Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Potatoes

Episode Date: January 4, 2021

Alex Schmidt is joined by podcaster/founder Jack O’Brien (The Daily Zeitgeist) for a look at why potatoes are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

potatoes known for being food famous for becoming fries chips good food nobody thinks much about them so let's have some fun let's find out why potatoes are secretly incredibly fascinating Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. Jack O'Brien is my guest. Jack O'Brien. Yes, very exciting. I agree. He created the former podcast called The Cracked Podcast. He's the creator and co-host of the current amazing podcast, The Daily Zeitgeist. Yeah, as they say. And be sure to check out The Daily Zeitgeist if you have not. It's where Jack O'Brien and Miles Gray and excellent guests do a show every weekday about

everything going on in the world and then extra shows about the latest trends as they happen. And beyond that stuff, me and Jack go back a ways. Like, I don't think I need to tell you that I'm super fortunate to have met him and worked with him and learned from him. And he's been a very important person for me all around. He's also awfully busy making that amazing daily podcast, The Daily Zeitgeist. So I'm super grateful to him for stacking this taping on top of everything else he's doing. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca

to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Catawba, Eno, and Shikori peoples. Acknowledge Jack recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Ortongva and Keech and Chumash peoples. And acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about potatoes, a food that immediately makes me think of this Simpsons reference. The situation is that Bart is struggling to find something to bring for show and tell. Why don't you bring this potato? That's pretty big.

Mom, you're always trying to give me potatoes. What is it with you? I just think they're neat. I'm very excited to tell you that Marge is right. The potato is neat. And we will talk about the specific and complex and historical reasons why that we're going to get into today. So, please sit back or chop up some potatoes and chop up some bell peppers, red and green ones, to cook a feast in the honor of my guest today.

Because here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Jack O'Brien. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Jack, this is a real treat. Thanks, man. Oh, that's basically all I've been saying off mic. But now that we're on, here it is. It's great to be here. Great to be with you again on mic, Alex.

Yeah, man. Yeah. You look well. Yeah. Yeah. I've constructed many custom Zoom filters to make it appear that way. So I'm glad it's working. Yeah. Yeah. I've constructed many custom Zoom filters to make it appear that way. So I'm glad it's working. Yeah.

Yeah. The lip gloss is really nice that you've given yourself. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Cool. Not just for ladies, you know? Everybody.

You can all do it. No, it's for everyone. It's an important part of lip health, I've always said. You appear to be on a beach right now. Is that part of the filter? Yeah, yeah. appear to be on a beach right now is that uh is that part of the filter yeah yeah lip beach yeah sure sure yeah that's that's the pyramid of lip health it's like glass and a beach and then there's like i think dairy in there the dairy always gets in they bought it all up man it's the worst they're so good at that the most evil uh people who know dairy dairy farmers gotta watch out for them

yeah i didn't i wasn't thinking about that until we started talking about that but that's one of my favorite things from the old shows is that you'd find like all this stuff about the food industry and it's like oh they're puppeting the entire government it turns out it's great yeah good for them yeah it's all dairy farmers you know in dark shadowy rooms all the way down linda you also were uh very nicely agreed to this particular topic and i always start by asking people what their relationship is or opinion of it but also i thought of i thought of the old nickname potatoes o'brien yes as a reason to talk about potatoes. But how do you feel about them? So I am Irish.

It will shock you to learn. Jack O'Brien. And I feel like potatoes are the chicken of Irish people. It's in everything. Eminently easy to mess up. You can make them too bland uh they're the base of everything but yeah a few years back i noticed there was a dish called potatoes o'brien uh which is i've been told is an offensive impression of irish people and i should stop but i can't stop myself uh but yeah i when they when they complain to you i'll bet it was in a voice

like this oh yeah exactly like that don't you exactly with a nice jig playing in the background usually but um the i spent some time in ireland and uh was made aware how i guess in america too it's a very common last name but it's potatoes o'brien is like bread smith in america like it's just the the two most common things that uh ireland has um it's got potatoes and bell peppers chopped up which I don't know how peppers are not a food typically associated with the last name O'Brien. That O'Brien's a real hot tamale. Or Ireland, I guess. That does not jump out in the top 10 there. But we're a worldly people, us O'Briens. And then, you know. And then, yeah. You know, personally, my mom made a mean twice-baked potato, which I think are traditionally known as baked stuffed potatoes in America.

