“Not at all. They were taken from here to Ireland.”
“Then why are they called Irish potatoes?”
“Because they proved to be so much the most profitable crop the Irish people could raise that they soon came to be the chief crop grown there. I don’t know whether the colonists found any of them growing wild in Virginia or not. They are supposed to have originated in South America and Mexico. At any rate, they are strictly native Americans. By the way,” said Ed, “the people who thought tomatoes poisonous were not so very far out in their reckoning. Both the tomato and the potato are plants belonging to the deadly nightshade family, and the vines of both contain a virulent poison.”
“Perhaps somebody tried tomato vines for greens,” said Phil, “and got himself ready for the coroner before the tomatoes had time to grow and ripen.”
“That isn’t unlikely,” said Ed. “At any rate, an experiment of that kind would have gone far to give the fruit a bad name.”
“However that may be,” said Irv, “it is pretty certain that men must have found out what was and what wasn’t good to eat mainly by trying. There’s salt now. It is the only mineral substance that men everywhere eat. All the rest of our foods are either animal or vegetable.”
“And that’s a puzzle,” replied Ed. “Man must have got a very early taste of salt, or else there wouldn’t be any man.”
“How’s that?”
“Why, the human animal simply can’t live without salt. He digests his food by means of an acid which he gets from salt, and from nothing else whatever. So he must have had salt from the beginning.”