The Voyages of a Potato Companion: Phytophthora Infestans

Abstract

Accompanying a shipment of potatoes in 1845, a fungus-like traveller unintentionally made it to Europe, after having maintained a low profile for centuries in Latin America. Decades later, scientists identified this stowaway as the basic ingredient for an outbreak of potato late blight and gave it a name—Phytophthora infestans. By following the potato on its travels back and forth between its cradle in the Andes and its development into a monocrop food staple in Europe over the last centuries, we trace the transatlantic trajectories of its fungal companion. We explore when and why a fungus such as P. infestans became known, and feared, as an invasive species, after centuries of spontaneous and invisible co-existence with the potato in Latin America. Why could P. infestans suddenly come out of its companion’s shadow to cause a large-scale outbreak of the disease in Europe in the 1840s? How did it become a driving power for the development of plant sciences and related technological innovations in potato agriculture up until today? Since the late eighteenth-century, specific agricultural, scientific, and political practices have enacted a logic of ‘potato modernity’, subjecting the potato to an artificial monoculture regime. Abruptly interrupting centuries of multispecies co-habitation of a fungus, the potato, and humans, P. infestans was invented as an invasive intruder that needed to be contained and conquered.