A sweetpotato by any other name is still a sweet potato.

“When I was growing up in Louisiana,” Wayne McLaurin
recalls, “if it hadn’t been for
sweet potatoes and peas, we’d have starved slap to death.”

Since that time, McLaurin, a horticulturist with the University
of Georgia Extension
Service, has gathered some juicy facts about this food. It isn’t
related to the Irish
potato, by the way. That could be why the National Society of
Horticulture Science
now refers to it as sweetpotato — one word, not two.

However you spell it, the sweet potato deserves more respect.

“Nutritionally, the sweet potato ranges as the most nutritious
food per unit eaten of
anything,” McLaurin said. “It has almost everything in it,
including estrogen, vitamins
A and C, beta-carotene, starches, sugar and minerals, but no
protein.”

It can be baked or fried. It’s great as chips or in casseroles
and pies. Sweet potatoes are
a great substitute for carrots in carrot cake. The list goes
on.

“In the pre-Civil War South,” McLaurin said, “people harvested
the sweet potato, took
the unblemished ones and piled them up, covered them with straw
and mud five inches
deep and sealed them in.

“The dried mud insulated them, repelled the rain and kept them a
good temperature,”
he said. “When they needed the food, they’d break into the hill
and eat them. The
sweet potatoes would store all winter as long as the seal was
intact.”

The sweet potato was a staple in Georgia as recently as the
1920s and ’30s, when
farmers grew 80,000 acres. A favorite meal for many Southern
generations was sweet
potatoes, cornbread and salt pork.

“We didn’t have as many Irish potatoes that grew well, and sweet
potatoes did grow
well,” McLaurin said. “So they were more plentiful.

“It was a big part of the diet,” he said. “Per capita
consumption has gone way, way
down, but it’s making a comeback because of the nutrition.”

Researchers are developing other flavor types of sweet
potatoes.

“We have five to seven types of apples but only one sweet potato
that we work with,”
McLaurin said. “The flavor is very strong, but we tend to eat
things like white bread,
Irish potatoes or rice — bland things — so we can put
something with it.

“We’re trying to develop a bland sweet potato with high
nutrition,” he said, “that might
compete with Irish potatoes and grow well in Georgia.”

Farmers didn’t stop growing sweet potatoes just because people’s
tastes changed.

“The sweet potato weevil is a real problem,” McLaurin said. “We
don’t really have
anything other than two bricks that will kill it. It’s one of
the two major insect
problems worldwide.”

UGA horticulturist Stan Kays is working with McLaurin to assess
sweet potatoes
worldwide to look at flavors.

“We’ve found everything from stuff that’s so sweet to others
that are horrible,”
McLaurin said. “We found buttery flavors and others that taste
like turpentine or
canned corn.”

McLaurin’s feels strongly that “sweet potatoes have real
potential for increasing human
nutrition. They’re one of the highest potentials for value, not
just an empty
carbohydrate.”

They also bring out the chef in McLaurin. What’s his favorite
way to cook sweet
potatoes?

“I like them baked,” he said. “Or french fry them with fish. Or
french fry them and put
some cinnamon and brown sugar on them for breakfast. Chips are
good with blue
cheese dressing.

“My mama would mash them, form them into a ball, poke a hole and
put a
marshmallow inside, and roll the ball in coconut and chipped
pecans.”

The sweet potato may be only holiday food for most people, but
it has a friend in
Wayne McLaurin.

To learn more about growing and cooking sweet potatoes, contact
the county
extension
office.