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Secrets of the Potato
 BECOME A KITCHEN BOTANIST: Secrets of the Potato
The white or Irish potato is one of the most common foods in the world and many of us eat them every day. You know it is a part of a plant, but what part? Plants with flowers have roots, shoots, leaves, buds, stems, flowers and fruits. So you might think a potato is a root, because it grows underground.
Take a really close look at an oblong potato to discover its secrets. One end has a bit of dry tissue, which might have provided an attachment, so we can call this end the base. The surface has many indentations commonly called "eyes." Are they located on the surface at random, or do they describe a pattern? You get the prize if you say yes and that the pattern is a spiral!
Now look at each "eye." There is some scruffy stuff in the center and a faint ridge on the side of the eye towards the base.
You do an experiment at home to find out how all these clues fit together. Cut a potato in two. Make sure one piece of the potato has one or more eyes, and put the cut surface of that piece in a shallow container with water. In a few days, shoots will emerge from the eyes, and in time, potato plants made up of stems and leaves will grow.
The leaves will be arranged on the stem in a spiral, and each leaf will have a bud between the leaf base and the stem. Remember the ridge at the base end of each eye? It marks an unformed leaf.
So the underground potato is similar in its basic structure to the stems growing above ground. The potato is an underground stem called a tuber, and this is reflected in the plant’s scientific name, Solanum tuberosum.
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