Sweet Potato

The sweet potato is a dicotyledonous plant in the morning glory family whose sizeable, starchy, sweet-tasting tuberous roots are used as a root vegetable and are a staple food in parts of the world; cultivars have been bred to bear tubers with flesh and skin of various colors, and the young shoots and leaves are occasionally eaten as greens. The sweet potato and the true potato are only distantly related, both being in the order Solanales, and though darker sweet potatoes are often called yams in parts of North America they are even more distantly related to true yams, which belong to an entirely different plant order. The sweet potato is native to the tropical regions of South America, in what is now Ecuador, and of the roughly 1,000 species in its family it is the only one of major agricultural importance.