THE WORLD-FAMOUS FRENCH FRY

 

 BY WILL SWAIM, GlobalTradeMag

Japanese kids have always been early adopters of global cultural trends—consider baseball (the country’s national sport) and Santa Claus, whom the Japanese have transformed into a kind of Jewish matchmaker presiding over a Christmas that looks more like Valentine’s Day.

Now Japanese youth are storming fast-food joints to order belly-busting volumes of fried potatoes, disgusting some observers by eating them all, and outraging others by leaving some behind. Blogger Brian Ashcraft reports that one scold took to Twitter to admonish the revelers: “Look, buying 23 large French fries is fine, but you gotta eat them all, you gotta eat every last one.”

Fried potatoes are truly international—whether they make a cameo in Canadian poutine (put to bed beneath blankets of gravy and a kind of cheese), as chips in England, as Belgian fries or a freak Japanese trend. But no matter where you eat them, the global trade cycle of what Americans call “French fries” begins in the Andes.

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In the 1550s, Spanish infantry encountered the potato in the arid Peruvian highlands. Shipped back to Europe, the tuber slowly grew in popularity, imbedding itself in Ireland, for example, as the chief staple. “No London merchant ever formed a new company to trade potatoes,” writes Steven Topik, my Global Trade colleague and co-author (with Kenneth Pomeranz) of The World That Trade Created. “But crises created needs to which the potato was beautifully suited; today, potatoes are the second-largest food crop in the world.”    READ MORE