50 Fun Facts About Potato Trivia for Kids

Which part of the potato plant is the potato we eat?

It is called a tuber. The plant uses it to store food for itself, which is why it is so full of starch.

Where in the world did people first grow potatoes?

Farmers near Lake Titicaca, in what is now Peru and Bolivia, were growing them thousands of years before the pyramids were built.

Roughly how long ago were potatoes first farmed?

That is older than the pyramids of Egypt. All today's potatoes come from that one early wild species.

Which explorers first brought potatoes across the ocean to Europe?

They came back with them after conquering the Inca Empire in the 1500s. Europeans took a long time to trust the strange new food.

Potatoes are cousins of which other food plant?

Both belong to a plant family called the nightshades. After flowering, a potato plant even grows little green fruits that look like tiny green tomatoes.

What are the little dents on a potato called?

Each one protects a tiny bud. If you leave a potato in a cupboard, new shoots grow out of them.

Why do farmers keep potatoes covered up in the dark?

Green potato skin contains a bitter chemical called solanine that the plant makes to protect itself, so green bits should be cut away.

About how many different kinds of potato are there in the world?

Around 3,000 of them grow in the Andes alone. A seed bank in Lima, Peru keeps nearly 5,000 types safe.

Which country grew the most potatoes in the world in 2024?

China grew almost a quarter of the world's 390 million tonnes in 2024, and India was second.

How tall does a potato plant grow above the ground?

It has hairy stems and pretty flowers with yellow centres.

What colours can potato flowers be?

They are yellow in the middle and pollinated by insects. A French queen once wore them in her hair to make potatoes fashionable.

Which French queen wore potato flowers to make people like the new vegetable?

She and King Louis XVI wore the blossoms in their everyday clothes to show off the plant. Before that, the French thought potatoes were only fit for pigs.

Which king of Prussia ordered his farmers to grow potatoes in 1756?

His farmers were suspicious of the strange lumpy plant, so he made growing it the law and handed out cuttings.

A French pharmacist called Parmentier first ate potatoes when he was locked up where?

He was captured during a war and fed potatoes, which the French thought were pig food. He liked them and spent his life persuading France to eat them.

Which famous painter made a picture called The Potato Eaters in 1885?

It shows a poor family sharing a plate of potatoes by lamplight. He wanted to paint country people exactly as they were.

In the Andes, people make chuño by doing what to potatoes?

The freeze-dried potatoes last for years. Inca soldiers carried them on long marches as a light, filling food.

In Inca stories, who was Axomamma?

She was a daughter of Pachamama, the earth mother. Potatoes mattered so much in the Andes that they had their own goddess.

Which country do most people think French fries really come from?

One story says American soldiers in Belgium in the First World War called them French because the Belgian soldiers spoke French.

Which US president served 'potatoes in the French manner' at a White House dinner in 1802?

He had lived in France and loved French cooking. Fries are cooked twice: once to soften the inside, once to make the outside crispy.

Why are French fries usually fried twice?

The first fry is at a lower heat, the second at a higher heat for the golden crunch.

In Britain and Ireland, what do people call potato chips?

Confusingly, in Britain 'chips' means the thick fried potatoes Americans call fries.

A famous legend says potato chips were invented in 1853 by a cook in which New York town?

The story goes that a grumpy customer kept sending back his fried potatoes, so the cook sliced them paper-thin. Historians now think the tale is a myth, but the name 'Saratoga Chips' stuck for years.

What was the very first flavoured potato chip, invented in Ireland in 1954?

Joe 'Spud' Murphy of the Tayto company made it. Before that, chips came with a little twist of salt in the bag.

Pringles chips are a special curved shape so they stack. What did the inventor put them in?

Chemist Fredric Baur spent two years designing the saddle-shaped chip in the 1950s to stop chips arriving broken and stale.

Which two things are usually mixed into mashed potato to make it creamy?

