http://www.boston.com/dailynews/103/nation/FARM_SCENE_Georgia_scientists_:.shtml

FARM SCENE: Georgia scientists explore the market for a non-sweet sweet potato

By Elliott Minor, Associated Press, 4/13/2001 08:11

ALBANY, Ga. (AP) Elmo Brown builds a fire in a rusty barrel on cold days. He ducks under a blue canopy on rainy days. He hasn't found a way to escape the spring heat, so he just tolerates it.

Brown, 83, has been peddling sweet potatoes on the same Albany street corner for 55 years and he's been eating them all his life.

''I like to bake them, fry them, stew them and brown and roast them,'' he said.

Brown's customers keep coming back to savor the potatoes' sweetness. But not everyone is so fond of them, and scientists are searching for ways to reduce the sweetness to increase the market for the vitamin-rich vegetable.

''They're great for an occasional vegetable, but if you're going to eat them every day, you want something that's not sweet,'' said Stanley Kays, one of two University of Georgia horticulturists at work on the project. ''Can you imagine making up 90 percent of your caloric diet with Hershey bars?''

Kays and McLaurin hope their work will lead to designer sweet potatoes with varying degrees of sweetness or none at all. The two have already created a non-sweet sweet potato that tastes like an Irish, or white, potato.

They believe it could lead to plenty of new products, such as sweet potato french fries, and provide a nutritious diet for developing countries. Crossing their non-sweet potato with one high in vitamin A, for example, could yield a tater that fights thousands of cases of child blindness caused by nutritional deficiency around the world each year, they said.

Producers of sweet potatoes, grown in 25 to 30 mostly Southern states, could use some new offerings. White potatoes are used in 10,000 types of processed foods and have become a $2.7 billion crop. Meanwhile, the value of the U.S. sweet potato crop has shrunk to $219 million.

Sweet potatoes are more nutritious than white potatoes. They're packed with vitamins and minerals and low in fat and calories.

They were a staple of impoverished Southerners during in the 1920s and they still are the world's seventh-leading food crop. But U.S. per-capita consumption has dropped from 29 pounds during the 1920s to a low of 3.9 pounds in the 1990s. By comparison, Americans consume an average of 140 pounds of white potatoes each year.

Kays and McLaurin tried several combinations of less-sweet potatoes before choosing their current not-so-sweet variety.

''We picked this one out because we're used to Idaho baked potatoes,'' Kays said. ''It had the flavor and textural qualities that Americans could relate to.''

Their unsweet potato isn't available to farmers or consumers. Instead, they're releasing the plants to breeders who can incorporate its qualities into new varieties. They plan to send some to North Korea, which is gripped by famine and has lost much of its white potato crop over the past four years.

Meanwhile, they're trying to develop a scientific method for analyzing sweet potato flavors to get potatoes that best suit particular tastes.

China, which grows 84 percent of the world's sweet potatoes, is a potential market for the non-sweet types, Kays said. The Chinese like french fries, which could be made cheaper by substituting non-sweet sweet potatoes, Kays said.

Brown, the potato peddler, says he'll stick with his sweet variety.

''I'm not going to fool with them,'' he said. ''All my customers would leave.''

On the Net: North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission: http://www.ncsweetpotatoes.com/index3.html

-- Anonymous, April 13, 2001