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It comes up every year: Americans think they can buy yams at the local grocery store because the red sweet potatoes, which aren't even related to yams, are labeled as such.
A couple years ago a friend and I were having this discussion on FB, and he joked, "The difference between yams and sweet potatoes is 10 cents a pound." A few days later I was at my local produce market and they had sweet potatoes and "yams" side by side, and darned if the "yams" weren't 10 cents a pound more expensive! I posted a photo on FB of the signs next to each other under his comment and he replied, "Chestnuts, I haz 'em."
All so-called “yams” are in fact sweet potatoes. Most people think that long, red-skinned sweet potatoes are yams, but they really are just one of many varieties of sweet potatoes.
Thanks for clearing this up. I had no idea. I always thought those long red ones were yams too. Either way, they are all very good as far as I'm concerned.
so...have we settled this...the difference is 10 cents per pound?
Heh, that and the fact that they're in two completely different plant families and are different parts of the plant.
I read a couple years ago that you can occasionally buy a true yam in the US in very specialized gourmet stores, but I've never seen one. I've eaten them when working in Africa, though. I've seen pictures in articles about yams of a tribal chief's "yam house" where they're stored. They're usually tall and narrow with pointy roofs.
Sprouts have both sweet potato and yams. They also have Japanese sweet potato too.
But why does the Sprouts website say, "You may never come across a true yam" with a photo of the difference between them if they sell them? All the photos they have of "yams" that they sell are sweet potatoes. Unless they carry them occasionally and don't list them on the website, which is possible.
What is the next discussion - pumpkin or squash???
"A pumpkin is a cultivar of a squash plant, most commonly of Cucurbita pepo, that is round, with smooth, slightly ribbed skin, and most often deep yellow to orange coloration." wikipedia article about pumpkins
Speaking of curcurbits, I'm an entomologist by training, specializing in native bees, and one of the people I worked with at the Smithsonian wrote a whole treatise, along with a colleague, about the "squash and gourd bees," solitary native species that specialize in pollinating plants in that family. Some of them are quite large and attractive bees; they don't look like honey bees or bumble bees.
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