How the potato reshaped European cities

 It starts with a root. Not the glamorous kind. Not wheat, with its golden waves and biblical poetry. Not grapes, ripe for wine. No, this is a knobby, dirt-covered tuber growing high in the Andes. A survival food. A peasant’s staple. And like so many world-changing things, it enters history sideways.

When Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Inca Empire, they were searching for gold. They left with something arguably more valuable: the potato. They didn’t know it at the time, of course. To them it was strange and earthy and vaguely suspicious. But it grew easily in poor soil. It stored well. It didn’t rot on the journey back to Europe. That was enough.

From there, the potato began its slow climb to power.

It wasn’t an overnight success. For decades, it was treated with suspicion, grown for animal feed, or reluctantly accepted by poor farmers with no better options. In some places, priests condemned it as un-Christian—after all, it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible. In others, people feared it caused disease. But famine has a way of rewriting culinary tastes, and over time, the potato proved itself. It thrived where grains struggled: cold, wet climates, thin mountain soils, isolated plots where wheat simply wouldn’t grow. Places like Ireland. Or the Scottish Highlands. Or the Bavarian Alps.

And here’s where the story begins to take geographic shape.

The potato didn’t just provide food—it provided a new kind of food security. A small family, working a tiny plot, could grow enough potatoes to survive the year. Suddenly, marginal land became habitable. Populations rose. In Ireland, from just over 2 million in the early 18th century to more than 8 million by the 1840s—many of them surviving almost entirely on potatoes and milk. This wasn’t a coincidence. It was a demographic revolution, rooted—literally—in the soil.

And when populations rise, cities grow.

The potato helped feed the labor force of industrial Europe. In England, where workers moved from farms to factories, the steady stream of cheap calories kept wages low and productivity high. In France and Germany, where urban planning began to adapt to the demands of swelling cities, potatoes were often the unspoken force beneath the cobblestones. They enabled industrialization not through machines, but through mouths. And with more mouths came more housing, more infrastructure, more public health crises. Cholera outbreaks in London. Open sewers in Paris. The push for water treatment, sanitation boards, paved roads, organized waste disposal—all of it a response to population density that would not have existed without the agricultural surplus made possible by the potato.

But like all simple solutions, it had its vulnerabilities.

The Irish Potato Famine was not caused by the potato—it was caused by the monoculture of the potato. In Ireland, where British landlords had pushed tenant farmers onto smaller and smaller plots, many had come to rely almost entirely on a single variety: the Irish Lumper. When Phytophthora infestans, a fungal blight, arrived in 1845, the results were catastrophic. The potatoes turned black in the fields. They rotted in storage. There was no backup crop. Over a million people died. Another million emigrated. It wasn’t just a natural disaster—it was a political and geographic one. Food exports from Ireland continued during the famine. Relief was slow, inadequate, and filtered through a colonial logic that viewed Irish suffering as a consequence of laziness or divine will.

The famine didn’t just decimate a population. It triggered mass migration, redrew demographic maps, reshaped global cities. Irish families fleeing starvation landed in Boston, New York, Liverpool, and Montreal. They brought their language, their labor, their politics. And in many ways, the modern face of North American cities—Catholic parishes, labor unions, Irish neighborhoods—was shaped not just by immigration, but by the failure of a crop that had once fed a nation.

And yet, the potato endured.

Today it’s nearly invisible in its ubiquity—French fries, chips, vodka, instant mash. But hidden behind those golden arches is a centuries-long story of food security, population growth, colonialism, labor exploitation, and cultural adaptation. A single root that spread across the globe, embedded itself in kitchens and cultures, collapsed an economy, fed an empire, and reshaped the human landscape.

Nobody planned that. The Inca farmers didn’t envision urban sewers in Manchester. The British landlords didn’t imagine their export crops would help trigger a diaspora. And the Spanish conquistadors certainly didn’t know they were carrying a tuber that would help build the modern world.

But that’s how history often works. Through unintended consequences. Through edible infrastructure. Through systems we barely understand until they fail.

And all of it—started with a root. Dug from the side of a mountain.