Fluffy 'floury' potatoes make the best mash. In Britain it is just called 'mash'.

What do people in Britain call a potato baked whole in its skin?

Because it is cooked in its skin, or jacket. The Incas baked potatoes long ago in an underground pit called a huatia.

Tater tots were invented in 1953 to use up what?

The founders of the frozen food company Ore-Ida did not want to throw the scraps away, so they chopped them up, added flour and shaped them.

Hash browns are shredded fried potatoes usually eaten at which meal in America?

They are a diner classic, cooked on a big flat grill next to the eggs.

Poutine, a dish from Quebec, is fries topped with gravy and what?

It appeared in the 1950s in Quebec, and several towns still argue about who made it first.

Gnocchi are little potato dumplings from which country?

The dough is usually just potato, flour, egg and salt, rolled into small pieces and boiled like pasta.

Latkes are potato pancakes eaten to celebrate which holiday?

They are fried in oil to remember the lamp oil in the Hanukkah story. The word comes from a Yiddish word for a little pancake.

Sweet potatoes are not really potatoes. Which flower family do they belong to?

They are not yams either, even though shops in America sometimes call them that. Regular potatoes are in the nightshade family.

Which toy was the first ever to be advertised on television?

Hasbro started selling it in 1952, and it has never gone out of production.

When the Potato Head toy first went on sale, what did children stick the plastic face parts into?

Parents complained about rotting vegetables, so in 1964 Hasbro added a plastic potato body to the set.

Who invented the Potato Head toy in 1949?

Hasbro began selling his idea three years later. The original set even came with a little pipe, which was dropped in 1987.

A married pair of Potato Head toys appear in which series of animated films?

The husband was voiced for many years by the comedian Don Rickles.

Someone who sits around watching TV all day is nicknamed what?

The phrase was made up in 1976 by a man called Tom Iacino, a friend of a comic artist.

Which brown-skinned potato is the most widely grown in North America?

It comes from a potato picked out by the plant breeder Luther Burbank in 1873. It is the classic baking and fries potato, and it has hardly any dents in its skin.

The yellow-fleshed Yukon Gold was developed at a university in Guelph, Ontario. Which country is that in?

It was bred in the 1960s and has smooth, thin skin and buttery yellow flesh.

Which fluffy kind of potato is best for baking and mashing, according to cooks?

Floury baking potatoes are about 20 to 22 percent starch. Waxy ones hold their shape better when boiled, so they suit salads.

Which sailors are said to have first brought potatoes to Ireland, stopping there to dry their fish?

Ireland became one of the first places in Europe to grow potatoes on a big scale, in the early 1600s.

Which two Englishmen are often given credit for bringing potatoes to England?

Drake was returning from sailing right around the world. Nobody knows for sure which story is true.

What colour is the middle of a potato flower?

The petals can be white, pink, blue or purple, and insects carry the pollen from flower to flower.

Potatoes have tiny holes in their skin called lenticels. What are they for?

The 'eyes' are different: they protect the little buds that grow into new stems, and they sit in a spiral pattern.

About how much of a boiled potato is water?

A 100-gram boiled potato with its skin is 77% water and gives you about 87 calories.

About how many kinds of potato are grown in Peru, more than anywhere else?

Peruvian cooks use potatoes in lots of dishes, and mountain families make a freeze-dried potato called chuño.

In Belgium, what are the special shops that sell fries called?

Belgians call fries frieten or frites and eat them with lots of different sauces.

In Turkey, a baked potato stuffed with butter, cheese and toppings is a fast food called what?

The potato is wrapped in foil, baked, sliced down the middle and the inside mashed up with kaşar cheese.

About how long does a big potato take to bake in a normal oven?

A microwave does it in six to twelve minutes, but the skin will not go crispy that way.

In 1537, who were the first people from Europe to see a potato, while exploring Peru?

A soldier named Juan Castellanos wrote about the plant in a report on raiding an Inca village while looking for gold and silver.