[ring] “Hello?””Hi, I’m calling for the president of the Sweet Potato Council.
“You got him.” There’s something Americans have been confused
about for a long time. Yeah, I was hoping you could clear something
up for us: What is the difference between a sweet potato and a yam?
[laughs] “A sweet potato and a yam are nothing alike.”
It turns out that what grocery stores in the US have been calling yams...they’re actually just
sweet potatoes. “A sweet potato is the orange-fleshed potato
you see in your supermarket.” The orange kind are most common today but
they can also be purple, and originally, all sweet potatoes had white or yellowish flesh.
And a yam looks like this. “It’s kind of brown-covered and white
on the inside. And you would only find it in a specialty store in the United States.”
More than 90% of yams are grown in West Africa, where they’ve been a staple food for thousands
of years. “So if they’re completely different vegetables,
why do the grocery stores label sweet potatoes as yams?”
“That name came about in the United States in the 1920s.”
Louisiana farmers advertised their moist orange sweet potatoes as “yams” to try to stand out
from the other sweet potatoes. But they didn’t come up with that word out
of nowhere. It was already being used for sweet potatoes in the 19th century
So where did it come from? Well, here’s a clue: The word “yam” was probably derived
from these West African words And the most obvious way that African words
could travel to the Southern U.S.? Slavery. So when West African people were forced into
slavery in the new world, they probably used the word yam to refer to the root vegetable
that they found there: the sweet potato.