But when I was young a lot of potatoes were lost to sprouting. As soon as a spud starts growing sprouts, its days are numbered. The sprouting hastens deterioration, and the overall quality of the potato starts to drop off.
Farmers used to lose some of their crop to sprouting before they could sell their harvest, and consumers lost sacks of spuds stored in home cupboards to the same problem.
It wasn’t that foxes invaded our kitchens to eat our potatoes. It was that the spuds themselves “ate” the starch stored in their pudgy brown bodies to fuel their growth.
In the 20th century farmers started to treat their potatoes with chemicals to delay the sprouting process. The chemicals helped, but they were artificial compounds, not natural to the food chain.
It’s at this point that new research enters the picture. At agricultural universities across the nation, scientists are always at work to improve the lot of farmers and consumers alike. The goal is to get more food of higher quality out of the land, to do so as sustainably as possible, and to help us consumers as we make a wide variety of choices about how we want to eat.
Lots of agricultural scientists are able to do their research work because of our tax dollars. At the federal level, agricultural research is supported by part of the Department of Agriculture called the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).
Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. Follow her on the web at http://www.rockdoc.wsu.edu and on Twitter @RockDocWSU. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.