Sweet Potatoes
People in both North
America and South America
ate lots of sweet potatoes. That's because sweet potatoes are very good
for you. They have lots of calcium, potassium, Vitamin A, and Vitamin C,
and your body needs all of those things. Plus, they taste good, and they
are very sweet which helps to give you energy. They are distantly related
to morning glory flowers, and also to white potatoes.
Sweet potatoes are a kind of vine, with white flowers. The part you eat
is the root of the vine plant. People first ate them by gathering them in
the wild, where they grew naturally, which was in Central
America and the warmest parts of South
America. But sweet potatoes were so useful and so good that by about
3000 BC people had learned to grow them on purpose,
and soon they shared that knowledge with their neighbors, and so after a
while people were growing sweet potatoes all over South and North America,
wherever it was warm enough for the plant to grow.
When African people came to
North America, they called sweet potatoes "yams". That's because back home
in Africa, they had eaten a food that was a lot like sweet potatoes, which
in Africa was called "nyami" or "anyinam". They aren't really the same plant,
but they look and taste a lot alike, so the African people called sweet
potatoes "yams." They cooked them the way they had back home, and ate a lot
of them.
To find out more about sweet potatoes, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Bread Comes to Life: A Garden of Wheat and a Loaf to Eat, by George Levenson (2004). From wheat to bread, lavishly illustrated, for kids.
Ancient Agriculture: From Foraging to Farming, by Michael and Mary Woods (2000). For middle schoolers, with plenty of information about how farming got started, and how it worked.
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