BY RIGHTS potatoes should be declared a super-food.
Not only do they survive in arid lands, in the glacial north, at sea level, and run riot in the Amazonian rain forests, but each tuber also contains sufficient vitamins and minerals, proteins, calories and cellulose, for a healthy adult to survive indefinitely on a solid diet of potatoes alone.
This wonderful bundle of nutrition is also credited with having strong aphrodisiac powers (although research has shown these powers are somewhat depleted when consumed as chips after too many pints of lager on a Saturday night).
A perennial plant of the Nightshade family, potatoes are the cornerstone of what we call comfort food; it’s the Gentiles’ answer to chicken soup.
Paphos-based Christos Mavromatis knows all there is to know about potatoes, both how to grow them and how to serve them. As taverna after taverna forsakes freshly cooked chips for the frozen cardboard variety, Christos serves only his own grown potatoes at his restaurant, Laterna, just as his father did more than 20 years ago.
He grows his potatoes – and wheat – on land tended by his father and grandfather. In those days families managed to feed and clothe their families through growing and selling their potato crop, but times have changed.
Today Christos would be hard pressed to feed and clothe a wife and children solely from the bounty of his fields. The real dirt on Cyprus potatoes for any small holder like Christos is that the figures just don’t stack up. It costs him around 800 euros to farm three tons of potatoes. If he sold on the potato harvest, after taking into consideration the time spent in preparation, seeding, planting and irrigating, plus the special machinery and human labour needed to harvest the crops, he would be lucky to make even a tiny profit. He fares slightly better with his wheat which is milled and then is sold on to bakers, or for animal feed.
All this begs the question of why anyone would labour in the fields day in day out all year round, when there’s no real profit margin.
“Simply because I love the land. I love the scent of the soil, and the joy of growing things, of seeing them come through the earth and then being able to eat them,” he said.
“Nothing can take away the thrill of farming to create food no matter how many years you keep tending the fields.”
It’s also a way of staying close to his family history. He uses the same old tractor his father did to plough the exact same furrows.
“Now as I work the fields I can still remember him doing the same thing, with me as a small boy up there beside him on the tractor, watching him work the plough along with the three pronged grape that we use to uncover the crop,” he said.
His main crop of potatoes is planted between December and February and harvested from April to early June. Christos then uses part of the spring crop as seed for the later crop which he plants in August /September and harvests in November/December.
“I know almost to the day when my wheat should be harvested to give the best yield, same with the potatoes, and that’s something my father taught me,” he said. “I couldn’t give it up. It’s a whole way of life for me.”
In recent years young heads may well have been turned temporarily by tasty pasta, trendy polenta, and ‘poshed up’porgouri, but with one portion of potatoes providing up to 19 per cent of the recommended daily intake of iron and the rest offering a meagre seven per cent, what other super food offers such goodness?
In the UK the potato has recently fought back against these lesser foodstuffs with one enterprising company having launched a Spuds To Go’ eatery, offering every form of cooked potato.
No frozen, or bland high-powered hosed, chilled supermarket specials, can ever replace freshly picked, freshly prepared fried or mashed Cyprus potatoes.
n You can enjoy Christos potatoes at his Laterna tavern in Kato Paphos, tel 26 932393
Spud facts
Potatoes are the world’s fourth largest food crop after rice, wheat, and maize.
Cultivated as long as 10,000 years ago, they are credited with having originated in Peru.
In the Andes you can still find over 100 varieties of potato in a single valley and farmers will cultivate on average 10-12 different varieties at one time.
There are 5,000 different varieties worldwide with another 200 wild species and sub species.
The annual world production of potatoes is estimated at around 315 million tonnes.
India and China now share the title of the largest potato producing countries with China harvesting over one-third of the world’s potatoes.
Belarus has the highest consumption of potatoes per capita, with each Belarusian consuming 338 kg annually.
Potatoes are used in the making of biodegradable golf tees, the starch is also used in the manufacture of paper and cardboard, and the extracted cellulose in potatoes is an important ingredient in the processing of colour photography
Last year the UN officially declared 2008 to be the International Year of the Potato.
