A dig through time · by Kofi Richter
8,000 Years of Purple
September 20, 2026
When people at the market see a Russian Blue cut open for the first time, they usually ask the same thing: is that natural? It is. In fact, purple potatoes are about as natural, and as old, as potatoes get. Grab a shovel. We're going down.
▼ Depth 0.3 m
2026
Port Perry, Ontario
A Russian Blue takes first place in the red and blue potato class at the Port Perry Fair. It's grown in Scugog soil, sold at the Port Perry Farmers' Market, and mashed into a colour that makes kids stop and stare. To understand how it got here, you have to dig a long way down.
▼ Depth 1.2 m
1900s
The seed savers
For most of the 20th century, supermarkets narrowed potatoes down to a handful of reliable white and russet varieties. The odd, colourful ones survived in backyard gardens and seed-saver catalogues, passed from grower to grower. That's the world heirlooms like the Russian Blue come from. Its exact family tree is fuzzy, as heirloom histories often are; the name probably tells you more about whoever was saving the seed than about where it started.
▼ Depth 2.5 m
1600s–1700s
Across the Atlantic (again)
Potatoes reached North America in a roundabout way: not straight up from South America, but back across the Atlantic with European settlers. Within a couple of centuries they were a staple in farm kitchens from the Maritimes to Upper Canada.
▼ Depth 3.4 m
1570s
Europe meets the potato
Spanish ships brought potatoes to Europe in the second half of the 1500s. Europeans were suspicious at first. Potatoes are in the nightshade family, they grow underground, and they looked nothing like grain. It took a couple of centuries, some determined champions (like the French pharmacist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier) and a few famines before the potato became the staple it is today.
▼ Depth 5.8 m
8,000 years ago
The Andes
This is where it all began: the high Andes of what's now southern Peru and northwestern Bolivia, around Lake Titicaca. Farmers there domesticated the potato roughly 8,000 years ago and, over generations, developed thousands of varieties: yellow, red, speckled, and plenty that were purple all the way through.
They also invented chuño: potatoes left out to freeze in the cold mountain nights, thawed in the daytime sun and stomped to squeeze out the water. The result keeps for years. Freeze-dried food, thousands of years before astronauts.
▼ Depth 7.9 m
Before that
Wild roots
Go deeper still and you'll find the potato's wild relatives, more than a hundred species growing from the southwestern United States down to Chile. Small, bitter, and tough, they're the reason plant breeders still go looking in the wild when they need potatoes that can handle new pests and a changing climate.
So the next time someone asks if purple potatoes are natural, you can tell them: they've been purple for thousands of years. We just got them a ribbon.