Each year during the holidays, as I dive into a gooey marshmallow-crusted sweetpotato casserole, I think: We need to eat more sweetpotatoes.
Not only are they delicious, they’re packed with nutrients and high in fiber. They have anti-inflammatory qualities and have high levels of vitamins A and C, as well as zinc and potassium. These super root vegetables deserve to be a staple on our tables year round.
This year, I’m doing it, and I’m keeping it simply local.
Could I do that at the grocery store?
At one local chain, I noticed the small, bright-yellow sign, at the foot of a bin, beaming LOCAL. I wondered: “How local is local in a big-box store like this?”
I did a little digging and found a page on the store’s website that lists the 48 farms across North Carolina where it procures its produce. Seven farms on the list grow sweetpotatoes. The closest to New Hanover County is Jones Family Farms in Mount Olive.
Mount Olive seemed, to this Wilmingtonian, a bit of a stretch to call local. I went to the farmers market.
While sweetpotatoes easily grow here, they are native to South and Central America.
In the late 1400s, Spanish explorers discovered potatoes in the New World and brought them back to Europe, where they soon became a sensation.
Potatoes came to North America when colonists landed on the East Coast.
Soon the orange version was called a sweetpotato to distinguish it from a white potato, sometimes known as the Irish potato.
Sweetpotatoes, which are in a completely different scientific family, came to be known as yams, a staple in the diet of West Africans, the home of many enslaved people who ended up in the American South.
By the end of the 19th century, sweetpotatoes graced tables across the nation as a favorite starchy side dish.
Today, our state grows 60 to 70 percent of all sweetpo- tatoes in the U.S. Nearly 87,000 acres can produce one billion pounds in an average year.
We even have a signature variety: In 2005, NC State’s Dr. Craig Yencho and his fellow researcher Kenneth Pecota introduced the Covington. The variety was named for the school’s esteemed sweetpotato scientist, Dr. Henry Covington, who served on NC State’s horticultural science faculty from 1948 to 1974.
Over the last two decades, the Covington sweetpotato quickly became the mainstay of commercial farmers, due to its uniform size, long shelf life and resistance to disease. Today it accounts for 20 percent of all sweetpotatoes grown nationally; 90 percent of the sweetpotatoes grown in North Carolina are Covingtons.
The sweetpotato and lentil salad recipe that follows works as a side on a cool night, or as a main dish for an unseasonably hot fall luncheon. And once you try its mustard dressing, you may have found your new go-to for all kinds of salads no matter the season.
This story appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of Edible Port City.
