Tubers & Root Dishes

Roots were domesticated wherever the ground offered them: potatoes in the Andes around 8000 BCE, taro in New Guinea’s Kuk swamp, yams across West Africa, cassava in Amazonia. All store their energy underground where it keeps, and several are poisonous raw — so every one of these traditions also had to invent the leaching, grating or long cooking that makes them safe.