SPUDS, TATERS, POTATOES

“Spuds,”  “taters,” “Irish lumper,” “tuber,” ¨apple of the earth¨ (pomme de terre), the humble, or is it “noble,” potato can be  variously labelled. It also comes to the

table in various forms: baked, mashed, fried, scalloped, as tater tots, hash browns, rösti, chips, potato salad, poutine, raclette. In my native state of Maine, it even comes as a sweet chocolate concoction, a “needham” which blends coconut, chocolate and, yes, potato.  Overall, the tuber is a marvelous and versatile foodstuff, welcome just about anywhere in the world.

An unwanted interloper. Not bad for a plant originating in Peru.  Its spread was due to what is called the “Columbian Exchange,” the movement of plants and animals across the Atlantic as the result of European colonization of the Americas. Wheat and rice came west from Europe . Maize, tomatoes and potatoes went the other way.

Potatoes were not an immediate hit. It  took an intrepid French scientist, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, to get the vegetable onto everyday tables.  Potatoes had been in Europe for some 200 years by the time of Parmentier’s birth, 1737. As is often the case the foreigners were shunned.  Potatoes were animal food, little else. Well, in Germany they were something else, prisoner food. That was where Parmentier first encountered them.  Once liberated, he sought to get potatoes into the human diet. His motivation (he was an agronomist with interests in nutrition and public health,) was reinforced by his showman’s panache for marketing..  He invented recipes, gave dinners at which luminaries like Benjamin Franklin were invited and was a relentless promoter.

Lesson to be learned: foreigners, outsiders, unfamiliar ones may occasion a negative reaction, but this reaction may be wrong.  The initial, unreflective reaction, needs to be complemented by intelligence, experience and good sense.  

Mr. Potato Head.  Does anyone remember this?  A bunch of facial attributes attached to stick pins. The point (so to speak)? Stick them onto potatoes, creating various faces. 

Lesson to be learned.  It’s possible to be overly pampered and spoiled.  Food has, for most of human history been scarce. To live at an epoch when food can be a toy is a statement about our time.  Does Mr. Potato head somehow condemn us as superficial and self-indulgent? Well, yes. Generalized, the “food is a toy” attitude could translate into a loss of appreciation for what food is, and what is involved prior to its arrival in a home.  Food becomes just another consumer good, something to be used and discarded. Its unique status, as a necessary staple, one that in certain situations, should not be commidified, tends to be overlooked if not forgotten entirely.

The Great Irish potato famine.  Sometimes food commodification  leads to a great human catastrophe.  According to once widely-accepted lore, the Irish peasantry had, in the 19th century, become too dependent on a particular potato strain. This strain was susceptible to infection by the mold Phytophthora infestans.  The received lore is straightforward and easy to grasp. It is also, by omitting important details, just plain wrong.  Ireland, it turns out, was producing plenty of food in the middle of the 19th century. Why was that food, food grown in Ireland, not used to feed Irish people?  Well,
colonization and immoral capitalism. Colonization meant that far-away British landlords controlled, politically and economically, what went on in Ireland. Immoral, unreflective capitalism meant that the landowners for whom successful crops meant profits, disregarded the sufferings and deaths of the people who grew the food which made them wealthy. Why?  They needed to make a profit. They needed to repay their bank loans. In their scale of values, these were more important than irish peasants dying from starvation. 

Lesson to be learned: One tendency, deep in the human psyche, against which we need to struggle: thinking that the suffering of fellow humans either does not matter, or is their fault; or maybe both does not matter and is their fault.  All we have to do is slip into another easy, immediate, gut feeling: think of them as “other” or ‘different.” Such a tendency is not just pervasive but can be reinforced by economic considerations. This happens often when the work of those considered “different,” is crucial to a system that keeps us wealthy and comfortable. Without a real effort at thoughtfulness and understanding, the temptation to detachment and indifference, to thinking the economic considerations are more important than humanitarian ones, is simply too strong to overcome.