British farmers crack the sweet potato

Britain’s home cooks have been baking them into wedges, “spiralising” them into colourful curls and noodles and mashing them as an alternative to the traditional spud. The new-found enthusiasm for sweet potatoes has triggered record supermarket sales but a new variety means they are now not so exotic. British-grown sweet potatoes will go on sale in supermarkets for the first time next week, the first successful results of a crop innovation in the south of England which has taken three years to develop. The move has been hailed as a breakthrough for British farming, as the sweet potato typically relies on warm and dry growing conditions and has until now only been sourced overseas, typically from southern US states such as North and South Carolina, Egypt, Senegal and Israel. More