Home » Sensitive Subjects » Meet a French soldier who was taken as a POW and fed only potatoes during his captivity, and survived. Feeling like he should have died, he made it his life’s mission to convince the world of the nutritional value of potatoes, and his tomb in France is decorated with potatoes as a tribute.

Meet a French soldier who was taken as a POW and fed only potatoes during his captivity, and survived. Feeling like he should have died, he made it his life’s mission to convince the world of the nutritional value of potatoes, and his tomb in France is decorated with potatoes as a tribute.

Grave of Antoine-Augustin Parmentier

If you amble through Paris’s popular Pere-Lachaise Cemetery, among tombs of celebrated philosophers, singers, and playwrights, you may discover a grave surrounded by potato plants. If an admirer has stopped by recently, there may even be a tuber resting atop the tombstone. You have found the final resting place of Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, history’s greatest potato promoter.

When Parmentier was born, in 1737, the French disdained potatoes: Farmers grew them as animal feed, but they were seen as unfit for human consumption, with the potential to cause leprosy. At the time of his death, though, potatoes were grown throughout Europe, and the hardy, dependable crop was credited for breaking a cycle of famine.

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