This little book introduces various aspects of sweetpotatoes in the USA. Though a very minor crop that plays only a small role in the diet of most Americans, there are, nonetheless, aspects of US sweetpotatoes introduced here that will hopefully be of interest to the Japanese reader.
The concept for this book grew out of my having grown up in the USA, but having lived many years in Kawagoe City (in Saitama Prefecture, Japan) which has a strong sweetpotato image. Eiji Yamada, Business Manager of the Kawagoe Friends of Sweetpotatoes, suggested and encouraged the writing of this book, and was heavily involved in its design. Hiroshi Inoue, Kawagoe Sweetpotato Museum Curator, was involved in editing the contents to ensure the book would be of interest to the lay reader. My wife Masako edited my Japanese manuscript into readable form. My thanks to these three for their invaluable help. Thanks go, too, to the Kawagoe Friends of Sweetpotato and the Kawagoe Sweetpotato Products Promotion Board for funding the printed version of this book. Thanks, too, to the staff at Spoon for designing and editing the printed version of this book.
My thanks also go to many researchers and others involved with sweetpotato, in both the US and Japan, for introducing me to so many valuable references. It was my original intent that the articles in this book would be heavily footnoted, and include all relevant bibliographic references. In that way, I could have suitably given proper credit to the many individuals and printed works I have referenced, and provided more detail than I have given in this book. Therefore, I must apologize profusely to all concerned that due to funding coming from lay groups, limited funding at that, this small book is necessarily slim, and being aimed at the lay reader, leaves out most of the original footnotes and bibliographic references. Also, much of my material had to be pruned, and so must wait another chance for publication.
However, as a compromise, I have created a special site on the Internet at:
http://www.tiu.ac.jp/~bduell/sp/usasp/
This site contains not only the contents of this book, but also all the footnotes and references that had to be left out of the paper version of this book. As I also used a large number of Internet references to create this book, those links are available for readers' use in the Internet version.
The author takes responsibility for the entire contents of this book. Care has been taken to accurately portray the situation of sweetpotato in the US, but should the reader find errors, please kindly inform this author.
Hopefully this book will give some new perspectives to its readers concerning sweetpotatoes in the US. I would be glad to hear readers' comments.
March 1999
Barry Duell
Kawagoe Friends of Sweetpotatoes, Chair
Tokyo
International University, Professor
1-13-1 Matoba-kita
Kawagoe, Saitama 350-1197
JAPAN
E-mail: bduell@tiu.ac.jp
Copyright by Barry Duell, 1999.