Then & Now | How Hong Kong got its taste for sweet potatoes, once grown as pig feed
- The sweet potato was a hardy, hearty – and delicious – substitute for rice and was widely used to feed pigs, making it less attractive for some people
- The Manchus may have ended their rule a century earlier had it not been for ‘New World’ foods helping to calm rural unrest over food shortages and overpopulation
Chinese philosopher and novelist Lin Yutang shrewdly noted in My Country and My People (1935) that “patriotism is simply nostalgia for the foods of one’s childhood”.
Hong Kong’s ongoing fondness for the humble sweet potato, in all its delicious variations, further validates this simple, yet potent, truth.
Many botanical introductions across maritime Asia came as a direct result of the 16th century Portuguese voyages of global exploration, trade and conquest. Sweetcorn and maize, tomatoes, guavas and – most notably – the chilli; none of these now-universal food plants existed anywhere in Asia until European settlers introduced them.
Unlike the common potato – another botanical migrant from Central America – sweet potatoes can tolerate poor soils and humid, subtropical conditions, and thus became more widely cultivated.
While the Portuguese were responsible for the wider dissemination of these species, the first introductions usually came via the Spanish, who brought seeds and tubers across from Mexico to the Philippines on their annual silver bullion transports from Acapulco to Manila.
