If you can't propagate it by a seed, you have to propagate it vegetatively,

27:02which makes what Sandy said about all these hundreds of varieties in South America so amazing because they have been propagated as tubers for hundreds or even thousands of years. And as soon as you lose one, it's gone, you know, because it's genetically unique. Oh, so genetically, there's so much diversity there. That really didn't help.

27:23If you grow them by pollination, then what you get is not predictable, right? You're shuffling the deck every time. And it's a big deck in this case. It's a big deck, yeah, a very big deck. So potatoes are like humans. No, no, I didn't. No, I'm still trying to, I'm still trying to, I'm not being facetious at all. I'm still trying to understand this. I'm so sorry. You, you asked me to come on. No, I love this. I thought, my whole life's been a lie. I can't forget.

27:55I genuinely feel like crying. Let it all go. I thought when I went into the supermarket and I was choosing different potatoes, I was being fancy.

28:07Do you know what I mean? When you go, oh, I've got these fancy potatoes, but they're all just potatoes. Potatoes? I know, but they are fancy, Susan, because they are, they are fancy because they're, they're, they're different. I feel everyone says it's a breakdown and you're just being nice. So what you're saying is they're clones, basically. Yes, so the, the different varieties of potatoes are all clones. That's why if you ever want to see potato fruits, which, who's seen a potato fruit? Anybody seen a potato fruit? Nope. You have to grow

28:38two different varieties and then they'll cross-pollinate and make a fruit. They look like sort of ugly brownish green tomatoes.

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31:51I needed a break from unpacking. But just as I was able to take a breath and open my Hershey's cookies and cream bar, my new roommate Rachel walked in. I offered her a piece, but she said no. Then after a beat, she said, actually, those are my favorite ones. We left. The ice was broken and we've been friends ever since. Hershey's. It's your happy place. The big question

Potato Varieties

32:16I want to ask you, Glenn, is why do potatoes explode less than they used to? Because I think, in the old, you know, that bit of getting the fork and making sure it won't explode, and the two things I think now, with the contemporary potato, as I see it, you don't find as many... He's angry from Melvin Bragg's job. It is. Welcome to the contemporary potato. I've got my Miss Potato Head to turn it. No, because when I was growing up, very often when you had a potato, there would be that nasty little, you know, kind of, the little black kind of eye that would be in it. And the other one was

32:47that I think it is harder to make a potato explode, and I've been doing a lot of tests. Maybe you just got better at preparing for microwaving them by sticking a knife in them. Oh, so there is a decline, then, in the explosive nature of the potato when placed in the oven. It's not that I've heard of. I'm a bit worried that you said these nasty little eyes. Do you mean the eyes on the outside, on the skin? No, no, I mean, on the inside, you used to cut them open, didn't my mum just buy really cheap? Oh, hollow heart. That's called hollow heart. That's a growth defect. If you grow potatoes and they find, you know, when you're about to sell them to market

33:18and they find a lot of hollow heart in the tubers, you can often get a whole field's worth of tubers rejected because of that. So it's a growth defect. That used to be a lot more common, I think, growing up. There's been a lot of work in trying to eliminate hollow heart over the years by selective breeding.

33:36I'm hearing words like hollow hearts. I'm hearing about all of these things and I grow my own potatoes and I'm very protective of them and now I'm concerned because the thing when you grow your own potatoes is you don't know what's happening because you can't check on them all the time, can you? You can't say,