History tends to celebrate conquerors, kings and the occasional philosopher who managed to invent both a theory and a scandal. The quiet revolutionaries of the kitchen receive far less attention, such as Antoine Augustin Parmentier. A pharmacist by training and a potato evangelist by vocation, he spent much of the late eighteenth century persuading France that a strange underground root vegetable was not a threat to civilisation.
At the time the potato was widely suspected of being the botanical equivalent of a criminal. Many Europeans believed it caused disease, moral decline and an unattractive complexion. In France it was often relegated to animal feed. Its reputation had not been helped by the fact that it belonged to the nightshade family, a group of plants that includes several species with the social habits of poison.
Parmentier encountered the potato under unusual circumstances. During the Seven Years’ War he was captured by the Prussians and, as a prisoner of war, fed a steady diet of potatoes. Instead of dying, which would have confirmed prevailing French wisdom, he emerged perfectly healthy. This led him to suspect that the vegetable might have been unfairly maligned.
Back in France he embarked on what would today be called a public relations campaign. The Enlightenment produced many great thinkers, but Parmentier may have been the first man to market a vegetable with the enthusiasm of a modern brand manager. He organised dinners where every dish featured potatoes.
He persuaded the French Academy to consider the humble root a solution to famine. He even convinced Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to play along. The king reportedly wore a potato flower in his buttonhole, while the queen adorned her hair with the blossoms, a piece of culinary propaganda that made the vegetable fashionable at Versailles.
Parmentier’s most famous stunt involved a field of potatoes outside Paris. During the day it was guarded by soldiers, giving the impression that the crop was something extraordinarily valuable. At night the guards conveniently disappeared. Parisians promptly stole the potatoes, which was precisely the point. If the public believed the vegetable was worth stealing, they might also believe it worth eating.
The campaign worked. By the early nineteenth century the potato had become an accepted part of the French diet. Parmentier’s name now adorns several dishes, including Hachis Parmentier, a comforting arrangement of minced meat and mashed potato, sometimes described as the French cousin of Shepherd’s Pie.
But there is yet another culinary legacy, attributed to him with a mixture of pride and diplomatic discomfort. If Parmentier popularised the potato in France, one could argue that he is responsible for the French fry.
The suggestion unsettles people. Belgians insist that fries were invented in the Meuse valley long before Parmentier began his potato crusade. Americans have enthusiastically adopted the dish while ignoring the geopolitical implications of the word “French”. The French themselves tend to call them simply Frites, neatly sidestepping the question of who deserves credit with diplomatic aplomb.
Nevertheless, Parmentier’s role is difficult to ignore. Without his campaign the potato would well have remained a botanical curiosity in French agriculture. Without widespread potatoes there would have been no abundance of sliced, fried potato sticks. And without those, an entire global snack industry would look very different.
The modern world has taken the humble fried potato to remarkable lengths. It appears beside hamburgers in American diners, alongside steaks in Parisian bistros and inside paper cones at Belgian street stalls. Entire multinational corporations have built fortunes on little more than potatoes, salt and hot oil.
No other pharmacists can lay claim to have changed the world’s eating habits with a humble vegetable first encountered in a Prussian prison.
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