I'm not a scientist but an experimenter

September 21, 2016 10:10 PM

How Mr and Mrs Gock Saved the Kumara - amongst other achievements.
posted by unliteral (8 comments total)

This is great, thanks a lot.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:46 PM on September 21, 2016

Thank you for posting this. What's interesting is that the kumara we all grew up with in New Zealand (and which, I guess, has made its way into Australian cuisine), the "Gock kumara," if you will, is nothing like the pre-European kumara that formed the staple food of the Maori diet. That kumara would've been tough, fibrous, and tiny (perhaps as small as a yam) and was quickly bred out in NZ once better varieties of sweet potato were imported into the country via international trade routes after European contact and settlement. There's some more information about the multiple timelines and routes involved in the spread of kumara in the Pacific here:

The humble sweet potato is an immigrant to Oceania. Native to South America, the tuber has proliferated through Polynesia and the surrounding Pacific islands — but no one is sure how it got there. Using genetic evidence from herbarium specimens and modern crops, researchers have now narrowed down the route of the sweet potato, which could provide clues as to the movements of the people who carried it.

Brian Switek, DNA shows how the sweet potato crossed the sea, Nature (21 January 2013).
posted by Sonny Jim at 12:05 AM on September 22, 2016 [5 favorites]

From Sonny Jim's link: I looked up the PNAS paper, and here's a map of the dispersal of Kumaras
posted by dhruva at 12:12 AM on September 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

These people are amazing. Love her shout out to Syrians right as the credits roll.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:32 AM on September 22, 2016

Tiny tuber terminology tangent: Kumaras and what are called sweet potatoes here in the US are the tuberous roots of the Ipomoea batatas plant. Sometimes these tubers also get called yams here. However, tubers from a completely different genus of plants, Dioscorea, get called yams here too. Delightfully*, a third kind of tuber from an other completely different plant (Oxalis tuberosa) is called in the states, a “New Zealand yam.”

Oh and, those things called potatoes in the US? Unrelated to either yams, New Zealand yams, or sweet potatoes.
posted by pickles_have_souls at 8:08 AM on September 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

And there are people who think immigrants are bad. Makes you think.
posted by adam hominem at 3:24 PM on September 22, 2016

What a lovely story, and what adorable, admirable people.
posted by Oyéah at 5:02 PM on September 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

What an awesome couple. Here's a couple more articles about them and their innovation.

“What are we going to eat? Somebody has to do the growing. You must work for mankind, not yourself”.
posted by lucidium at 5:16 PM on September 22, 2016 [1 favorite]