In the ever widening search for novel petfood ingredients, one candidate was literally right under our feet. That is, until the last couple of years, when sweet potatoes became the "darling carb" of new products and increasingly popular in specialty petfoods. For example, sweet potatoes can now be found in:
In North America, the sweet potato is often (mistakenly) called a yam. There are several stories as to why. In one, slaves of the US's antebellum South mistook sweet potatoes for the yams of their native Africa and called them nyami. Another story goes that over-eager marketers in the 1930s, attempting to differentiate their sweet potatoes from another, incorrectly labeled theirs as yams-and the name stuck.