The Sweet Potato That Destroyed China

The Sweet Potato That Destroyed China

Did you know that the sweet potato destroyed China? If you find this to be an outrageous claim, just ask Charles Mann, the author of the bestselling book 1493. Better yet, take a trip back to 1492 when Columbus landed in the Bahamas. His great contribution wasn’t in discovering America. Voyagers from North Africa may have done that before Christ.

Columbus did speed up globalization. Horses, pigs, and smallpox were imported to the New World from Europe. Lemons, oranges, and slaves came from Africa. Spices found their way from Asia. Before Columbus sailed, the French never smoked a cigarette, the Irish hadn’t tasted a potato, and the Italians had no tomato sauce. Those commodities existed only in the New World. Columbus didn’t discover America, but he opened its treasure trove to the world.

That brings us to the sweet potato, a tasty tuberous root indigenous to South America, and silver, another prevalent natural resource. When a Spanish galleon stumbled upon a Chinese fleet in Manila, traders from China finally saw something they wanted from the West: the New World silver on that Spanish ship. Soon huge fleets of Spanish galleons were transporting tons of Peruvian silver to Manila in exchange for Chinese silk, porcelain, and spices. It was a trade deal made in heaven, until a Chinese merchant saw sweet potatoes on a Spanish ship.

When that trader tasted a baked sweet potato, it was love at first bite. He bought up all the potatoes in the Spanish fleet. Sure enough, the sweet potato became wildly popular in China. Soon the Spanish were bringing bags of these delectable delights along with their silver. The best part of this sweet deal was that the potatoes could be planted in the rocky soil of mountains above fertile rice valleys. But the sweet potato craze led to greedy farmers clearing forests to plant more. Eventually, tropical rains eroded the deforested mountains.

Floods came to the valleys below, wiping out the rice. Famine led to food riots. As emperors of China retreated inside the Forbidden City, warlords rose up to quell the anarchy. Millions were slaughtered. As China’s infrastructure collapsed, pestilence stalked the land. A weakened China was taken over by European powers, and it did not recover until fifty years ago—all because of the sweet potato!

Here’s a compelling question: what’s the “sweet potato” that could destroy America—that thing we crave today that might be remembered as a tragedy four hundred years from now? Could it be our iPhones? We are as crazy about our handheld devices as the Chinese were about their sweet potatoes. Everywhere we go, people ignore each other while staring at a screen, communicating with folks who aren’t in the room. Social media multitasking is producing an attention-deficit generation. Never has friendship been so cheaply gained or so easily disposed of as on Facebook. Will future generations talk about the “Apple” that hastened the end of deeply genuine relationships? Today, why don’t you put your handheld devices aside and engage in some meaningful face-to-face conversation? Remember this before you pick up today’s version of the sweet potato:

Posting on social media while socializing is unsocial.

Let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another.

Hebrews 10:25