You basically do a very cheesy mashed potato inside of potato skins, and it's very delicious. And I also like this dish called French fried potatoes that McDonald's prepares. I try and get them a little extra crispy. Oui, Jack. That's a,

that's a get to international here, but J'ai Voudre, that is, I think French. Yes. Yeah. Nice. Yes. It's a french dish uh they they're known for their culinary arts and uh this is one of their great exports yeah and then as i'm also a big taco bell fan but i i was fortunately not a big uh taco bell potato dish proponent so the fact that they have phased that out did not affect me as much as people had assumed.

There was a lot of people being like, hey, man, hope you're hanging in there. Which is interesting because I would have assumed potatoes would be the cheaper ingredient than literally anything else. But apparently not apparently they they were too pricey for the yum brands people um so they phased them out right like we're keeping the champagne fountain obviously but the potatoes of course we gotta lose it. I'm sorry. Yes. Love that champagne fountain at Taco Bell. Baja Blast is the champagne of Taco Bell, as I think we can all agree. Yeah. We all just toasted the new year with it. Sure.

Yeah, of course. Yeah. Of course. I assume many people feel similar in a general way about potatoes, but especially with the... Yeah, I'm glad you didn't feel stereotyped by me connecting you to it i'd felt connected to it because like i i especially when you said brad smith like schmidt is the german version of smith so there's there's like a million people with my exact name in that country and if i ever go i'm sure i'll be like oh yeah this is this is us okay there we go yeah not only is there a bar on every block in dublin there's a bar named o'brien's on every block in dublin and also usually a corner

mart uh named o'brien's they are not shy about putting that name on there and uh yeah confusing the phone book to a large degree the phone book book is just, oh, they don't have any other, any other letter in their phone book. Yeah. And then the, you know, just being vaguely familiar with the Irish potato famine and, you know, the fact that that's probably how my people got here, how my ancestors traveled to the United States and, you know,

uh, having the realization that it was not just like a, oh man, the potatoes are bad this year type thing, but actually a, uh, a real Imperial kind of attack on the Ireland, uh,

island of Ireland and the, the people of Ireland by the crown. Ah, yeah. The blasted crown. My catchphrase, the blasted crown, as you've heard me say at least a dozen times since we started talking today. Yeah, I always, at the top of Daily Zeitgeist, you guys rail against Queen Elizabethabeth ii usually it's a list of conservative but that's how we kick it off yeah yeah yes i am watching the crown for the first time and uh yeah it's it's a wild ride uh that's not true

it's the opposite of a wild ride but it's uh something to do while doing work in the background i i haven't seen the most recent season but i saw the previous season and my partner brenda asked me like hey what's the crown like and i was like well the episode i just watched prince philip is really sad because the moon landing guys are really impressive and then i felt very silly for having watched that for an hour i was like oh that was a whole episode wow okay that was one of the uh more impressive and prolonged depictions of the like just patheticness that whole episode of him just being like you know i'm a bit of a pilot myself uh they're just like cool um yeah anyways people should check out the crown

yeah you can watch neil arm awkward. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. I think from here we can get into numbers and stories and all the things about the potato. I'm so excited. And on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics in a segment called Stats the Halls with Numbers and Figures. Fa la la la la la la la. Nice. Stats the halls with numbers and figures Fa la la la la la la la Nice We had Stockpile from Christmas So I'm working through them Yeah, you're still working through the Christmas ones

Yeah That name was submitted by Kevin Foster Thank you, Kevin We have a new name for this segment every week Please make them as silly and wacky as possible Submit to SifPod on Twitter Or to SifPod at gmail.com I have a Because there are many Oh, yeah, yeah make them as silly and wacky as possible submit to sifpod on twitter or to sifpod at gmail.com i have uh i mean oh yeah yeah the zeitgang uh submits akas for us where we incorporate our

names into little songs at the top of the show and i i've come to really value christmas carols because they're nice and the notes are clear and uh they have evolved to be singable by uh people like me so i do love a good uh christmas carol i'll be doing christmas carol tdz ak's uh through april is my plan after all christmas is the one thing that is you know people like to hear about year round. It never goes bad, right? I really, you should save like the snow based ones for later in the run too. Like, like let it snow in May and people are like, I live in Canada and we're past this.

