Things I didn't know about the potato

In a free to read article from The Economist's 1843 magazine:

Scientists reckon that potatoes originated in the Peruvian Andes. It was probably from here that the first ones were ferried back to Europe in the 16th century by Spanish conquistadores.

Europeans at first treated potatoes as a botanical curiosity, and mostly used them to feed livestock. Over time, however, they became a staple in many countries. But the Peruvian strains of potatoes were used to a consistent 12 hours of equatorial sunlight – they’re now known as “short-day potatoes” – and fared poorly in the longer but weaker summer sun of higher latitudes in Europe. Nevertheless, Europeans became so hooked on spuds that when an epidemic of potato blight hit crops in the mid-19th century, it caused the “great famine” in Ireland and beyond.

 After the famine, most farmers in Europe switched to the “long-day” species native to Chiloé. It is these Chilean varieties that, through decades of micro-evolution and selective breeding, developed into the common spuds we now see in our supermarkets. Most potatoes these days are grown in Europe and Asia: China, India and Russia are the three top producers. The citizens of Belarus, Ukraine and Latvia are the most voracious consumers, eating around 500g of potatoes a day each, or two large spuds. Yet more than 90% of modern potato varieties cultivated across the world today can be traced back to Chiloé.

It explains at the start of the article:

Off the coast of northern Patagonia, some 1,220km south of the capital of Chile, lies an island shaped like a peanut. The patchwork farms and wood-shingled churches of Chiloé lie below moody skies that often unleash horizontal raindrops amid howling winds. Get enough drizzle in your eyes to blur out the volcanoes in the distance, and you’d swear the radiant green hills belonged not in South America, but half a world away in Ireland. And just like Ireland, the staple crop on Chiloé is the potato.

Seems odd that I don't recall reading about this Very Important Island before.   

Here it is: