"Little fry, who made thee?" In the beginning was the potato.
How it found its way from the South American highlands into
those little sacks of McDonald's fries is a long, adventurous
tale, involving Conquistadors, Marie Antoinette, and Thomas
Jefferson. Millionaires have been made and millions more have
died from dependence on that simple, innocent potato. Here,
then, is the story of the spud, which reached its crowning
achievement only once it had been paired with oil. The potato
seems to us today to be such a staple food that it is hard to
believe that it has only been accepted as edible by most of the
Western world for the past 200 years. Our story begins thousands
of years ago, in South AmericaPeru, Ecuador, and the Northern
part of Chile, to be exactwhere the Andean Incas first
discovered potatoes growing wild in the highlands, and were
cultivating them as early as 750 BC. As well as being their
staple source of food, the Incas also used potatoes for telling
time, treating illness and injury, and divina