This is not a thing anymore. Yes, even we are past this. Yes. Oh, I should say that in family uh our instead of having a christmas tree we have a christmas potato oh that we just decorate uh yeah which i'm sure that's assumed uh with the last name o'brien but yeah it's a giant potato in the middle of the living room is the oh it's much bigger than a normal potato like it's tree size okay yeah right Oh, it's much bigger than a normal potato.

Like it's tree size. Yeah, right. I mean, big for a potato. It's, you know, softball sized. I'm impressed by it, at least. My kids, not so much. And first number here about potatoes is more than 99%. So more than 99%. That is how many modern potato varieties are descended from potatoes grown in South Central Chile.

So one specific region of Chile is where almost all potato varieties today come from. Wow, that Columbian Exchange really did it. Yeah, and one of the, like a very, very key critical source for this one is going to be the book 1493 by Charles C. Mann. The subtitle is Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, because it's about, oh, we did the Columbian Exchange and what happened to the entire planet after that. And one of the main things was the potato. sorts of uh there's a number of things that were created by people in the americas or at least cultivated by people in the americas and each european country just got to pretend like they they all just adopted one and ireland was like well we'll take the potato thanks yeah and italy was like every tomato thank you uh thank you and spain was like, every tomato, thank you. And Spain was like, here too.

And they're like, okay, we can share. But yeah. That's right. That's right. That's wild. Does Chile still cultivate a lot of potatoes? Do we still get potatoes from that part of the world? Yeah, it's an odd thing where, we'll have various sources here, but especially The Economist talks about a lot of Chile is large islands, and there's one large island called Chiloé that has 286 varieties of native potatoes. quote, in an array of vibrant colors and unfamiliar shapes. And then descendants of those are most of what the whole rest of the world grows.

And also the Irish lumper, which was the main potato in the Irish potato famine, probably came from Peru or Bolivia. And then when that all died, it was replaced by Chilean potatoes. That's wonderful that we're contrasting the island named Chilauea. Like, Chilauea, away man everything's great here with the irish lumper the lumper what a name uh we have a way with words i did i did double check if it was a gag name it is not a gag name that's actually what they call it yeah i mean it makes sense it's it's efficient what's the old uh the lumpy thing

there uh the lump when when they're talking about unfamiliar shapes did you get any descriptions on what those are like heart-shaped uh rainbow-shaped what are we talking i feel like when they say unfamiliar shapes they're grading on a potato curve. It means long, skinny ones and funky, knobby stuff. Within the genre of if you doodled a lump kind of thing. Got it, got it. But they truly are in a rainbow of colors, especially. We'll have a couple National Geographic articles linked where people visit Peruvian and Bolivian potato farmers today. And they just have a handful of potatoes where it's every color in the rainbow.

I didn't think potatoes worked that way, but it's really cool. Yeah, I did not know that. And they also think that the very first domestication of potatoes was either in Peru or Bolivia about 7,000 to 10,000 years ago is another number. That's from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. So we're several millennia into eating potatoes, which was not always possible. Right. They were poisonous before? Yeah.

And I'm mainly going to push people to sources because I don't totally understand it. But I guess a lot of domesticating potatoes has been making them less poisonous especially in the early days and there are still some people who grow like semi-poisonous ones in the andes mountains and then they will eat clay along with the potatoes and then the clay like absorbs and leeches out the poison for them yeah you gotta have the clay after you eat some potatoes you're always you always just want a handful of clay it It's a great pairing. That is one of the most amazing things about the domestication of, and a lot of it was happening in the pre-Columbian Americas that, you know, all of these foods and vegetables and fruits were like things that were initially poisonous and like tiny and looked terrible and they they're just like yeah that'll become a great fruit like once we you know a lot of genetic modification happening the uh out in the the field before um that was kind of seen as a bad thing right

yeah big time like a lot of very careful the the antique version of gmos yeah yeah like i also i wish i wish when i was a kid and i was like i don't feel like eating fruit i wish i had been told like this is the nicest fruit has ever been this used to be horrible and you need to like respect history and as a nerd kid i would have been like okay sure my wife is korean and she was raised to just think of fruit as like the ultimate it was like candy to her that was like the ultimate treat that you could get and we're trying to bestow that on onto my children it's uh but yeah you're also having to shield them from the fact that real candy exists uh which is hard uh and a lie um that i don't like

to live have you ever seen the original picture of corn like what corn looked like when it was first i think so in its natural wild state yeah it's like two nubs on the it's just like two kernels on the top of what looks like a weed that you would pull out of your garden. Yeah, man. I wish I could go back a couple thousand years and show them what we have now. They'd lose their minds.

