Sweet Potato reigns in North Carolina

North Carolinians are loyal to their “official state vegetable,” often incorporating servings of sweet potatoes into family meals and holiday feasts.

The North Carolina General Assembly approved legislation in 1995 making the sweet potato the Tar Heel State’s “top vegetable.”

The bill was “recommended” by students at the former Elvie Street School in Wilson who were in the 1993-94 fourth grade class taught by the late Celia Batchelor.

The kids were mostly 10-year-olds at the time, and nicknamed themselves the “Tater Tots,” in order to help get attention from the news media as well as the legislators.

North Carolina produces more sweet potatoes than any other state, growing nearly half the country’s supply. And Wilson County sits right in the center of sweet potato farmland.

 The Wilson kids had their facts in a row – pointing out that Native Americans harvested sweet potatoes and introduced them to explorer Christopher Columbus. “Dinosaurs may even have munched on sweet taters,” reported Josh Shaffer for Our State magazine.

The sweet potato bill took more than a year to get through the House of Representatives, and once it arrived in the Senate, “every vegetable with a constituency reared its head demanding fair consideration,” according to Shaffer.

“Many of us think that the official state vegetable ought to be the rutabaga,” said one Fayetteville legislator.

Lawmakers threw out tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage, collards and other vegetables in protest.

The sweet potato survived the verbal food fight on the Senate floor…and prevailed.

 

Growing conditions are right in Coastal Carolina

Sweet potatoes thrive in North Carolina’s coastal plain because of its sandy soil and temperate climate.

Surprisingly, the sweet potato is not at all related to the white (Irish) potato. The sweet potato belongs to the root family, while the other potato is a tuber.

Sweet potatoes and yams are not the same. They are two distinctly different vegetables. While sweet potatoes are indigenous to North America, the yam comes from West Africa and Asia. 

There are hundreds of different varieties of sweet potato. They are usually orange and have an oblong body with tapered ends.

 Sweet potatoes are high in vitamins A and C and low in fat. They have a low glycemic index, which makes them a good source of nutrients for diabetics. They are also very high in potassium, magnesium and phosphorus.

Jennifer Harbster of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., is a sweet potato historian. She said that English botanist John Gerard wrote about the sweet potato in 1597, noting that it was best eaten when “roasted and infused with wine, boiled with prunes or roasted with oil, vinegar and salt.”

Gerard also suggested that the sweet potato “comforts, strengthens and nourishes the body” and has aphrodisiac qualities. English King Henry VIII consumed massive amounts of sweet potatoes, especially spiced sweet potato pie,” Harbster said. 

A leading character in William Shakespeare’s comedy “Merry of Wives of Windsor (1602) bellows: “Let the sky rain potatoes.” 

Harbster said: “By 1880, Americans were enjoying some sort of variation of candied sweet potatoes. American cookbooks, such as the widely published 1893 Boston Cooking School Cookbook by Fannie Farmer featured a recipe for glazed sweet potatoes.”

 Around the same time, George Washington Carver, an agricultural scientist and inventor, compiled more than a hundred recipes for the sweet potato, she added.