Sweet potato lie

They're called yams in Tabor City and Louisiana, but yams and sweet potatoes aren't from the same family or the same coast

A yam is a yam is a yam. Unless it is a sweet potato.

Confused yet?

Trust us, you are.

Americans have been confusing sweet potatoes for yams for centuries. With the coming of the sweet potato's high season, we thought we'd try to clear up the confusion.

It gets tricky, so pay attention.

The sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) is a member of the morning glory family and is native to these shores. Americans grow two kinds of sweet potatoes: a yellow, firmer variety (grown in the North) and a softer, bright-orange fleshed type (grown in the South).

In North Carolina, we do sweet potatoes. We're the nation's largest producer, growing more than 700 million pounds each year, according to the N.C. Sweet Potato Commission.

A yam (Dioscorea Species) is grown in Africa and Asia but looks very different from a sweet potato. It's doubtful you have ever seen a true yam, which has scaly, dark-brown skin and can grow up to 4 feet long.

Americans call sweet potatoes yams most likely because African slaves used the word to describe sweet potatoes when they arrived.

Again, a sweet potato is not a yam.

Unless you're in Louisiana, where sweet potato farmers have insisted upon calling their crop yams for decades.

Or Tabor City, where the 38th N.C. Yam Festival is held later this month.

"There's so much confusion about them," says Sandra Oliver, a food historian who co-authored a book called "Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving Recipes and History, from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie." "Two of them are sweet potatoes, a yam is a whole different critter, except in Louisiana, apparently."

And North Carolina.

Got all that? Please pass the yams, er, sweet potatoes, whatever.

Recipes

Spice-Scented Sweet Potatoes

Sweet Potato and Black Bean Burrito