The potato is the fourth largest food crop on earth. You probably eat it several times a week. You almost certainly know less about it than you think.

The potato originated in the Andes of South America, where indigenous peoples had been cultivating and preserving it for thousands of years before Europeans ever saw one. When the Spanish brought it back to Europe in the late 1500s, the French banned it, the Scottish refused it on religious grounds, and most of the continent considered it food fit only for animals. Within two centuries, it had become so central to Irish life that when a blight destroyed the crop in the 1840s, one million people died and another million fled — not because the potato failed, but because politics, ideology, and colonial indifference turned a crop failure into a catastrophe.

Potatoes covers where the potato actually came from and the remarkable Inca preservation methods that predate modern food science by thousands of years, how a French agronomist tricked Paris into eating potatoes using reverse psychology, why the Irish Famine was a political disaster as much as an agricultural one, what growing potatoes teaches you that buying them never can, what the potato actually does for your health and what we do to undermine it, why the part most people throw away is nutritionally the best part, and how the world has found thousands of ways to love a vegetable whose flavor, on its own, is almost completely bland.

Part of the I'm No Expert, But series: short, accurate, accessible books on topics that are more surprising than most people expect. Readable in under an hour. The kind of book that leaves you thinking: I'm glad I know that now.