The Potato Museum Blog: Potatoheads Talking

Spuds on NPR

On New Year's Eve we donned our potato skins and did an interview with Melissa Block for All Things Considered on National Public Radio. Her producer called us in line with the United Nations' dubbing of 2008 as the International Year of the Potato.
For those of you who do not know our story, we started out in the food history biz focused on the powerful potato. Tom began The Potato Museum in 1975 as a classroom project for his students at the International School of Brussels in Belgium. It grew as word spread, its pioneering museum about a food effort turning up a few years later as part of two major exhibitions--the Smithsonian's Seeds of Change event for the Quincentenary and Canada's remarkable Amazing Potato exhibit at Ottawa's National Museum of Science and Technology.
The FOOD Museum On Line and this Blog is an offshoot of that venture. Listen below...

If You Build A Better Peeler, They Will Come, Maybe

As the world continues to explode in some areas, and in other areas, people trek to the beach, a new potato peeler makes its debut. This time, it's a glove version--apparently it's a really, really roughed up glove, because you can fondle a spud right out of its skin with these gauntlets.

The " As Seen On TV" Tater Mitts people promise "no knives!, no nicks and cuts!"  To the potato?

Hash Stashed in Mash

As reported recently by www.shortnews.com:

Jailer Arrested for Putting the Pot in Potatoes

Robert Earl Hannon, a prison guard at Laflore County Jail in Greenwood, Mississippi, is free on $15,000 bond after he was arrested and charged with smuggling marijuana into the prison inside his lunch.

According to Leflore County Sheriff Ricky Banks the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics had been investigating how various contraband items were making their way into the prison when they apprehended Hannon.

The guard's alleged smuggling activities were discovered after his lunch was found with a large serving of mashed potatoes. He was known not to eat potatoes. Two ounces of marijuana and $200 cash were discovered buried in the mash.

Starchy Art

According to a report from China News, each year The Starchy Gallery in East Dulwich, London, runs a potato art competition. Gallery owner Jo David says of the potato: "You start to look at one, you can see faces in it already."

This year's winners produced a spud rendition of a British singer. You can view some of the entries, as well as a video here.

Italian Woman Escapes Lethal "Spud"

Ah, the lingering joys of war---last week Olga Mauriello bought some potatoes at her local market in the small town of San Giorgio a Cermano near Naples, Italy. As she was washing her dirt-covered spuds, she discovered that one of them appeared to be a pine cone-shaped hand grenade. Police arrived and safely detonated the live grenade, and later reported that it was dug up in a potato field in France. The grenade was of a type commonly used in World War II.

( At right: Potato or grenade? www.bolender.com)

Lincoln Head P. Chip?

Yes, we saw it with our own eyes--for sale on Ebay for extremely specialized collectors--a spud chip greatly resembling the 16th President, Abe Lincoln. Alert potato tracker Nolan K. informed us about this but, alas, we responded too late.

Did anyone out there buy this?

Fasting with Veggies

Just had a call from a person about to begin a fast for spiritual reasons. He asked if a potato were a fruit or a vegetable--apparently veggies are ok on this fast. So I said that the spud was  in the vegetable column and definitely not a fruit. I explained, however, that many veggies , botanically speaking, are fruits because anything edible that develops from a flower is a fruit.

But the potato, an underground tuber, the storehouse for the potato plant of excess nutrients the plant does not need at the time, may not exactly be what the spiritual fasting gods ordered either, growing in the dark as it does.....

Mr. Potato Head Soars Above New York

No Couch Potato he, Mr. P.H. was retrofitted last year as a fit and healthy runner, and in his balloon incarnation again will fly in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade this week. In addition, the United States Potato Board has opened a Potato Head-quarters in New York's Chelsea Market that will be offering recipes and family spud fun through Friday.

Melanie Wickham, executive secretary of New York's Empire State Potato Growers Association, will be one of 20 tuber types helping guide Mr. P.H. along the parade route.

Not appearing in the parade is an actor some in the business apparently once dubbed "Mr. Potato Head,"  Daniel Craig, the new Bond, James Bond. Frankly, we don't see the resemblance....

Aaagh It's Mr. Potato Pumpkin Head!

According to consumeraffairs.com, Target stores is recalling $5 kits of Mr. Potato Head-type ( I assume these are not real licensed Mr. PH items)  stick-in ears, noses, eyes, etc., for use with PUMPKINS, a sacrilege right there, with the usual concerns about small children ingesting the parts.  Take the kits back to Target while your kids ingest raw pumpkin seeds and wield sharp knives back at home.

World Food Day

Today is World Food Day, October 16, a date that probably passes largely unnoticed except in the city of Rome, where some are involved in sessions planned by the Food and Agriculture Organization ( FAO)  of the UN, headquartered there. The theme of this year's "day" is "Investing in Agriculture for Food Security.”

It appears that 400 million children around the world are hungry most of the time, many in countries like Chad, Bangladesh and Niger. In the poorest places children often do not even go to school, places where they might receive minimal rations --they are needed to help families survive by working. Others go to school hungry, and do poorly once there. Clearly, the cycle of hunger and illness begins with undernourished mothers giving birth to underweight babies, or babies lacking vital nutrients in the earliest months of life. 

( Map:  The more red the site, the hungrier the people.)

The Ethiopian Herald out of Addis Abbaba reported on World Food Day this way:

"Foreign aid for agriculture and rural development has continued to decline, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said.

In a press release issued yesterday in connection with World Food Day, the UN specialized agency said that from a total of over nine billion USD per year in the early 1980's, foreign aid provided to the agriculture and rural development sector fell to less than five billion USD in the late 1990's.

Meanwhile, an estimated 854 million people around the world remain undernourished, it added.

Only investment in agriculture, together with support for education and health will turn this situation around, FAO said.

Most of the world's farmers are small scale farmers and as a group they are the biggest investors in agriculture, the release said, and added that if they can make a profit with their farming, they can feed their families throughout the year and reinvest in their farms by purchasing fertilizer, better quality seed and basic equipment."

The FAO provides  Food Security Statistics here: http://www.fao.org/es/ess/faostat/foodsecurity/index_en.htm