A Tuber and A Grass--Smithsonian Magazine

The little-known role the powerful potato played in the development of color photography is described in a beautifully-illustrated piece in the September issue of Smithsonian Magazine. In 1903 Auguste and Louis Lumiere of Lyons, France, adhered dyed microscopic potato starch crystals to a glass plate used by photographers. The resulting images called autochromes are still lovely today--soft, true colors--a portrait of Mark Twain makes the clever curmudgeon almost cuddly. The autochrome is just one facet of the amazing spud, well-chronicled on our sister site for The Potato Museum. Alas, the author of the Smithsonian piece, as usual for writers unfamiliar with the terrific tuber describes the potato as "lowly and lumpy."

The harvesting of wild rice by native Ojibwa in northern Minnesota is chronicled in another piece in the same issue of Smithsonian. Each September Indians use the traditional "knocking" method to gather 50,000 pounds of rice into their canoes. Most is then sold to local mills.

Comments

[Kelly Mahoney]

And that is why I love the potato.