farmdoc's blog post number 113

I eat to live; I don’t live to eat. Doing that, it’s unclear if I’m following Socrates or Moliere, but anyway that’s what I do. Nonetheless there’s a couple of foods that do stir my salivary glands: bread, as I told you yesterday, and potatoes. So I’m thrilled the United Nations has declared 2008 the International Year of the Potato. Potatoes are an important food globally, so they deserve celebrating and commemorating. Me? I love them any which way: boiled, mashed, chipped, roasted, peeled, jacketed, or however. And I have no preference for any particular potato variety. Last year a politician – perhaps even Dick Adams – sent me a card listing the best way to cook each potato variety. I don’t care, so I lost it. Okay, Sigmund? I do know that because McDonalds chips are long, they only use Russet Burbanks. But it takes a longer time to grow a longer potato; so where long potatoes are grown – e.g. Canada and Tasmania – there’s insufficient time to plant a nitrogen-fixing winter crop such as winter rye, so the bare ground means too much nitrate in ground water runoff. The answer? Shorter chips. But it won’t happen, because longer chips fill the containers more efficiently, and they’re easier to eat one-handed when the other’s on the steering wheel. Eat your hearts out Socrates and Moliere.