Black Dot Potato

Life of a Potato

The potato is the fourth most important food crop in the world and is a staple dietary component in many countries. The potato was first domesticated in Peru between 3000BC and 2000BC and was the main energy source for which the Inca Empire flourished, then later on became a similar energy source for its Spanish successor.

The Problem With Black Dot

Like humans, potatoes also suffer from disease and one in particular that should raise some interest in the potato is Black Dot Disease. This is a common superficial fungal blemish on potatoes and the black dots are often just visible to the naked eye. This can be found on potato tubers, affected areas may show a light brown back colour, which can darken during storage.

The name black dot accurately describes the numerous dot-like, black sclerotia that can appear on tubers, stolons, roots and stems both above and below ground level. A significant portion of stem may be covered with sclerotia which are easily seen after vine kill. Total root growth is reduced and appears brown to black in colour. The fact that this disease is so common how can it really affect the world as we know it, even though not a disease lethal to humans there are other ways that it can affect us. There are ways in which to prevent this disease and have more control over them by doing very simple things such as deep ploughing the fields, cleaning the tubers for planting and having long rotations of the crops which will give each potato a longer life.

The Big Picture

Black dot is bigger than you think, if this disease is not carefully monitored it could lead to all sorts of problems for big businesses, such as McCain's and McDonald's which are a few companies that rely on naturally grown potatoes as they refuse to use any sort of genetically modified products and McCain could be badly affected by any disease as the mainly use only potatoes. Supermarkets such as Salisbury's and Tesco believe that customers will not buy anything that does not look nice, they demand the best to keep an image, even though people really would not care about it as long as it was edible and we knew more about what the disease was about.

It is partly because of this high demand for as we would say pretty looking, smooth potatoes, that a potato which has been infected with black dot has to be picked out and thrown away, and this can be devastating if an entire crop has been infected, so much would be wasted and thrown away with the rest of the rubbish, and this would waste not only time, but work labour, money, as well as equipment used to harvest the potato, and all just because a supermarket has to keep up the right image and their belief that the best looking things will sell more, this does go to show that not all the proper research has been carried out.

What SCRI do

SCRI is a centre for sustainable cropping, where researchers are trying to develop new ways of growing healthy genetically modified food such as fruits and vegetables. What they do is find new ways to modify food so it is can taste better, is able to grow in areas it couldn't before and to find ways in which they are immune to their diseases, such as cross breeding them with other potato types that are already immune, so how can they do this? How can they combine more than one type and keep the taste the same and keep all the good substance of the spud intact? This is what groups such as SCRI are trying to do every day, to improve the quality of our food sources.

This was all part of a project we had to do. we were given a presentation from a man who works at SCRI and what it was they did exactly. We then had to research our given crop of which they do and find out as much about it as we could before putting our thoughts in the form of an mood board and by producing an A2 broadsheet of the crop. As you can tell from all of the above I got a potato but when I was researching into it I came across Black Dot disease and thought this would be interesting to base my project on.

We are currently working on the final part of the project which is to produce a 3D typography piece that is to go on display this Friday at our little exhibition. I will post an image of my final outcome next week. Up above is the outcome for my broadsheet.