In December 2008, the International Year of the Potato, I rise in winter darkness. The sun won’t join me for hours. To thaw my bones, I crumple yesterday’s crossword and arrange moss-kissed applewood twigs. My apple tree was planted in 1848, when this fieldstone farmhouse was new, before these lands were declared Canadian. Within my rustic Jøtul stove, fingers of wood intertwine in solemn prayer for warmth. On my third attempt, the match head flares into flame. I touch it to the newspaper’s corners. Smoke from the twigs emits a fragrance both sweet and tart. The kindling crackles, my cue to add logs from the stack piled outside the side door.

It’s five on Christmas morning. I’ve transitioned into the second trimester of my first pregnancy. My rural existence is otherwise solitary. The turkey I ordered from the Mennonite-run Meat & Cheese in Elmira weighs over twenty pounds, because in seven hours, the solitude of my pastoral home will be broken by the arrival of my twin, her husband, their two children, and my parents. This has been the coldest winter on record for years. In the week before Christmas Eve, Ontario has been battered by four snowstorms that unfold in rapid succession.

I gaze out the window and bite my lip. They’ll have to take it slow, I whisper to myself. Days like this are the only kind that can sedate my speed. When others meander behind the wheel, in doubt or caution, I fume and swear, and not always under my breath. I long to be like my mother, who, when caught behind a car inching along the road, muses patiently, Look at these lovely people, out for a walk in their car.

That is how my extended family must navigate the backroads from Waterloo to Elora today. They must go for a walk in their car.

I glance at the clock on the lone wall papered with yellowed pages of poetry by William Butler Yeats. The turkey must enter the oven before the hour ends. I set the dial to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. On tiptoe, I pull a pot from the corner cupboard and swing it beneath the tap. Through the window above my sink, the moon is a waning crescent, effusing just enough light to set the cerulean hue of the snowy landscape sparkling.

In the cutlery drawer, I fish for the paring knife, then place the open mouth of a ceramic bowl snug between my knees, a giant maw hungry to catch peeled skins.

I heave a sack onto the kitchen island and extract a potato, small and firm, dusted with earthy afterbirth. I wash soil from its skin and poise the paring knife. The ritual begins.

The small lump I squeeze has traversed over five centuries and thousands of kilometers to land in my palm. The potato is often associated with Ireland, the birthplace of my ancestors. In American Sign Language, the gesture for “Ireland” closely mimics the sign for “potato.” The nondominant hand curls into a fist while the other extends two fingers to tap the fist like a fork, testing whether a boiled potato has softened. For “Ireland,” the forked fingers swing in a circle before tapping the fist.

But the potato’s humble beginnings lie almost ten thousand kilometers to the southwest, high in the Andes of Peru. After the Spanish conquest of the Incas in 1532, the conquistadores sailed the tubers to Europe, where the colder climate initially inhibited their growth and spread. In the sixteenth century, Northern Europe’s colder months proved too shocking for the tuber to properly thrive.

Not so in Ireland, where snow rarely descends. Warmed by El Niño, the nation’s slightly warmer temperatures proved perfect. The spud soon took the stage as the primary staple crop. The dependence of Irish people upon it became so singular that when blight later infested the harvest of 1845, the consequences upon the population were devastating.

I glance at my own burgeoning belly and picture the swollen stomachs of the starving Irish, their abdomens pregnant with emptiness, bloated by famine. But famine is the wrong word here. There was no shortage of food in Ireland.

The food Ireland produced was not meant for the mouths of poor Irish land tenants or their families. Beef, pork, and grains were instead exported to Britain. Only the potato was left to sustain the people of Ireland. As the tuber crop turned black with rot, over a million Irish mouths began to die of hunger. And that’s the more fitting term: The Great Hunger, An Gorta Mór.

What unfolded after the potato blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans hit Ireland in 1845 was an egregious failure of public policy that constituted a crime against humanity. The impact of An Gorta Mór is so colossal that it went on to enter folk memory. No doubt the betrayal by Britain and the starvation and annihilation of so many Irish souls lit a fuse beneath political efforts for Ireland to move toward independence from British rule. Independence would not be achieved for another eight decades. Another century would pass before, in 2013, scientists identified the specific strain of P. infestans: Herb-1.

The womb of Ireland herself was emptied by the blight—countless deaths as the result of potato blight and Britain’s criminal neglect. A mass migration was biting at the heels of The Great Hunger. Irish people began to flee in droves from the shores of the Emerald Isle and the nation’s population halved.

My parents inherited this legacy of leaving. They both hail from families of ten children and were the first in each to leave. My father, Pádraig, departed first, landing in Montreal in the winter of 1957. He worked for a year to save enough for my mother to join him with their three children the following year. By Canada’s centennial in 1967, they added three more to their growing brood. Six spuds spreading their own roots through Canadian soil.

Could the Irish potato famine happen again? In a 2018 article[1], Jean McLain, professor of environmental science at the University of Arizona, wrote, “Scientists believe the Herb-1 strain is now extinct,” and “Fungus in soil is not unusual.” Among McLain’s research foci is food safety. She points an accusatory finger at monoculture, the farming of one single crop, as the villain that allowed the Herb-1 strain to first take hold and spread in 1845. Modern agricultural practices have adapted to better resist susceptibility to disease or fungal outbreaks by employing methods like crop rotation and intercropping, in which a second crop is planted in alternate rows.

