Slow Food USA has put Carbondale, Colorado’s Red McClure potato on its Ark of Taste, an exclusive list of foods that are delicious–and disappearing.
Long before Outside magazine named it one of the best towns in the West, Carbondale, Colo., was better known for potatoes than outdoor adventure. The potato fields vanished, though, and so did a potato variety that was born here. But a century later, the Red McClure is back, and getting some long overdue recognition.
Concerned that this heirloom variety had disappeared from its birthplace and was drifting into obscurity, the Roaring Fork chapter of the Slow Food movement conspired to track down the elusive tuber and bring it back.
Their efforts paid off. In September, Slow Food USA added the Red McClure to the Ark of Taste, its list of some 200 foods from across the country deemed delicious, endangered and worth fighting to protect.
The Red McClure, which was developed in Carbondale a century ago, joins an exclusive list that includes Olympia oysters from the Pacific Coast, the true red cranberry from Maine and handmade filé, the sassafras powder at the heart of Louisiana gumbo.
“The Ark of Taste is the only thing like it in the world,” said Tom Passavant, co-chairman of Slow Food Roaring Fork, which has worked to bring the Red McClure back from the brink of extinction and into commercial production.
It’s a select list of foods that are not only in danger of disappearing from the menu altogether. They’re also tasty and deemed worth fighting to preserve.
“We know the potato is good,” Passavant said. “It’s fresh. It’s local. It tastes good. But you never know how a national group that is used to tasting more esoteric things is going to react to a potato.”
They liked it. The Slow Food USA Biodiversity Committee voted unanimously to add the Red McClure to the US Ark of Taste.
At a special tasting in Madison, Wis., tasters “were extremely enthusiastic,” Emily Vaughn, a member of the Biodiversity Committee, wrote in a letter to the local Slow Food group.
The Red McClure can credit its existence to immigrant Thomas McClure, who defied his father by leaving Ireland for the American Gold Rush. He traversed hard-rock mining towns across Colorado before settling down as a Carbondale potato farmer.
His variety, introduced around 1910, was a natural mutation of a popular variety being grown in what had been a major potato-producing town. In the 1930s, before labor shortages and plunging prices killed the town’s potato industry, Carbondale was shipping out 400 railcars of spuds.
“The potatoes grown there are not excelled anywhere in the world, and are equaled in but few places,” potato magnate Eugene Grubb had declared in 1912.
The Red McClure became a favorite in the potato fields of southern Colorado’s San Luis Valley, but over the decades, new varieties that were redder and less blemished took over. Soon it practically disappeared.
“No food item should go extinct, much less in the area where it was developed,” said Marie Louise Ryan, a member of Slow Food Roaring Fork, who championed the potato’s return.
Ryan wanted to grow the local potato in her garden, but she was shocked when she couldn’t find them anywhere. A Fort Collins lab offered to produce it in a test tube, but Ryan demurred. Test tube potatoes just aren’t Slow Food style. Finally, she found them alive and well, and in the open air, in the San Luis Valley.
“Virtually it’s disappeared,” said Dave Holm, horticulture professor at Colorado State University’s San Luis Valley Research Center, where just one-tenth of an acre of Red McClures remained in cultivation. “I don’t know, right off, anywhere else in the United States you could go to find it.”
A few San Luis Valley old-timers still grow them, Holm said, and some say they prefer the flavor to newer varieties, but the Red McClure had disappeared from seed catalogs.
In spring 2009, Ryan loaded up her Subaru wagon with 1,000 pounds of Red McClures and brought the potato back to Carbondale. Demand was so high, she had to double the order this year. Commercial farmers bought them to sell to customers. Nurseries bought them to sell to gardeners. Restaurants have asked for them, too.
“We certainly don’t want to see things die away,” said Sarah Rumery, owner of Osage Gardens, one of the area farms to start growing the potato. “We’d like to help support it.”
For Red McClure supporters, bringing back the potato is partly about flavor, partly about heritage.
“The old Slow Food line is, we preserve heritage foods by eating them,” Passavant said. “That is really exemplified by the products on the ark.”
For Passavant, it’s also about land use. Instead of seeing agricultural land either developed or preserved in a land trust, “I like to think there might be a third way to do it,” he said, “which is to keep the land commercially viable. Our goal at Slow Food is to do it with the potato.”
