The book's greatest strength is the lengthy and sympathetic description of the Irish Great Famine of the 1840's. I am somewhat familiar with the secondary historical literature of the period and can confidently say that Zuckerman has thorough grounding in the sources and has fairly presented them.
There are some problems: the book could have been better organized, it skips too lightly over the origin of the potato in South America and although it cites sources, a more traditional footnoting style would have been helpful.
Mr.Zuckerman, I am now your fan and look forward to reading your next book.
Despite the potato's vital nutrients, it soon became known as the food of the poor and remained out of favor among the gentry. Even the peasants did not appreciate the strange plant that formed odd tubers which sprouted, which they declared to be of the Devil. But by the end of the seventeenth century, the potato as a staple food for Ireland's poor had become widely known. At the same time in England, the potato had yet to become a table food. Farmers fed them to their livestock. Within a hundred years, the potato had "nosed its way into English life." In France, where the fear of nightshades was even greater than in England, the potato caught on because the wet summers did not affect this hardy plant as they did grain.
Zuckerman traces the tuber's history from its beginnings through the horrific Potato Famine of Ireland to farm staple in a post-Civil War U.S. The potato represented a food whose ease of preparation lightened the burden for the average American farm wife. In chapters titled Potatoes and Population, A Passion for Thrift, Women's Work, The Good Companions, and Good Breeding (showing the evolution of the tuber from exotic and fearsome to low class, to beneath notice), Zuckerman educates and entertains, and at the same time shows us that having read the history of the lowly spud, we can never regard it in the same way. Perhaps the humble potato did rescue the Western world.