49 Fun Facts About Potato Trivia for Kids

The potato is often called a root vegetable, but botanists say it is really a swollen what?

Stem: a potato is a tuber, the swollen tip of an underground stem, and the plant packs it with starch as its own food store.

Where in the world did people first grow potatoes?

In the Andes: farmers near Lake Titicaca, in today's Peru and Bolivia, tamed the potato from wild plants that were too bitter to eat.

About how long ago did people first start farming potatoes?

About 8,000 years ago, which makes potato farming far older than Egypt's pyramids; yet nobody in Europe, Asia or Africa tasted a potato until about 450 years ago.

Which explorers first brought potatoes across the ocean to Europe?

The Spanish met the potato while conquering the Inca Empire, and by the 1570s their Canary Islands were growing it for sale and shipping it on to northern Europe.

Potatoes are cousins of which other food plant?

The tomato is a close cousin: after flowering, a potato plant even grows small green berries that look like tiny tomatoes, though farmers plant pieces of potato instead of the seeds inside.

What are the little dents on a potato called?

Eyes: each one shelters a tiny bud, so a potato left in a cupboard will send shoots out of them as it tries to grow into a new plant.

Why do farmers keep potatoes covered up in the dark?

Light turns them green and bitter: in the light they also build up solanine, a bitter natural poison that the plant uses to defend itself against pests.

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

About 5,000, in all sorts of shapes, sizes and colours; a special gene bank keeps thousands of them safe so that no kind is ever lost.

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

China grew almost a quarter of the world's potatoes in 2024, with India second, even though the plant reached Asia only a few centuries ago.

In 1995, where did scientists manage to grow five small potatoes as an experiment?

In space: astronauts aboard the shuttle Columbia grew them in a special chamber, a test of how crews on long voyages might one day farm their own food.

Which British pie is topped with mashed potato instead of pastry?

Shepherd's pie is traditionally made with minced lamb under its mash; make it with beef and many people call it cottage pie instead.

Which queen is said to have worn potato flowers at court to show off the plant?

Marie Antoinette is said to have worn the blossoms in her hair, and King Louis XVI joined in, after the royal couple were presented with bouquets of them.

Frederick the Great, the king who ordered his farmers to plant potatoes in the 1700s, ruled which kingdom?

Prussia: Frederick sent out orders and planting instructions so that his people would still have something to eat when famine struck.

Antoine Parmentier, first fed potatoes as a prisoner of war, went home to champion them in which country?

France is where Parmentier, an army pharmacist who came home from captivity a potato enthusiast, hosted dinners for famous guests built around potato dishes.

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

Vincent van Gogh gave the family rough, bony hands on purpose: he wanted to show they had dug the potatoes out of the earth themselves and so had honestly earned their meal.

Chuño, a mountain food that keeps for years, is made by doing what to potatoes?

Freeze-drying them: the potatoes are left out to freeze on bitterly cold nights and dried in the daytime sun, making a light food that once fed Inca armies on the march.

What destroyed Ireland's potato crops in the 1840s, causing a terrible famine?

A plant disease called blight rotted the potatoes in the ground year after year, and because Ireland grew only a few kinds, almost none of the crop could resist it.

Despite their name, French fries are also claimed as a national invention by which country?

Belgium says its cooks were frying sticks of potato first, though historians still argue about it; Belgians eat theirs with mayonnaise and have even opened a museum devoted to fries.

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

Thomas Jefferson fell for French cooking while serving as America's minister in Paris, and had James Hemings, the enslaved man who cooked for him, trained there as a chef.

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

Crisps is the British and Irish word, because over there 'chips' already means the chunky fried potatoes that Americans call fries.

In the famous legend of the first potato chips, what did a fussy diner keep saying about his fried potatoes?

Too thick, so the annoyed cook is said to have sliced the next batch paper-thin; historians call the 1853 tale a myth, because recipes for such chips were in print decades earlier.

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.

Ordinary chips are slices of whole potato, but what are Pringles made from?

A dough of dried potato is shaped and fried into that stackable curve; potato is only 42 percent of the recipe, so a judge once ruled Pringles were not potato chips at all, until a higher court disagreed.

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

Milk and butter, and sometimes a great deal of butter: some French recipes use as much as one part butter for every two of potato, and the chef Joël Robuchon became famous for just such a buttery mash.

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

A jacket is the potato's own skin; in Victorian London, street sellers sold hot jacket potatoes by the ton all through the autumn and winter.

Tater tots were invented in 1953 to use up what?

