The potato has a similar early history in Europe, which is funny seeing that it's such a staple and cliche by now: >The Burgundians invented the French appella

The potato has a similar early history in Europe, which is funny seeing that it's such a staple and cliche by now: >The Burgundians invented the French appellation pomme de terre–but they also banned it on the grounds that it caused leprosy. While intendant of Limoges in 1761, the enlightened physiocrat Turgot tried to dispel the popular belief that the purple flower of the potato was a version of deadly nightshade by eating it in public and making peasants sit next to him to observe that he was not poisoned. The French were not, of course, alone in their prejudices. In 1770 famine-afflicted Neapolitans refused to touch a boatload of potatoes sent as a gift; burghers of Kolberg in Prussia told Frederick the Great, ‘the things have neither smell nor taste, not even the dogs will eat them, so what are they to us?’; and Russian peasants distrusted the potato because it was not mentioned in the Bible, believed that it caused cholera and rioted when attempts were made to force them to grow it. From Blanning's The Pursuit of Glory, 399.1 in my ebook