Why wasn't the earth apple a more successful crop?

I think it was fairly widely used in France before WWII. However, when food was rationed, topinambour is basically all that was left unrequisitioned and the French spent four years eating topinambour all the time.

What I'm saying is don't talk about topinambour to the older French population, they might punch you. Probably why it's almost disappeared now
Same thing happened in Belgium topinambour and rutabaga left bitter memories to the peoples. You'd be lucky to find any on sale...
 
The common Dutch word for this crop is 'aardpeer', which means 'earth pear'; it needed to be distinguished from the 'aardappel' :). (Though 'topinamboer', 'jeruzalemartisjok' ('Jerusalem artichoke') and knolzonnebloem ('root sunflower' not 'sunflower root', which means something different), however the latter two are less common than 'topinamboer' or 'aardpeer').

Interestingly, potatoes used to be called "earth pears" in Finland and Sweden. (Maapäärynä in Finnish and jordpärön in Swedish.) Our modern Finnish word for potato, peruna, is actually derived from päärynä, pear.

The Jerusalem artichoke is called just "ground artichoke". (Maa-artisokka in Finnish, jordärtskocka in Swedish.)
 
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Which crop are you thinking of exactly? Sorry for being dense.
And to make matters worse, in my native Dutch, a potato is called an 'aardappel', literally an earth-apple. So to me the question rather sounds like :'Why didn't the potato get replaces by the spud?'
 
You can buy them from some good greengrocers in the UK, where they're grown as a garden plant and treated as - and commonly called - the perennial sunflower.

I love them, I think they are delicious. But I do commend Gerrard on his accuracy. Seriously. Comparing them to legumes or brassicas is understating the issue. I'm not a particularly gassy person, let's put it that way, but I am a twenty something 6ft 12 stone man and I looked like I was 6 months
pregnant, and sounded like a cheap joke shop, for forty eight hours.after consumption.
 
For those that keep wondering, Jurgen refers to this plant:
576px-Sunroot_top.jpg

JlmartichokeS.jpg

(from Wikipedia)
 
this seems like it would be a good crop for animal feed for the future, when climate change causes problems... it has a high calorie yield, it is tolerant of poorer soil. But from everyone is saying on here, it's problematic for human consumption...
 
Simply it seems to be a matter- potatoes work in poorer soil and are easier to prepare; otherwise the two are very similar. The marginally better caloric intake from J. Artichoke would be negated by the greater effort at growing and preparing.

Even better is what everyone is missing regarding why potatoes were considered great in Europe, especially Germany and Poland- with large numbers of armies wandering around trampling everything potatoes survived that kind of "environment" better than wheat, maize, etc. Doesn't look like J. Artichoke would do as well.

It seems basic "evolutionary" law dictated why potato succeeded as a human staple crop and the other plant didnt.
 
this seems like it would be a good crop for animal feed for the future, when climate change causes problems... it has a high calorie yield, it is tolerant of poorer soil. But from everyone is saying on here, it's problematic for human consumption...
It can actually be pretty tasty once in a while
 
You can buy them from some good greengrocers in the UK, where they're grown as a garden plant and treated as - and commonly called - the perennial sunflower.

I love them, I think they are delicious. But I do commend Gerrard on his accuracy. Seriously. Comparing them to legumes or brassicas is understating the issue. I'm not a particularly gassy person, let's put it that way, but I am a twenty something 6ft 12 stone man and I looked like I was 6 months
pregnant, and sounded like a cheap joke shop, for forty eight hours.after consumption.
I wonder... we can buy vegetables that are processed in all kinds of ways... any idea if this plant could be commercially processed to make it less gas-causing? That might make all the difference...
 
I wonder... we can buy vegetables that are processed in all kinds of ways... any idea if this plant could be commercially processed to make it less gas-causing? That might make all the difference...
So I just researched this and you have two options.
Eat it raw or cook it with a potato in the pot, it will neutralize the enzymes we can't digest
 
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