Right. They'd be so excited. Yeah. Violent people like to say they would travel back in time with a machine gun. I would travel back in time with corn on the cob and just blow mines just like kings bowing down to me as i eat it like yes exactly yes yes bow to me respect the cob cob well and uh next number here is the number five because five is the potatoes position in the current i would call them power rankings for just how many for just what crops are the most

popular crops on earth it's the fifth most common thing we grow in terms of harvest volume as potatoes wow can we do you do you have you have the top four in front of you? Yeah, and then the four ahead of that are rice, wheat, maize, or corn, and then number one in the world is sugar cane. So candy strikes again. There we go. There's also a thing where that number for potatoes would be higher if it included sweet potatoes and also if it included yams it turns out that all three of those plants are super

different genetically they have very little to do with each other if i ever talk about sweet potatoes that'll be like a future episode we won't we won't do that here yes you must remain clear maintain a clear division between your potato episode and your sweet potato episode. Genetically speaking, not the same. And it's setting expectations for the audience. You know, there are massive sweet potato fans. Just rapid. Yeah.

Lovers of sweet potatoes. Furious. Yeah, it turns out potatoes are in the genus that's called solanum which is the nightshade family so the closest relative of potato potatoes is tomatoes eggplants and peppers got it yeah all things that started out poisonous right that's the nightshade family yes right they really must have been out of options when they decided, like, what should we eat? Well, we got this poison. I don't know.

We could try that and eating a handful of clay afterwards. Yeah. Food is hard to come by sometimes. I almost feel like I still don't understand that practice of eating clay so you can eat potatoes. Like, that's just really not an eating behavior we have to think about in the modern day there's no there's no foods we're eating where we're like well you have to eat a sack of bricks too otherwise forget it like it's not gonna happen i guess the closest thing would be mixed drinks where it's like we like to have a little uh orange juice with our poisoned oh thing that poisons our system yeah that's right that's the that's the zone where we're like i mean poison right rest of the stuff

no way yeah yeah there's also there's like one other thing to talk about sweet potatoes for a second is that yams are a whole separate plant. But in the US and Canada, we'll often describe a Thanksgiving dish of sweet potatoes as yams, even though that's a very different plant, mostly grown in West Africa. So it turns out I've never had yams, even though I thought I had. I was fooled. Ah, we've never had yams. How about that? I've not eaten yams in Africa, so I'm assuming I am with you in that book. And then next number here, and I think I like doing this kind of number with every plant. The next number is 10 pounds, 14 ounces. 10 pounds, 14 ounces, or almost five kilograms, is the Guinness Book of World Records heaviest potato. Wow.

On record, it's the heaviest, biggest potato that's ever been grown. Wow. And it was grown in 2011 by a man named Peter Glazebrook, who is a farmer in the East Midlands of England. And he is also the world record holder for the heaviest onion, the heaviest cauliflower, the longest parsnip, and the longest beet. So this guy, his thing is like massive root vegetables. That's all he does.

He's got a lane. That is a 10 pounds, 14 ounces, did you say? That is a very large, that's a giant baby. That's the first thing I thought when I saw the number. Yeah. I was like, it was like, Whoa.

All right. Uh, yeah. Good for her. Good for her. Good God. Yeah. Wow.

