Author: Alona Martinez / Source: Atlas Obscura
Manuel Choqque Bravo, a fourth generation potato farmer in the Andean highlands of Chinchero, is about to perform a magic show. He lines up multiple deformed tubers, indigenous to the area best known for its proximity to Machu Picchu, and one by one slices them in half, revealing a color spectrum of intense violet and gold hues.
He’s a veteran to such presentations, so he knows to pause and let his audience savor their first glimpse of the beloved papa andina that has captured his heart and driven him to change the world’s view of tubers.
“People think the potato has no healthy properties, but the truth is far from that,” he says in the soft-spoken, lyrical cadence typical to his hometown. Bravo has made it his mission to resculpt the world’s view of the potato by creating unique potato hybrids—packed with nutrients and flavor—on his family’s farm.
Bravo, just shy of his 32nd birthday, grew up running through his family’s fields. The expectation that he continue in his father’s footsteps weighed on him as a young man.
“I always had that pressure, but at first I believed being in the fields was synonymous with an atraso, backwardness,” he says, “just like many youngsters in Peru today who emigrate to the cities because they believe working in the fields will result in the same conditions as that of their parents.”
In high school, he decided to pursue law, but as fate would have it, he arrived late to school and ended up in the wrong class. “I accidentally signed up for a botany class and from that moment on was hooked.
I thought, ‘Wow, plants are just like the human body—they have veins.’”
Afterward, he headed off to the Universidad San Antonio Abad in Cusco, the first of his family, the first of his entire village, to attend university. He studied agricultural engineering and then worked at the Centro Internacional de la Papa (the International Potato Center).
If there’s going to be an international center for potatoes, it makes perfect sense that it would be in Peru. Estimates of the number of tuber varieties in the country fall anywhere between a robust 3,000 and 5,000 types, and it is believed that the tuber was domesticated around 8,000 years ago on the mountain slopes near Lake Titicaca. Since then, Peruvians have embraced the potato in their cuisine with dishes such as causas and papas a la huancaina (yellow potatoes in a spicy, creamy sauce).
Bravo is not the first to tinker with the potato. The Inkas used the same valley for their own version of agricultural engineering, building enormous circular terraces carved out of the mountainside in nearby Moray. These stacked fields emulated the microclimates of different slopes, which, archeologists theorize, allowed it to be used as a kind of agricultural research station.
“The truth is we are connected from the beginning,” says Bravo. “All the work I have done, I began with native potatoes that were varieties the Inkas had.”
There are countless varieties, and almost all of them have some form of natural pigmentation. What stands out with Bravo’s is the intensity, or increased pigmentation, of his colorful potatoes. It’s a result of his determination to not only preserve, but to perfect the potential of Peru’s revered crop.
“At first I thought everything I had learned at the university was the same as what I learned from my father working in the farm,” says Bravo. “It affected me a lot. I thought, ‘No, I cannot continue with the same concept.’” He emerged determined to research new, innovative ways to breed potatoes.
He spent some time working at the Instituto Nacional de Innovación…
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