Leftover slivers of cut potato struck the founders of the Ore-Ida frozen-food company as a waste, so they mixed them with flour and seasoning and squeezed the mix through holes to make little nuggets.

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

Breakfast is when American diners serve them, and the name is a recipe in itself: 'hash' comes from a French word for chopping up, so hash browns are chopped, browned potatoes.

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

Cheese curds, fresh enough to squeak, went onto fries and gravy in rural Quebec in the 1950s, and several towns still argue about which of them did it first.

Gnocchi are little potato dumplings from which country?

Italy also makes gnocchi with no potato at all: in Rome they are made from semolina instead.

Latkes are potato pancakes eaten to celebrate which holiday?

Hanukkah recalls a little lamp oil that lasted eight days, so its treats are fried in oil; the first latkes were probably made of cheese, as potatoes had not yet reached Europe.

Sweet potatoes are only distant relatives of potatoes and belong to which flower family?

Morning glory is the sweet potato's family, so it is barely related to the potato; and although American shops often label the orange ones as yams, true yams are a different plant again.

Mr. Potato Head is credited as the first toy ever advertised where, back in 1952?

On television: the advert spoke straight to children instead of their parents, a new idea at the time, and it turned the toy into a runaway hit within its first year.

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

A real vegetable, usually a potato from the kitchen: the toy named after a potato came without one, and its plastic potato body did not arrive until 1964.

George Lerner first sold his Potato Head parts as free gifts for boxes of what?

Cereal: a cereal maker bought Lerner's idea first, and the brothers behind Hasbro then paid to take it over and sell it as a toy of its own.

Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head are characters in which series of animated films?

Toy Story made a film star of the old plaything in 1995, giving him the voice of comedian Don Rickles and a whole new generation of fans.

If a couch potato watches too much TV, what does a 'mouse potato' spend too long using?

A computer: 'mouse potato' appeared in the 1990s as a joke on 'couch potato', the older nickname for someone who lazes in front of the TV all day.

Which potato variety is America's classic choice for baking whole?

Russet Burbank: 'russet' is an old word for reddish-brown, the colour of its skin, and the variety descends from a seedling that Luther Burbank raised in the 1870s and sold for a small sum before moving to California.

The Yukon Gold potato was bred by university scientists in which country?

Canada: Gary Johnston bred it at the University of Guelph in 1966, to suit the tastes of immigrants who had arrived from Europe.

Which kind of potato do most cooks choose for mashing and for baking whole?

Floury potatoes are packed with starch, so they collapse into a dry fluff when cooked; waxy ones hold their shape instead, which is what you want in a salad.

Which US state grows more potatoes than any other?

Idaho: potatoes thrive in its light volcanic soil, watered by canals dug from the Snake River, and the state grows about a third of America's whole crop.

In a British fish and chip shop, the chips are traditionally sprinkled with salt and what?

Vinegar: fish and chips mattered so much to Britain that it was one of the few foods the government never rationed during the Second World War.

What colour is the middle of a potato flower?

Yellow: the petals may be white, pink, purple or blue, but the little cone of pollen-bearing stamens in the middle stays yellow whatever the variety.

What are lenticels, the tiny holes in a potato's skin, used for?

Breathing: a potato is still alive after it is dug up, so it goes on swapping gases with the air through its skin, even in a sack in the cupboard.

A potato is famous for its starch, but what is it mostly made of?

Water makes up about three quarters of a boiled potato, which is why instant mash is simply real potato with the water taken out.

If a newspaper calls an issue a 'hot potato', what does it mean?

Nobody wants to handle it: like a potato straight from the oven, a 'hot potato' is a problem so awkward that people pass it on as fast as they can.

A British 'chip butty' is a pile of hot chips served in what?

A sandwich: 'butty' is slang that grew out of the word butter, and the classic version is soft white bread, generously buttered, wrapped around hot chips.

Kumpir, a baked potato mashed with cheese and piled high with toppings, is a favourite street food in which country?

Turkey: kumpir stalls mash the potato inside its skin and heap on toppings from sweetcorn to sausage; the snack arrived from the Balkans, where a similar word simply means potato.

Why do many cooks bake potatoes in an oven when microwaves are far quicker?

For a crunchy skin: a microwave cooks the inside in about ten minutes but leaves the outside soft, while an hour or so of dry oven heat turns it crackly.

Kartoffel, the German word for potato, grew out of an older word for which food?

Truffle: potatoes swell underground just as truffles do, so an old word for truffle, tartufolo, was borrowed for the new crop, and German turned it into Kartoffel.