Potato Tuber

Today potatoes are commonly eaten mashed, fried, boiled, baked, and most any other way imaginable, but when Europeans first came into contact with the potato plant (Solanum tuberosum) they were very skeptical of it. A native of South America, the potato had been cultivated for well over a thousand years by the Incas when Spaniards arrived on the continent in the mid-sixteenth century and returned to Europe with specimens of the plant.