I read it in the National Geographic is as close to a guarantee of truthiness as you're ever likely to find. In its recent photo essay on Potato Variety, however, it gets things wrong not once but five times. Despite its mania for accuracy and fact-checking, Nat Geo has yet to respond.
We asked Botany Professor Eve Emswiller to give us her expert view on our blog; here is an edited version of what she wrote.
As far as I can tell, National Geographic's gallery of “Uncommon Chickens” didn’t include any ducks, turkeys or bats, and the one for “Rare Cattle” had no goats or camels. People would have noticed. In the “Potato Variety” gallery, on the other hand, they missed half of the story. If they’d gotten it right, they would have been able to educate their readers about more than variation within a single crop. They could have gone on to explain about the values of cultivating a diversity of different species, diversity that far exceeds even that in the amazing native Andean potatoes.
Among the not-so-lost crops from long-before-the-Incas, are a whole bunch of Andean root and tuber crops (often lumped together as ARTs). Ancient Andean people not only domesticated potatoes in all their incredible diversity, but also other tuber crops from three completely different plant families. For those who haven’t met them yet, the three non-potato Andean tubers are (1) oca, Oxalis tuberosa, of the Oxalidaceae, the wood sorrel family; (2) ulluco or papa lisa, Ullucos tuberosus, of the Basellaceae, the same family as Malabar spinach; and (3) mashua, añu, or isañu, Tropaeolum tuberosum, from the Tropaeolaceae, the family of garden nasturtiums. None of these are closely related to each other, or closely related to the family to which potatoes belong (Solanaceae, the nightshade family). No other area of the world domesticated so many different tubers.
The three “minor” tuber crops may not have gained the worldwide importance of the potato, but for a story that focused on the loss of diversity, these other tubers offer even more poignant examples. In my travels in Peru with the germplasm coordinators of INIA (which currently stands for Instituto Nacional de Innovación Agraria), we came across many places where oca was being abandoned by farmers, due either to severe weevil larvae infestations, or in favor of more marketable crops such as commercial potato varieties.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it is absolutely wonderful that the NGS is featuring agricultural biodiversity in the magazine and online. Maybe it bodes well for another spurt of attention to this theme from magazine journalists — don’t they return to it every 25 years or so?
In truth, people are constantly mixing up the Andean tubers, so it is really no surprise that it is happening again. Ulluco is often mistaken for a colorful potato, and it seems as if oca and mashua are mistaken for each other more often than not. Many of the images online that are purporting to be oca, are not. Meanwhile, oca is often mistaken for a native Andean potato, just as in the case of the five tubers of oca (one of them fasciated) that were called potato by National Geographic. So, this is not an unusual case.
In fact, things may actually be better than I thought. See the 11th image in the Food Ark Photo Gallery, which has a caption that begins “A nest of hay preserves harvested potatoes and tubers in Pampallacta, Peru.” Pampallacta is part of the Parque de la Papa, yet the tubers pictured are oca again. So, does that mean that the Parque de la Papa is indeed working to preserve the non-potato Andean tubers as well?
Does truth, or rather accuracy, matter? Maybe not in entertainment. Who cares that a llama (or at any rate, some sort of South American camellid) trotted through the agora in Brad Pitt's ancient Troy? Or that Russell Crowe's Gladiator could never have trailed his hand so photogenically through ancient wheat? But in National Geographic? Well, we think it does. Especially if you are drawing attention to food diversity, rather than hiding it.