He ducks under a blue canopy on rainy days. He hasn't found a way to escape the spring heat, so he just tolerates it. Brown's customers keep coming back to savor their sweetness. But scientists are trying to reduce that sweetness to get even more people to develop a taste for the vitamin-rich vegetable. The two have already created a non-sweet sweet potato that tastes like an Irish potato.
Sweet potatoes are more nutritious than white potatoes.
They are packed with vitamins and minerals and low in fat and calories. They grow well in warmer climates, making them an ideal food for the tropics. They were a staple of impoverished Southerners during in the 1920s and they still are the world's seventh-leading food crop. But U.S. per-capita consumption has dropped from 29 pounds during the 1920s to a low of 3.9 pounds in the 1990s. Per-capita consumption of white potatoes, which account for 31 percent of all vegetables consumed in the United States, has increased to 140 pounds, largely because of the increased demand for potato chips and french fries.