Which vegetable was illegal in France between 1748 and 1772?

Potatoes were once banned in France from 1748 to 1772. The French Parliament reportedly forbade potato cultivation because they believed they were poisonous and caused leprosy. Potatoes had recently been introduced into Europe by Spaniards, who brought them back from the Inca Empire in South America. The French did not trust the new food and mainly used it for feeding pigs until Parliament banned the vegetable in 1748.

For many years, the French believed that potatoes were strange and dangerous because they were grown underground. Even starving peasants refused to eat them. This eventually changed after the army medical officer Antoine-Augustin Parmentier was captured by the Prussians during the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) and was fed potatoes with no adverse effects.

On his release from the Prussian prison, Parmentier began promoting potato consumption, saying they were filling, inexpensive and did not need much work to grow. He carried out various publicity stunts to publicise the new food, such as hosting dinner parties full of potato dishes, presenting King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette with bouquets of potato blossoms, and putting armed guards on his potato patch to make them seem like precious produce.

In 1772, the potato was finally declared edible by the Paris Faculty of Medicine. Louis XVI congratulated Parmentier, saying, “France will not forget that you found food for the poor.”