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Dr. David Tay discusses the International Potato Center's mission and its daily work.

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Lima, Peru

David Tay puts on a lab coat and pushes through a door labeled with a black-and-white sign that reads simply, “Potato.”

This room, where thousands of “plantlets” sit in test tubes under bright lights, is his domain, his turf – his potato patch.
Here at the International Potato Center (CIP) – home of the world’s largest potato collection – Dr. Tay is the head of the potato gene bank, where scientists are seeking to keep alive 4,600 potato varieties native to the Andes.

Maintaining a potato collection is not cutting-edge science, the type that lands on the front pages of research journals. It is tedious, thankless work. Tay jokingly compares it to garbage collection – meaning the kind of job that most people prefer not to do.

Yet for him, it’s a treasure trove: “I feel that God has been kind to me,” says the bespectacled scientist, who was born in Malaysia and wrote his thesis on potatoes, researching them here at this center 30 years ago. His mission today is to preserve all the CIP’s varieties as part of a poverty-reduction and food-security program, so that no type of potato disappears, and all types are available to farmers and researchers. “We all feel this is our social responsibility for the present and future generations,” he says.

Just a few months ago, these words might have seemed hyperbolic. But the spud has suddenly been thrust into the spotlight, now that prices for soy, wheat, and corn have skyrocketed. The United Nations has called 2008 the Year of the Potato, as has Peru. Governments around the world are turning to the root to help ease hunger. Peru’s military is eating potato bread instead of regular white. And at this humble center in Lima, the phone is suddenly ringing off the hook, journalists are knocking at the door, and requests for expertise are pouring in from around the world.

“Potatoes are being looked at as one of the pathways out of poverty,” says Pamela Anderson, the center’s director general.

•••

But aren’t potatoes from…?

Tay understands the question even before you get it out. “Americans think potatoes are from Idaho,” he says. “Ask a European, and they say the potato is from Ireland.”

Actually, it’s Peruvian. Potatoes date back about 8,000 years, to the shores of Lake Titicaca, 3,800 meters above sea level, in what is today Peru. Incan armies ate potatoes centuries ago, and rural communities eat them today. An estimated 5,000 varieties grow in the Andean region; 80 percent of those sit in the CIP.

In fact, spend just one hour in this sleek, modern center, and your understanding of the potato – if you are one who thinks first of russets and Yukon Golds – will be transformed. In neat metal trays sit a sampling of about 40 kinds, ranging from the common yellow to the chaucha amarilla, an ugly tuber with purple sprouts that Tay calls a favorite.

They come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and textures, with names such as yana puma maki and yuraq chojlla. Some are lumpy, others smooth; some are plump, others curl like plumbers’ tubes. One, whose name translates into English as “Makes the daughter-in-law cry,” even has its own lore: Purée it well, and you’ve won your mother-in-law’s approval.

But this collection’s splendor has gone largely unknown – or at least underappreciated – until now. The potato, with its complex carbohydrates and ability to grow at various climates and altitudes, is being reconsidered amid food shortages. “We are a grain-centric world,” says Ms. Anderson. “Finally our message is getting out.”

These days, the potato center is helping other countries strengthen their potato-seed systems. India is trying to double its potato production, while China, where in some poor regions potatoes are consumed daily, has become the world’s largest potato producer. In 2005, for the first time, potato production in developing countries surpassed that of the developed world.

But if the world is more excited about potatoes these days, they are just catching up with Tay. “Potatoes are always exciting,” he says, very seriously.

•••

A native of Borneo, Tay grew up with the jungle two miles from his door. Wild orchids and animals kindled his interest in conservation. But the only potatoes he ever saw were old and withered by the time they arrived in his hometown. In fact, by the time he got to England for his PhD, he believed all potatoes were soft by nature.

In England Tay was invited to work at the CIP, where he researched the cryopreservation of potatoes. He went on to sugarcane breeding and led other germ-plasm conservation centers, a career that’s taken him from the Barbados to Taiwan to Ohio, and back to Peru last year. “I felt like I couldn’t retire until I finished with potatoes,” he says.

On a recent day, he wanders through the bank, where specimens sit in storage at about 8 degrees C (46 degrees F.) under dim lights for up to two years before they are taken to the scientists for regeneration.

He opens the door to a freezer where native seeds can be kept, they believe, for 40 years at minus 20 degrees C (or minus 4 degrees F.). This is also where the CIP keeps meristems, or tiny shoot tips, frozen in liquid nitrogen. “It’s like science fiction here,” Tay says.

When plantlets weaken, the workers cart them off to the “transfer room,” pare the nodes, and replant them into new tubes, where the potatoes will recover and be stored again.

Yet for all this paring and freezing and nurturing, the Peruvian staple is not as omnipresent as a CIP visitor might expect. True, a chunk of sweet camote is found on every plate of seviche (a Peruvian seafood dish), and a round yellow potato is plunked into every bowl of chicken soup. But per capita, Peru pales in comparison to other countries: In recent years, Belarus has been the top consumer of potatoes (173 kg, or 381 pounds, per person, according to the CIP), followed by Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, and Poland. Peruvians ate less than half the potatoes (72 kilograms, or 159 pounds) of their Belarussian counterparts.

Now government authorities are seeking to change Peruvian eating habits. Peru’s President Alan Garcia recently suggested his countrymen increase their consumption to 100 kg per year. The CIP is repatriating native varieties to
rural Andean communities in order to keep the roots thriving. The center is also pushing for processed versions of the less common potatoes, and even companies as large as Lay’s are biting, with a new bag of native chips called Andinas.

“In urban areas, people don’t realize the treasure we have in the Andes,” says Kurt Manrique, the technical coordinator for the Promotion of the Competitive Production of Peruvian Potatoes (INCOPA) at the CIP.

Peruvian chefs are joining in, rebranding the potato as haute cuisine. At El Señorio de Sulco, in the upscale, seaside neighborhood of Miraflores, the specialty is the causa limeña, a Peruvian take on a sandwich, with two layers of mashed-potato-and-chicken-salad filling with lemon zest (eaten with a fork).

It might seem that all the buzz about potatoes, coupled with working at the CIP, would dampen one’s appetite for tubers, the way some pizza deliverers can’t face a simple pepperoni and cheese. But Tay says he never tires of potatoes. He eats them every day. “I just had papas a la huancaina for breakfast today,” he says – a Peruvian specialty with a rich sauce that includes cheese, evaporated milk, crackers, and pepper.

These days, the potato is appearing everywhere – on supermarket shelves and in restaurants around town. But Tay is no fair-weather friend to the spud: His loyalty is old and steady. He still likes his potatoes simple and soft – as if they’ve been sitting in storage for months.

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