You Want Fries With That?

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No, this is not what I say in my time away from the computer mining a few decades of traveling stories into some sort of cognitive narrative. Besides being an election year in the U.S. and the Year of the Rat on the Chinese Lunar calendar, this year is dedicated to a very famous vegetable.

The United Nations declared 2008 the International Year of the Potato. You think calling Idaho home I’d have known that. For decades the state’s license plates carried a picture of a potato with two simple words along side: Famous Potatoes. I found out about the designation in a back issue of  The Economist, not some local rag.  Their article focused on the Andes, potato’s place of origin. Idaho wasn’t even a footnote.

Botanically the spud has an exotic, tragic and triumphant history. Originating from South America, Peru and Bolivia specifically, Europeans thought the tuber poisonous when it arrived in the 16th century, by accident it seems in the hold of a ship. Once shed of it’s malicious reputation through cultivation and hybridization, it didn’t take long for potatoes to become a staple in the Old World diet, most famously in Ireland. The potato is blamed for much human drama: overpopulation on the Emerald Isle due to it’s ease of cultivation and preparation ( more time for extracurricular activites, less time baking bread. Wheat’s high maintenance.), tariif wars over corn and wheat, and finally, a famine that killed one in eight Irish citizens, leading to a mass immigration forever changing the American demographic.

That’s alot of vegetative karmic guilt for one plant to handle. In the 21st century potatoes are the most commonly eaten vegetable worldwide (thank the fast food chains for that). When mashed  with milk, they are not just comfort food,  but a nutrionally complete meal. No surprise McDonald’s is the number one purchaser of spuds, enlisting agri-business giants to genetically engineer the “perfect” potato that can be transformed into a french fry recognized around the world. Michael Pollan’s excellent book,  The Botany of Desire, devotes an entire chapter to our love/hate relationship with Solanum tuberosum.

 In celebration of 12 months dedicated to my state’s #1 export, share your favorite potato dish. Or better yet, what’s the best variation you’ve tasted in your vagabond adventures. For me it’s your basic scalloped, made with cream and topped with five year old Wisconsin cheddar. Got a casserole in the oven, so gotta go. Plenty to go around if anyone’s hungry ….