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Originally Posted by GtrsRGr8
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Now a trivia question for everyone who is reading. When did the non-Irish explorers of Ireland discover potatoes for the first time, growing in Ireland, and begin exporting them all over the world, in which places they had hitherto been unknown?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GtrsRGr8
No one has answered my trivia question yet:
When did the non-Irish explorers of Ireland discover potatoes for the first time, growing in Ireland, and begin exporting them all over the world, in which places they had hitherto been unknown?
BTW--It's no fair looking up the answer.
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Okay. No one has answered the trivia question, so the magnificent prize for the correct answer won't be able to be claimed. Sorry.
Here's the answer. Potatoes were not indigenous to Ireland, believe it or not. They were first discovered by the white man in Peru (in South America) by the Spanish "explorers" (to put it nicely). The Spanish must have liked potatoes; at any rate, they sent them to the Old World, presumably first to Spain. Probably not too long thereafter, they began to be grown in Ireland. And grown and grown and grown. The Irish must have really liked potatoes.
Unfortunately, they liked them too well. Potatoes became such a huge part of their diet that when disease struck the potato plants and/or potatoes, it caused the great Irish potato famine, in which millions of people starved (and millions more felt like they had to leave Ireland altogether, many ending up in the U.S.).