Audio gallery: Home of the potato
On Thanksgiving Day, we're asking you to ponder the origins of those potatoes in your holiday meal. No, we're not interested in where Aunt Gladys or Cousin Mike picked up those potatoes to mash and bring over to your feast. We want to know where the potato was first grown for food.
Here are a few hints. It's a mountainous area, in a chain of peaks that stretches more than 4, 000 miles. These mountains rise above a coastal desert on one side. On the other side of the mountains is the world's largest tropical forest.
For the Geo Quiz, we want you to identify the mountain chain and the continent where the potato was first farmed thousands of years ago.
Geo Answer:
The answer is South America, in the Andes Mountains, in an area now occupied by the nations of Peru and Bolivia. That region remains home to the greatest diversity of potatoes on earth.
And it's a place where scientists are trying to preserve those potatoes, and to help the people who depend on them.
Pamela Anderson is the director general of the International Potato Center in Lima, Peru. In this audio slide show she provides a brief and colorful history of the potato in South America.
(David Baron is the health and science editor at PRI/BBC's "The World." Baron traveled to Peru on an IRP Gatekeepers trip organized by the International Reporting Project.)