Papea Peru - Potatoes for Patriots!
In Peru the Ministery of Agriculture has launched a campaign to encourage people to eat more potatoes. This is both a nutritious choice and a patriotic act! With the massive increase in the cost of imported wheat and other cereals in the last year people in Peru found that the price of bread went up about 40%. In poorer parts of Peru this is a real problem because there is the risk of children not getting enough nutrition if the food is too expensive. The Peruvian response was creative as usual and the shops were soon selling ‘Papapan’, literally Potato Bread.
When I was last in Peru I tried some of this bread and it was nice, it is quite soft and tastes good, it is not pure potato but is a mix of wheat flour and about 30% mashed potato and tastes like French bread but has more iron. It would be nice to buy here in the UK.
Scientists believe that potatoes were first cultivated in the Andes about 8,000 years ago and there are now over 4,000 varieties (a few more than you will find in a british supermarket!) which allow potatoes of one kind or another to be grown in the very varied environments, high up in the mountains, in the valleys in dry or wet environments.
As well as proving a valuable source of nutrition for Peruvians and other Andean this incredible variety of potatoes could help feed people all around the world in very different climates where other crops would have problems.
The ‘Papea Peru’ campaign not only encourages people to eat potatoes but reminds them that it is good for their pockets and their country, as more demand for potatoes means more money for communities that produce them. ‘Papea’ is a slang word meaning ‘eat’ like English people say ’scoff’ that actually comes from the word Papa, meaning potato. So it has a double meaning, both ‘Eat Peruvian’ and ‘Peruvian Potatoes’ – it doesn’t translate so easily. In the television commercials people from different walks of life say ‘Este Pechito Come Papa’, this is also slang, literally translating as ‘This chest eats potato’ which is what you would say while patting your chest to show you mean yourself, like if you were saying ‘I was the one who thought of that!’ so it means they are proudly saying ’I eat potato’!
In this video you will see people who eat potato – including in our modern society a ‘Gringo’ immigrant with his wife and baby!
You can see they have Pastel de Papa (a savoury potato cake), mashed potato, and a Peruvian favourite called Papa Rellena (a ball of potato stuffed with meat).
There is a lot of word play going on here, but the translation is something like. “Potatoes are nutritious and eating well is good. Put potatoes on your Plate – Papea Peru!”
