Progress of potato staple food research and industry development in China

摘要

Potato is the largest non-cereal food crop worldwide and ranked as the world's fourth most important food crop after rice, wheat, and maize. Potato is a vital food-security crop and substitute for cereal crop considering its high yield and great nutritive value. Therefore, by replacing wheat, rice or maize in traditional staple foods partly by potato, the nutritional value of traditional foods and the utilization of potato are expected to be improved. China is the largest potato producer worldwide in terms of either volume or area. However, majority of potatoes are consumed as fresh vegetables for cuisine, and the industrial processing rate is much lower than the global average. Thus, research and development for nutritional potato stable food suitable for the dietary habits of Chinese residents are of great significance. However, we still confronted plenty of constraints in the development of potato staple food. In order to develop potato staple food suitable for Chinese residents' dietary habit like noodles, Mantou (steamed bread), rice and rice noodles, also to industrialize production of potato staple foods, some transformations need to be realized. Independent innovation is the only choice to realize the potato staple food processing and industrial development strategy on the technical level. Thus a lot of researches have been done to promote the development of potato staple food in China. Up to now, we already developed a series kinds of potato staple foods and some of these staple foods have already been widely promoted in Chinese markets.