I never ate a sweet potato I didn’t like.

Turkey and green beans (my children’s favorites), are holiday
foods from the Americas. My own Thanksgiving favorite, the
sweet
potato — or as some call it, the yam — is another New World
food.

Growing up with the greatest cook in the world, we learned early
to eat pretty much everything. In the blending of French,
Italian, Creole and Cajun, though, there was always true
“Southern cooking,” which involved sweet potatoes.

French Fried for Breakfast

Mamma fixed them french fried for breakfast with cinnamon and
brown sugar. For other meals, she baked, boiled or candied them
with marshmallows, made mouth-watering pies and also
sweet-potato
chips. We also ate many cold sweet potatoes as a snack after
getting in from school.

My favorites, however, were the sweet-potato surprises. They
were
made from baked sweet potatoes that Mamma mashed with spices and
rolled into golf-ball-size pieces. A depression with her thumb
into the ball gave the right amount of space to insert one or
two
miniature marshmallows.

Mamma then reformed the ball, rolled it in fresh-grated coconut
and chopped pecans and baked it until the outside was crusty and
the marshmallow melted inside.

Sweet Potatoes or Yams?

We called our sweet potatoes yams because the variety we grew
was
the Puerto Rican type that was moist-fleshed and very sweet. The
name “sweet potato” and “yam” have been used interchangeably
over
the years.

Actually, the African word nyami, referring to the starchy,
edible root of the Dioscorea genus of plants, was adopted in its
English form, yam.

This plant has a very starchy, nonsweet tuber very unlike the
moist-fleshed sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas). The
National
Society of Horticulture Science now refers to our “yam” as
sweetpotato — one word (but dictionaries still list it as two
words).

High in Vitamin A

The sweet potato is high in carbohydrates and vitamin A. It has
an abundance of uses. We cook the leaves like greens. And
besides
eating the roots all those wonderful ways, we process them into
snacks and candy for people, feed for animals, starch, flour,
alcohol and a variety of industrial products.

Sweet potatoes yield very well under a wide range of
environmental conditions. They can produce more edible energy
per
acre per day than wheat, rice or cassava.

Ranking seventh in total production among global food crops,
more
than 95 percent of the world’s sweet potatoes are grown in
emerging countries, typically by small-scale farmers and often
in
marginal areas. In developing countries, it is the fifth most
important food crop and is grown more than any other root
crop.

A History of Saving Lives

This hardy root crop has a long history of saving lives. The
Japanese have repeatedly relied on it after typhoons have
devastated rice crops. Sweet potatoes kept millions from
starvation in famine-plagued China in the early 1960s. And in
Uganda, where a virus ravaged cassava crops in the 1990s, rural
communities depended on sweet potatoes to keep hunger at bay.

In the densely populated, semiarid plains of eastern Africa, the
sweet potato is called cilera abana, “protector of the
children.”
The sweet potato is now the latest great hope in the war on
blindness, too.

In Africa, 3 million children under 5 years old suffer
blindness or some form of degenerative eye disease due to a lack
of vitamin A in their diet. Scientists have spent the past
decade
breeding orange-flesh, high-vitamin-A sweet potatoes to suit
Africans’ taste.

As you enjoy Thanksgiving dinner, just think of the way sweet
potatoes have changed lives over the globe.