the.com/tuber
the underground vault where plants stash sugar and quietly grow a backup version of themselves.
means A swollen, fleshy underground stem or root—like a potato—that a plant uses to store nutrients and from which new growth can sprout.
from Straight from Latin tuber, meaning 'lump, swelling, or bump'—the same root that gives us 'protuberance' and 'tuberculosis' (literally 'little swelling'). Romans applied it to anything that bulged, including the knobby growths plants push out underground.
- clone army
- each eye can sprout a genetically identical new plant
- not a root
- potatoes are swollen stems, not roots
- toxic green
- sunlight turns potato skin green and poisonous
- famine stakes
- one tuber blight starved a million Irish in 1840s
- ancient larder
- Andean farmers freeze-dried tubers into chuño millennia ago
potato — starchy underground stem of solanum tuberosum, feeds ~1.3 billion people globally
cassava — root tuber manihot esculenta, staple carbohydrate for 800 million people in africa and south america
taro — colocasia esculenta tuber, sacred crop in polynesia and hawaii for over 2000 years
yam — dioscorea genus tuber, central to west african cuisine and celebration, over 600 varieties cultivated in nigeria