And babies are lumpy and shapeless, uh, when they first come out in a lot of cases. So, uh, much like a potato. Right. Also in the nightshade family don't don't nibble on them

or anything right you know yeah yeah without a handful of clay nearby and then uh last number here there's another size one this is 25 inches by 14 inches so that's a length and width 25 inches 14 inches if you're on metric that's a little and width, 25 inches, 14 inches. If you're on metric, that's a little over 63 centimeters, a little over 35 centimeters. But anyway, that number is the length and width of the world's largest potato chip, the largest potato chip in the entire world. According to Roadside America, you can see it at the Idaho Potato Museum in the town of Blackfoot, Idaho. It's the equivalent of 80 potato chips, and it is a Pringle. It was created June 3rd, 1991 by what they describe as, quote, a team of Procter

and Gamble engineers, which is really fun to me. They were in the lab building this. The giant potato chip team. Gotta get all the biggest geniuses genius i was gonna ask if it was a pringle or like something similar that is sort of a rendered potato chip out of potato paste or just your standard like sliced thin potato because that would be wild where if they found one that big yeah right i feel like i guess you you know about pringle construction because i didn't know until researching this that it's made of stuff like i figured there was some kind of shaping going into it yeah it's constructed from potatoes and also rice and corn and wheat like it's it's sort of kind of not a chip i've always uh i've always just assumed that based on like the just what it feels like when you consume it it just kind of breaks apart into a paste when

you when you eat it like as opposed to something that has like kind of tiny sinews like a uh like your standard potato yeah chip yeah so they're like lab built and i guess like a regular potato chip would be limited by potato size but this this one, they were just like, they 3D printed it or whatever. They just knocked it out. Right, yeah. They had it. They definitely feel very 3D printed Pringles. There's also, it's been at the museum,

so it was created in 1991. It's been there ever since pretty much. And according to Roadside America, quote, after nearly 30 years of display, the chip is beginning to crack no yeah so if you go there you'll see there's like a fissure in it and they're starting to question whether it still counts and it's a whole uh crisis and i don't know there now not to uh underestimate like the the value of the science that uh has gone into, but wouldn't it be very easy for a team of Proctor and Gamble scientists

to up it by a centimeter? Or am I mistaking? Also, I would love to see a heist movie directed by the Coen brothers where the goal is to steal the world's largest potato chip. Yeah. Yeah, why don't they just do another maybe they like destroyed the equipment

because they were like no no man should have this it's like at the end of frankenstein when he throws it in the ocean or whatever like no no yeah yeah because i guess you need a mold right it's not you can't just honey i shrunk the kidsunk-the-kids a normal Pringle. You need the mold that's going to build it out. So you've got to create the mold and then presumably break the mold so that nobody gets their hands on it and controls the world. Right. The equivalent of a weather machine in the potato chip industry. Right.

Once you're president, you're given a folder about it. But otherwise, yeah. That's right. Yeah. But those are the main numbers. There'll be a few more in the takeaways, but those are kind of some stray numbers. And then we have three takeaways about the potato. Here we go into takeaway number one.

Woo! takeaway number one. A creative French scientist made potatoes popular worldwide after surviving on them as a POW. A creative French scientist. So he was a POW, was surviving on them. Where was he imprisoned? Yeah, so he was a French scientist named Auguste-Antoine Parmentier. Oh, sorry. Antoine-Augustin Parmentier. And we'll mostly call him Parmentier in the show. And he was a French scientist and was captured by the Prussians in the Seven Years' War. Seven Years' War was in the mid-1700s. And it was sort of a global conflict that included what we called in the U.S. the French and Indian War.

So he was trained as a pharmacist and he was an army pharmacist for the French army. He was not planning on like, you know, seeing combat or anything. And then according to Charles C. Mann, he was captured five times by the Prussians. So he was... He's either very, very good or very bad at his job. Right, right. When I read that, I thought maybe he wants to work for the Prussians? Is he just trying to, what's going on? Yeah, he's applying for a job they think they're capturing him.

And then the key quote here is, As a prisoner, he ate little but potatoes for three years a diet which to his surprise kept him in good health and his effort to understand how that could have happened led parmentier to become a pioneering nutritional chemist one of the first to try to figure out what is in food and why it sustains the body. Is the potato that nutritionally diverse that I could just survive off of a potato diet? Yeah, we're not doctors. No one tried this.

However, according to Charles C. Mann and some other sources, the way Mann puts it is if you had to eat only one kind of solid food all of the time, the potato is the best thing you could choose in the entire world. Wow. It is actually full of a lot of different things your body needs.

And then the main things it's missing are calcium and vitamin A and vitamin D. It's missing calcium, vitamin A, vitamin D. And cow's milk does all three of those things. So we're going to... Wow, milk and potatoes. Yeah. And so there's like this chunk of European history for more than a century where there are huge regions where lots of people basically just live on potatoes and milk. And you would think would die, but they don't. They just keep living and are relatively healthy. It's amazing.

