I bought 2 kg of potatoes last weekend. Four days later, I took
out the bag to peel some for dinner, and found that every single
potato in the bag had shoots on it. I spent a minute or so
muttering about supermarkets and their appalling buying
policies, but then I realised that, in a funny way, I felt quite
happy for those potatoes. It’s cold at the moment (by Brisbane
standards), but we passed the shortest day three weeks ago. In
their plastic bag, deep in the darkness of my pantry, those
potatoes knew that spring is only a week or so away. We ask a
lot of potatoes. There are some basic foodstuffs we expect to be
on hand all year – potatoes and onions, apples and bananas, eggs
and milk – yet even the humble spud is really a seasonal
vegetable. In 1949 the pioneer in World History, William H
McNeill published an article on ‘The Introduction of the Potato
into Ireland’ in the Journal of Modern History, based on his
postgraduate work. Now that every commodity, from cod to coffee
to the colour mauve, seems to ha