Through the narrow front door of this little three-floor factory you can see the abandoned remains of a vaguely neo-classical building: the old Bombay Talkies. In fact, nothing remains of the building except the roofless façade. But even that façade is ruined by rusting name boards for shops selling screws, iron rebar and other such tools of hard, gritty labour.
Inside the Jumboking vadapav factory, though, everything is clean, shiny and efficient. This little plant, deep inside the sprawling Bombay Talkies industrial compound in Malad, a suburb of Mumbai, processes more than 2 tonnes of potato every weekday. Each morning, sacks of potatoes are unloaded, de-sacked, sorted and cleaned before being tipped into two large steaming vats.
Six hours later the potatoes magically transform into 50,000-plus potato patties. Ashish Mirani, who manages the kitchen on behalf of Jumboking, beams as he tells us how the patties will now be shipped out in Jumboking trucks to dozens of company outlets all across Maharashtra and Gujarat.
The journey for these patties has just begun, but for the humble potato, romantically speaking, it is but the last few legs in an epic journey of thousands of miles and four centuries.
In 2006, the world produced more than 315 million tonnes of potato. Which places it in fourth place, after rice, wheat and corn, in the list of most widely grown food crops. The potato thrives, as the UN says in its snappy little International Year of the Potato 2008 brochure: “…on Peru’s mountains, the plains of Northern Europe, China’s Yunnan plateau, Rwanda’s equatorial highlands and subtropical lowlands in India.” Everywhere on the planet except the frozen poles.
And, as ably witnessed by Jumboking vadapavs, India is no stranger to the potato. We cultivate more than 25 million tonnes of the tuber—much of it in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. And, from piping hot aloo tikkis by the streets of Delhi to crisp masala dosas pregnant with potato filling at Saravana Bhavan in Chennai, the potato is an ubiquitous part of the Indian diet.
Not bad statistics at all for a vegetable that was literally unheard of in most parts of the world till 400 years ago. In fact, the only people who knew of the vegetable till sometime early in the 17th century belonged to the native South American civilizations—the Mayans, Incas and so on. The world, including India, lived blissfully unaware of this most versatile of vegetables.
This means that a whole host of luminaries in human history went by without ever enjoying the satisfying experience of a bowl of hearty mashed potatoes or plate of crisp, deep-fried potato chips. Jesus Christ was one. Closer home, emperor Ashok, the men who carved the caves atAjanta and Ellora, and several Mughal emperors missed out on tasty tubers and concoctions thereof. Not to mention entire civilizations—Roman, Greek, Persian, et al.