When: February 22
National Cook a Sweet Potato Day celebrates a root vegetable with extraordinary nutritional density, a history of use across Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and a peculiar American tradition of burying it under sugar and marshmallows on Thanksgiving in ways that obscure its actual flavor. Cooked simply, it's one of the most satisfying vegetables available.
The sweet potato is nutritionally one of the most complete foods on earth — and Americans mostly eat it once a year, covered in marshmallows.
Sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) are native to Central or South America and were domesticated at least 5,000 years ago. They were brought to Polynesia by pre-Columbian contact — the DNA evidence of sweet potato in Polynesia dating to at least 1200 CE, before European exploration, is one of the clearest proofs of pre-Columbian trans-Pacific contact. They spread globally through the Columbian Exchange after 1492. Sweet potatoes are nutritionally extraordinary: a medium baked sweet potato provides over 400% of the daily value of vitamin A (as beta-carotene), significant vitamin C, B vitamins, potassium, and fiber — for roughly 100 calories. NASA has studied sweet potatoes extensively as a candidate crop for long-duration space missions because of their nutritional density and caloric output per unit of grow space. The confusion between "sweet potato" and "yam" in American English has a specific commercial origin. The USDA requires labels to say "sweet potato" even when marked as "yam,"...