by Bonnie Burton

Created on: February 02, 2007   Last Updated: April 18, 2007

The next time you sit down to enjoy this tasty tuber, you might want to read these rather bizarre historical facts that will undoubtedly cause a stir when mentioned during your next dinner party. Viva la Solanium tuberosum!

* Queen Elizabeth's cooks, uneducated in the matters of potatoes (the plants were a gift from Sir Walter Raleigh), tossed out the lumpy-looking tubers and brought to the royal dinner table a dish of boiled stems and leaves, which in turn made everyone deathly ill. (whoops!)

* During the 16th century, Italy and France rejected the potato because they thought the outside texture resembled leprous hands and feet and therefore must carry disease.

* Paranoid ministers in Scotland banned eating the potato because it was never mentioned in the Bible.

* There were even hints from some religious folk that the potato was the real Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Eden.

* Over the centuries, potatoes have been blamed for rickets, leprosy and syphilis!

* In the late 19th century, Rev. Richard Sewall accused the potato of leading to laziness in housewives since there's so little prep time involved in cooking potatoes, which in turn leaves female hands idle and primed to do the Devil's work.

* In the late 1700s, potato starch achieved certain popularity as a wig whitener.

* Infamous criminal John Dillinger once carved a pistol out of a potato, stained it black with iodine (iodine turns black to indicate starch in a vegetable) and used it to escape from jail!

* Potatoes contain more potassium than bananas.

* The average American eats about 115 pounds of potatoes a year.

* Prospectors in Alaska during the Far Northern gold rush of the 1880s taught the natives to produce a distilled potato concoction called hoochinoo later shortened to "hooch," perhaps from such local potato varieties as Gold Coin, Extra Early Triumph and Extra Early Eureka.

* Potato eelworms, tiny pests that attack potato plant roots, can live for 20 years!

* Blister beetles are black shiny beetles about 1/2 inch long that feed on potato plant leaves. Do not crush them with your fingers, their body fluids cause blisters! Ouch!

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