I've always been confused about what the difference between yams and sweet potatoes was. It always seemed like an arbitrary choice by whoever was selling it and perhaps it was.
I've always thought that the super bright orange ones were yams and the yellow-ish ones were sweet potatoes. The image of the phylogeny of plants helps me make sense of it though. But the grocery store has been lying to me? And google images is lying to us? And that time that I thought I was growing yams in my garden I was really growing Beauregard sweet potatoes??
I've gone to the grocery store and pulled a bunch of sweet potatoes out of the same bin only to get to the cash and have some wrung through as sweet potatoes and others as yams based on the colour of the skin. It confused me. I imagine the cashier was confused as well.
Saturday night we had dinner at a Korean restaurant. One of the items we had were "Korean sweet potato fries." They were white in color and sweet tasting. My guess is that most of the "sweet potato fries" and chain restaurants are really Yams, right? They're always bright orange. That, or perhaps it's just good coloring.
No they aren't yams. Sweet potatoes come in a bunch of colours. The article describes that nothing (or very rarely) in North America will you actually find a yam. Sweet potatoes just look like yams from Western Africa and slaves started calling them that and the name has stuck.
Yeah, I apologize that I read the article after commenting. I saw that I have most likely never eaten a "Yam." -Now I must.