Singer Patti LaBelle, who gave us 50 years of soul music, now offers us her sweet potato pie product. Heard about that?

The Today Show let us know on Friday that the 8-inch, pre-packaged dessert, selling for $3.48 exclusively at WalMart, sold out across America in advance of Thanksgiving.

Seems that a YouTube video touting Patti LaBelle’s Sweet Potato Pie resulted in WalMart selling one pie per second for 72 hours straight, all last weekend, according to the Today Show.

Now, sweet potatoes get their due in America only around holidays. Thanksgiving, for example. Then they are largely out of sight, out of mind for the next year. The U.S. Sweet Potato Council is trying to change that.

I am loving that sweet potatoes made the national news last week, because I got my personal fill of sweet potatoes last June.

I had the tremendous experience of working in Kenya with the Kabondo Sweet Potato and Marketing Cooperative Society. For two weeks, I taught leadership and governance skills to 45 farmers for whom sweet potatoes are their sole livelihoods. If drought comes, as happened in western Kenya last spring, household incomes plunge.

And, because I didn’t decide to learn to cook until October, everything I know about sweet potatoes, I learned last summer from these fabulous farmers.

My trip to Kenya was on behalf of Catholic Relief Services and USAID’s Farmer-to-Farmer program. For more than 30 years, Farmer-to-Farmer has matched American volunteers with technical expertise in agriculture with farmers worldwide.

I’m not a farmer like most Farmer-to-Farmer volunteers; my specialty is training others in leadership development and group dynamics. (I also went to Uganda in August with Catholic Relief Services for the same purpose, to help more than 220 farmers of maize and bean crops get organized into rural cooperatives and practice leadership in that context).

Before my sweet potato immersement, I had to read up on the orange-fleshed variety. The farmers in Kenya had started growing them only three years earlier, after an expert from Haiti (sweet potatoes are native to Central America) introduced them to the Kabondo region, close to Lake Victoria.

Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative, recognizes and researches orange-fleshed sweet potatoes for their high Vitamin-A content.

African families are adding sweet potatoes to their daily diets because 43 million children in sub-Saharan regions are Vitamin-A deficient. Larger harvests and improved marketing of sweet potatoes will lessen blindness, malnutrition and, in turn, poverty.

Sweet potatoes rank as one of five most important food crops in more than 50 developing nations (alongside rice, wheat, maize and cassava). China grows more than 90 percent of the world’s sweet potatoes, the International Potato Center reports.

Then come, a long way below, Nigeria and Uganda in the world list for sweet potato cultivation. In Africa, sweet potatoes do well in poorer soils.

Once in Kenya among the sweet potato farmers last June, I had sweet potatoes on my breakfast plate every morning. I also was served sweet potatoes each time I was a guest in farmers’ homes, about eight times. The marketing push in Kenya, particularly toward urban families, is to consider sweet potatoes more for meals, instead of simply for snacks.

I very quickly learned to love my sweet potatoes. Especially as I had met the local farmers who grow them, selling them at the side of the road. Selling anything this way isn’t the best path to racking up sales, but it’s what they do. I am sure the side-by-side companionship the day through, is part of it.

The Kabondo Cooperative Society’s next special project is to develop and market its value-added sweet potato flour for Nairobi’s bakeries.

Africa’s inclusion of sweet potatoes as everyday food makes me wish that the United States could appreciate sweet potatoes year-round. Not only at the holidays.

Even though Michelle Obama grows sweet potatoes in the White House garden, they grow here mostly in just a handful of states. North Carolina is the leading producer, followed by California, Mississippi and Louisiana.

Louisiana, by the way, was the state where WalMart recorded its highest demand for Patti LaBelle’s Sweet Potato Pie since it started selling in stores in September. (Chicago, for what it matters, was the pie’s strongest city).

The recipe for Patti LaBelle’s now-famous pie is here, thanks to The Today Show. With a full stick of butter, a half-cup of sugar and whipped cream, no wonder it’s a sold-out hit.

The good news is that the pie supplier is racing to distribute more in time for Christmas. But before that happens, they need to source 2 million more pounds of California-grown sweet potatoes.

Here’s what the California Sweet Potatoes trade group pushes about its product on its website: “Bake them, boil them, broil them, grill them, fry them, steam them, roast them, saute them, puree them or just wrap them in a paper towel and pop ‘em in the microwave — savory or sweet, they’re the clever cook’s favorite vegetable.”

That’s great, versatile advice. While I am not yet a clever cook, I’ll vouch for them anyway, too: They are my new favorite vegetable.

Except that my favorite sweet potatoes farmers aren’t in California. They are, instead, in Kabondo, Kenya.

One last thing: My blog’s biggest reader, my mother, tells me that The Washington Post has written all about the Patti LaBelle Sweet Potato Pie sweeping the country pre-Thanksgiving in its Sunday edition, too.