If there's an elephantine vegetable prowling around your peanut box, the first rational step in defeating it is identifying what exactly it is. Yam or Sweet Potato? Sweet Potato or Yam? The same thing? Interchangeable?
Answer: NO.
This elephant is a sweet potato. How do we know? Long story short, you probably haven't had a real yam, ever. Yams are crazy big and don't grow in North America. We just call some varieties of sweet potatoes "yams" to make distinctions between sweet potato varieties. So yeah, it's a sweet potato. Really, it's not a big deal if you call them sweet pots or yams, people know what you mean.
As Wittgenstein summarized, linguistically, meaning is use.
Fact: The yam is not even remotely related to the sweet potato anyway. True yams are entirely different vegetables. They are sweeter than sweet potatoes and also contain more water. According to the North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission (!), several decades ago potato producers and shippers wished to distinguish a new yellow-fleshed variety from the conventional white flesh sweet potato. (THIS is a good article on the distinction.) The word yam, which comes from the Fulani (West African) word "nyami" meaning "to eat," was used to refer to these yellow-fleshed varieties (even though they were all still sweet potatoes).
So they're not the same. And you probably won't find a real yam in the grocery store anytime soon.
But are they both delicious and very healthful? Yes sir.
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