Potato is the term which applies either to the starchy tuberous crop from the perennial plant Solanum tuberosum of the Solanaceae, or nightshade, family, or to the plant itself. Potato is the world's most widely grown tuber crop, and the fourth largest food crop in terms of fresh produce ? after rice, wheat, and maize ('corn').http://faostat.fao.org/site/340/default.aspx The potato originated in the area of contemporary Peru and Bolivia, identified more specifically in research published by David Spooner in 2005 as an area of southern Peru, just north of Lake Titicaca.http://www.cipotato.org/pressroom/press_releases_detail.asp?cod=17&lang=en Potato was introduced to Europe probably in the 1570s, or approximately eighty years after the first voyage of Columbus in 1492, and subsequently by European mariners to territories and ports throughout the world as European colonization expanded in the seventeenth and eighteenth

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