I went to the grocery store to buy some items for dinner. One of the items was a sweet potato. I went to the self-checkout and started scanning my purchases. The sweet potato didn’t have a UPC sticker on it, so I had to type in the name. First I typed sweet potato, but the checkout machine said No result. Then I typed potato, and the machine displayed several choices such as Russet Potato and New Potato, but again, there was no sweet potato listed.
I was stumped for a few seconds, then I tried yam. Success! The checkout machine weighed the yam and sent the item name and price to the register tape. On the register tape, the yam was listed as sweet potato. Of course.
So what’s the deal with yams and sweet potatoes? Are they the same thing, or are they different? I decided to ask Google.
It turns out, they are not the same thing. Yams and sweet potatoes are not only not related, they don’t even have a lot in common. Furthermore, yams sold in U.S. grocery stores are almost never true yams. They’re simply a different variety of sweet potato. So why are they labeled yams?
It’s because of history. Broadly speaking, sweet potatoes come in two varieties called firm and soft. The firm sweet potato was the first to be produced in the U.S., and when the soft variety came along, grocers needed a way to distinguish it from the firm variety. They chose to label the soft variety yams. But they’re not yams, they’re sweet potatoes.
If you’re not confused yet, you should know that sometimes grocers will choose to label their yams as sweet potatoes, which is what they always were.
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