by MARGARET EBY
In the United States, the terms “yam” and “sweet potato” are used interchangeably, but they are completely different vegetables. The mix-up between yams and sweet potatoes originated from the Trans- Atlantic slave trade.
The confusion goes all the way back to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
When Adaorah Oduah attended her first American Thanksgiving feast at an aunt’s house in San Bernardino County in 2018, she was looking forward to one dish in particular: candied yams. Oduah had recently moved from Nigeria to California to study for a master’s in Global Communication at USC, and the yam was a food that reminded her of home.
“As a West African, I’ve had yam all ways: fried, boiled, porridged, pounded, souped, and even coated, but never ever candied,” Oduah wrote in an essay for Ampersand LA. The candied yam was the final frontier of innovation with the tuber. But at her aunt’s house, Oduah found a totally unfamiliar dish, a casserole of “orange blobs drenched in sugar and butter” that was nothing like the root vegetable she was familiar with. “Until now, I had presumed that yams needed no introduction, but upon coming face to face with its transatlantic imposter, I believe I need to make one on its behalf.”
In the United States, the terms “yam” and “sweet potato” are used interchangeably, but they are completely different vegetables. Yams are starchy and have a rough, brown exterior. They can grow up to 45 feet long and are eaten in parts of Latin America, West Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia. Sweet potatoes are a New World root vegetable, have a softer, reddish skin, a creamier interior, and often, a darker interior. Most American supermarkets are selling you sweet potatoes, not yams. To find the yam that she was familiar with, Oduah had to trek to an African market that imported them from Ghana.
The mix-up between yams and sweet potatoes originated from the Trans- Atlantic slave trade. Yams are an important part of West African food traditions. European slave traders steered their ships across the Middle Passage, they packed yams, along with black-eyed peas, to feed their captives. Slave merchant John Barbot estimated that 100,000 yams were required to sustain a ship bringing over 500 enslaved people, just 200 yams per person for a journey that could take months. In the Americas, where yams were not readily available, sweet potatoes, which had traveled from Central America with Christopher Columbus, took their place. As Dr. Scott Alves Barton, a chef and culinary educator who teaches at NYU, wrote in the February issue of Food & Wine , sweet potatoes became one of several transfer foods, a throughline allowing enslaved peoples to preserve their traditions and spiritual practices even in the face of captivity and abuse.
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