Almost two centuries since the famine began, the humble potato has grown into a global crop, cultivated on every continent except Antarctica. Nowadays, Herb-1 is no longer the threat. It’s climate change. Lesley Torrance, emeritus professor of biology at Scotland’s St. Andrew’s University and director of international development at the James Hutton Institute explains in a 2022 BBC article that “potatoes are a cool-climate crop”[2]. They thrive best in temperatures that do not rise above 77 degrees Fahrenheit.

While climate change extends the agricultural season, it also produces longer, hotter, drier summers that expose potato crops to heat stress. Researchers at the Hutton Institute are looking to potato varieties from the Andes in Peru, the potato’s place of origin, for clues. They hope to isolate traits from modern South American varieties for improved tolerance to heat and drought and greater resistance to pests and disease.

On Ireland’s timeline, The Great Hunger is often an insurmountable wall for Irish descendants attempting to trace their ancestry to a time before the blight. But on this cold, Canadian Christmas morning, the potent presence of my ancestors surrounds me.

My mother’s father was born in 1901 near O’Connell Street and Dublin’s Ha’penny Bridge. As a youth, he joined the resistance to fight for Irish independence. Family lore whispers about how my nana cycled messages hidden in soda bread related to the Easter Rising of 1916.

Close to a century after Ireland’s independence, I have begun my own. I left a decade-long relationship to pursue motherhood alone via in vitro fertilization and surgery. My own small spud is planted. And this Christmas morning, I woke early to begin the same ritual my mother performed all her adult life:

Dip the spud.
Peel it.
Carve its eyes.
Halve then quarter.
Dip the spud.
Peel it.
Carve its eyes.
Halve then quarter.

On the kitchen island, a candle flame guides my hand. The rhythmic motion of peeling lures me into a trance. I feel the hands of my Irish mother atop mine. My mamaí, Joan. (Siobhán, as my father calls her.) Holding my mother’s hands are her mother’s. My nana, Lily. Their hands move with mine in predawn pantomime. I ponder how often my mother’s hands performed this task. How often did her mother’s hands repeat it? My great-grandmother was a teacher blinded by glaucoma, a condition yet to be fully understood in her lifetime.

This process is so simple, so rote, that each of us might easily enact it in darkness, without sight but omnispective, like my seanmháthair mhór, who sees via the multiple eyes of potatoes. Whose nimble fingers inadvertently transfer their soil to anoint her forehead like a mark of Lenten ash as she makes the sign of the cross upon the first ring of the Angelus. My great nan, Kathleen.

These mechanics entwine our very DNA. Buried in our blood like tubers in soil. An inherited Irish gene:

Dip the spud.
Peel it.
Carve its eyes.
Halve then quarter.

The sounds of the ritual lull me:

Splash of water.
Turn of knife.
Scrape and cut.
Chop. Chop.

In my head a song appears. You say “po-tay-to” and I say “po-tah-to.” The name for potatoes in Gaeilge, the Irish language, is prátaí. The French term is perhaps my favorite, pommes de terre, apples of the earth. It carries the same translation in Dutch, aardappel.

The Bible never specifies the apple as the fruit Eve samples, but in Judeo-Christian culture, it became associated with sin. In pre-Christian Celtic tradition, however, the apple signified healing, wholeness, and fulfilled desire. “My apple” will become a favored term of affection for my child after I give birth. For now, this petite pomme de terre remains planted within my womb.

In Quechua, one term for potato is papa. In the land of the potato’s origin near Lake Titicaca, a variety of potato that is misshapen and notoriously difficult to peel is Quechua Lunchuy Huacachi. Translation? “Potato that makes the daughter-in-law cry.” I have never married, and the potatoes I prepare are Yukon Gold, but tears fill my eyes regardless. Atop my hands lie the worn, weathered fingers of all my female ancestors dipping and peeling atop my own. How many centuries in the wee hours to the sound of crackling firewood? To the dance of candlelight?

In the trance of my ritual, I feel a caress. Was that a squeeze? There is a distinct pull of matrilineal twine wound round my fingers and through the center of my palms as they move, like I’m a modern-day marionette, guided by the weaving hands of my ancestors long ago, stretching back before An Gorta Mór, maneuvering me through centuries with collective love and care in this simple act of meal preparation. Of this specific food.

Potato. An prátá. It’s no coincidence this is a root vegetable.

As I place the stuffed turkey into the oven, my roots tighten their hold upon me. My being entwines with them deep within the fertile loam of the Irish soil they’ve called home for more than a millennium. Outside, winter blows a bitter breeze. Indoors, I am warmed by an ancestral embrace whose embers glow within me, the babe I carry, and the binding ties of family soon to brighten our doorstep. We all share a common humble beginning: potato, roots, migrants, descendants.

What lessons have been gleaned from the potato? What’s taken root? Survival. Adaptation. Determination. Resilience. Stability. Strength. Love.

Image credits

Image 1: Ridge and Furrow. September 26, 2020. Great Blasket Island, County Kerry, Ireland. Credit: Nancy Forde
Image 2: Loss. September 27, 2020. Great Blasket Island, County Kerry, Ireland. Credit: Nancy Forde
Image 3: Peelings. September 24, 2020. Great Blasket Island, County Kerry, Ireland. Credit: Nancy Forde
Image 4: Earth Apple. June 29, 2024. Credit: Nancy Forde

Notes
1. Jean McLain, “Could the Irish Potato Famine Happen Again?,” Potato Grower Magazine, March 1, 2018, https://www.potatogrower.com/2018/03/could-the-irish-potato-famine.

2. Cammy Wilson, “Climate Change: Are Potatoes Being Put at Risk by Warmer Weather?,” BBC Landward, October 20, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-63299964.