China: Convincing the Chinese to eat potatoes

The shift to potatoes comes as the root crop uses 30 percent less water to grow compared to other sources of staple food such as rice, corn and wheat to make noodles.

To make the change feasible, the government doubled the land dedicated to potato crops, reported USA Today. Technicians are also doubling the production of potato plants by cutting the leaves of tiny sprouts and dropping the cuttings into bottles of growth jelly.

The method of propagation is being worked on at a Beijing facility and should result in each snippet sending up a shoot of its own in a few weeks. It is the fastest way to produce a lot of healthy potato seeds, said Xisen Potato Group Project Manager Li Huaming. Xisen is the largest potato developer in China.

Developing the potato industry and encouraging Chinese to eat the root crop instead of grains or noodles are vital measures to further develop China’s agriculture sector. In doing so, the country would be able to prevent discontentment which comes as the result of hunger, according to Chinese Vice Minister of Agriculture Yu Xinrong’s keynote address on summer.

China is already the world’s biggest grower of potatoes, but about 50 percent of its annual 95 million tons of production is shipped overseas. This situation explains the big challenge facing Chinese authorities to convince its 1.2 billion residents to abandon rice and go potatoes.

So far, French fries are the only type of potato dish that the Chinese eat. Part of the reason behind their dislike of the root crop is that it is associated with poverty; when China went through a food crisis in the mid-1600s, rice and noodles became a food for the rich and potato was all the impoverish Chinese had to eat.