we are sorted a group of mates who have your back when it comes to all things food from cooking battles to gadget reviews and cookbook challenges to a midweek meal packs app breaks we uncover the tools that will help us all cook and eat smarter join our community where everything we do starts with you hello everyone this is Ben I'm Mike welcome to fridge cam now in this episode we team up with croplife International and the European crop protection Association to celebrate one of the world's most staple ingredients this is a potato and I try to be fish chef in a cook-off which we love all too often we take for granted the huge range of ingredients that we can grab from our local supermarket with thousands of fresh product stocked in a single store we've been spoilt for choice all year round but what would happen if a fruit and veg disappeared from shelves luckily for us farmers are committed to producing food in ever challenging times and conditions and there are organizations like ECPA and CLI who help these farmers protect their crops from pests and diseases so we all have an affordable healthy and sustainable food supply without any protection in a normal year some farmers could lose up to NUMBER_TOKEN percent of their crop in this episode we use your questions to dig in and find out about our favorite crops the aforementioned potato then battle it out to see if mike that's me can't beat the chef that's been in creating a dish that best celebrates the spud so you have NUMBER_TOKEN minutes to celebrate potatoes chef James is ready and prepped to judge your dishes at the end shall we get going but first to research we met with Angela Clutton one of London's finest food historians and writers along the way we found out that the first makings of a potato dish goes back to NUMBER_TOKEN BC in South America there was evidence of them doing amazing things of theirs a dish called haven't you know which is probably terrible Annunciation and it would be frozen overnight and then soaked and then stamped on to get all the water out and then dry it and so basically that's like a freeze-dried potato NUMBER_TOKEN BC I know it's mad and so that was showing that then potato support has being something which is really useful versatile crop worth doing something with because I love direct exactly we also discovered that us Europeans weren't too keen on these strange spuds when they first arrived they were really thought Thomas being either something's gonna make you ill or something that very much just for the poor you have this very interesting of being happening in France in the middle at eighteenth century middle NUMBER_TOKENs that they were bound for human consumption they were thought they were gonna kind of make people ill they didn't really understand what it was this thing that came out of once the earth and so they thought it's like the devil's work it's kind of behind the phrase a devil's apple lastly we learn all about the potato famine in Ireland because of blight a fungal disease which has affected the production of potatoes over the years light is a form of mold that attacks potatoes and it causes them to wilt and rot and the potato itself becomes all a mushy and horrible and it spreads really really quickly so when blight appears in crops across Europe in NUMBER_TOKENs it absolutely kind of decimated potato crops in Ireland it was particularly bad datas had really become the Irish proof that they relied upon and so the Irish
START_SPONSOR_TOKEN too often we take for granted the huge range of ingredients that we can grab from our local supermarket with thousands of fresh product stocked in a single store we've been spoilt for choice all year round but what would happen if a fruit and veg disappeared from shelves luckily for us farmers are committed to producing food in ever challenging times and conditions and there are organizations like ECPA and CLI who help these farmers protect their crops from pests and diseases so we all have an affordable healthy and sustainable food supply without any protection in a normal year some farmers could lose up to NUMBER_TOKEN percent of their crop in this episode we use your questions to dig in and find out about our favorite crops the aforementioned potato then battle it out to see if mike that's me can't beat the chef that's been in creating a dish that best celebrates the spud so you have NUMBER_TOKEN minutes to celebrate potatoes chef James is ready and prepped to judge your dishes at the end shall we get going but first to research we met with Angela Clutton one of London's finest food historians and writers along the way we found out that the first makings of a potato dish goes back to NUMBER_TOKEN BC in South America there was evidence of them doing amazing things of theirs a dish called haven't you know which is probably terrible Annunciation and it would be frozen overnight and then soaked and then stamped on to get all the water out and then dry it and so basically that's like a freeze-dried potato NUMBER_TOKEN BC I know it's mad and so that was showing that then potato support has being something which is really useful versatile crop worth doing something with because I love direct exactly we also discovered that us Europeans weren't too keen on these strange spuds when they first arrived they were really thought Thomas being either something's gonna make you ill or something that very much just for the poor you have this very interesting of being happening in France in the middle at eighteenth century middle NUMBER_TOKENs that they were bound for human consumption they were thought they were gonna kind of make people ill they didn't really understand what it was this thing that came out of once the earth and so they thought it's like the devil's work it's kind of behind the phrase a devil's apple lastly we learn all about the potato famine in Ireland because of blight a fungal disease which has affected the production of potatoes over the years light is a form of mold that attacks potatoes and it causes them to wilt and rot and the potato itself becomes all a mushy and horrible and it spreads really really quickly so when blight appears in crops across Europe in NUMBER_TOKENs it absolutely kind of decimated potato crops in Ireland it was particularly bad datas had really become the Irish proof that they relied upon and so the Irish END_SPONSOR_TOKEN