In the 1530s, Spanish expeditions in the Andes encountered a crop that Andean peoples had been refining for millennia: the potato. Within a few centuries it became the world’s fourth most important food crop after rice, wheat, and maize — now grown across 150+ countries. (FAOHome)

That’s the surface story: a tuber goes global.

The deeper story is about acceleration.

Because the potato didn’t just feed Europe. It altered what Europe could become.

The potato as accelerant

When a food system becomes dramatically more efficient, it doesn’t only reduce hunger — it changes the energy equation of a civilisation.

More calories per acre.
More reliable yields in marginal climates.
More surplus energy — and in Europe, more grain freed for storage, trade, and mobilisation.
More people supported on less land.
More people available for towns, mines, factories, armies.

Historians argue about how much the potato mattered, but the direction is hard to ignore. A landmark study estimates that the potato’s introduction accounts for about one-quarter of the growth in Old World population and urbanisation between 1700 and 1900 — precisely the conditions that underwrote industrial expansion. (JSTOR)

So yes: you can make a case that the potato helped Europe shift gear.

But here’s the twist: the gear it helped engage wasn’t neutral.

What paradigm did the potato accelerate?

Europe’s new momentum didn’t simply express “more life.” It increasingly expressed a worldview in which:

• land becomes a production unit
• nature becomes “resource”
• value becomes what can be extracted, standardised, shipped, priced
• and ultimately: life becomes something we can claim to own

This is why the potato works as a metaphor for the last five centuries: a burst of biological abundance that accelerates a civilisation into an era of domination-by-optimisation — often in the name of the “Good Life.”

And if you follow that arc to its current frontier, you can see where the logic points next.

Not just to industrial farming. Not just to chemicals, data, and supply chains — but to the aspiration of a synthetic form of life: life redesigned to be controllable, reproducible, scalable, licensable — and therefore commodified.

The “potato” is no longer a tuber. It’s a platform.

What the potato raiders left behind

Now return to the Andes, but look again.

What was taken was a crop that could be planted almost anywhere — both above and below the soil surface.
What was left behind can only be lived.

High Andean agriculture is not just a technical system. It is also an ethics — and a logic — of living with uncertainty: altitude, frost, thin soils, microclimates, and time. One of its signatures is diversity: not for novelty, but for resilience, for survival.

What emerged (and still endures in many Andean communities) includes ayni — ongoing cycles of reciprocity that exchange comparable work or goods, sustaining community and land together. (National Museum of the American Indian)

And the biodiversity is staggering. The Andean highlands of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador are home to more than 4,000 native potato varieties, selected over centuries and adapted to harsh high-altitude conditions. (International Potato Center)

So perhaps it is true:

Biological and psychological diversity is intelligence.
Reciprocity is infrastructure.
“Enough” is not a failure of ambition.
Change is inevitable — so be prepared to be surprised.

An enduring civilisation carries an implicit orientation between Tribe and Cosmos.

Is the now-familiar potato, then, not also a reminder of an explicit orientation — between humankind, its origins, and the Mystery?

Perhaps the quest of 2026 is for a seed of fresh awareness: a re-cognition, a discerning logic, an all-embracing intellect — where the viability of Earth and the viability of humankind click into alignment with an even bigger mystery than we ever thought possible.

I am not advocating going back. I’m building on a fundamental truth: our species is emergent. As Clare W. Graves wrote in 1974, we are attempting to negotiate “the most difficult, but at the same time the most exciting, transition the human race has faced to date.” (clarewgraves.com)

So what is your “new potato” for this present acceleration?

Be prepared to be surprised.