George De Garffenreid, aged 8, of Denver, Colo., for his question:

Where did the first potato come from?

The potato plant is a native of the New World. Its travels took it to the Old World where it became popular enough to be adopted almost everywhere. Finally it returned again to its native Americas.

So far as we know, the first potatoes were eaten by the Incas of Peru. We don't know when that was, but It must have been long ago. For when discovered by the Spaniards, the potato had been cultivated in South America for many hundreds of years.

The potato is a relative of the tomato, the pretty petunia and the tobacco plant. Countless generations of careful selecting and cultivating are necessary to develop these plants from their wild state. In 1500, when the Spaniards first found potatoes in Peru, there were no more than one or two varieties of them. Today there are over a thousand.