That was always a question I had about the potato famine. I was like, isn't that not enough even if it was a good bumper crop? But that's wild. All right. Shout out to the potato. Yeah, it turns out it's an incredible food. And then with this takeaway here, the background is that potatoes start out in the Americas, especially South America and the Andes Mountains. And then they were first brought back to Europe in the 1500s by Spanish soldiers, murderers, et cetera. And then they...

Murderers, et cetera. They bring the potatoes over and people immediately think they're bad uh like it's it's like like i was a picky kid and there was a lot of like that looks funny to me so i don't want it that was europe when they were presented with potatoes they were like no way right it's like the lobster and uh back in the early days when it was a punishment for prisoners to eat lobsters. Right. That's great, though, that Prementia was like, I don't know, he was able to think complexly enough past the fact that he was being punished with the same food every day to be like, man, I feel great.

This is the healthiest I've ever been. Exactly. I love that situation where a guy is like i should probably be dead and so now my career is like why am i why did i not die when i spent years just eating one weird root like i should be dead that's wild and also the like europeans before this according to national geographic quote since potatoes looked lumpy and suspicious, they were variously blamed for, which is true. That's fair. All right, fair. They were variously blamed for leprosy, rickets, scrofula, tuberculosis, and syphilis.

And Presbyterian ministers in Scotland banned them on the grounds that there was no mention of potatoes in the Bible. And there was just this Europe-wide suspicion for the most part of the potato. Not just this looks gross, but we believe this causes diseases. And when Parmentier was being fed potatoes as a prisoner, the main French policy in particular was to use potatoes as hog feed. They were like, this is not for humans to eat. We can't feed this to people. I mean, to be fair to people long ago, I can't think of a food that would be dirtier than the potato. It's like entire surface is covered in dirt.

You just dig it out of the dirt and it's just dirty and then there's all sorts of like nooks and crannies for it to for the dirt to get inside of yeah delicious lumpy and suspicious is like i guess true like i okay all right suspicious and suspicious they kind of link those as though they are self-evidently the same thing uh which yeah uh i mean it's true when it comes to milk i guess you don't you don't want your milk to be lumpy uh you don't want your veggies to be lumpy yeah yeah even then they they did that thing that i hear modern grocery stores do where they throw out funny looking produce like ugly right like even then they were like i i don't know i'm covered in filth like a monty python peasant but i still don't want to have this like dirty dirty exactly yeah i do wonder if the potato would be among the least wasted of modern produce just because

they never look good. So like there's never a time when you're like, oh, there's an ugly potato. It's like by definition, potatoes are ugly. Yeah. Wow. I've never like thrown out a potato for or just like not found a potato to be appropriate looking because it can literally be any shape. Yeah, wow.

They're just all weird. So it's fine. Yeah, great. Yeah, exactly. Like they all look like they accidentally grew that way at just random. Like they were not like, whereas a banana has the same shape every time and if it's you know round or uh you know anvil shaped you're you're gonna be suspicious of that but potatoes that by design they just look

like something that uh fell out of something else yeah the other reason europeans were like it's not totally strange they rejected them is that you have this really aesthetically weird tuber under the ground because the the edible parts under the ground then the entire rest of the plant is very pretty and very poisonous like we were saying with nightshade stuff uh turns out i did not know a lot about potato plants it's a very pretty looking shrub with beautiful flowers on it and then also they have what are called potato fruits which look like little green cherry tomato sort of fruits but are like packed with this poison called solanine that might not kill you but will make you feel

very sick and and is not a pleasant thing to consume right so so you have to be like relatively careful with this plant if you're a european farmer you have to not mess it up yeah and then the ugly like dirt clump underneath it is the edible thing very tricky of uh nature right there yeah nature's always a jerk that's how i feel yeah yeah yeah yeah you i think that's a Werner Herzog quote. Nature's always a jerk. And so then you have Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, born in 1737, is constantly a POW and then survives.

And after the Seven Years' War, he says, OK, I've been a pharmacist, but now I'm going to get into agronomy and botany and figure out plants and specifically try to promote the potato. He had a couple opportunities to do it. There was a crop failure in 1769, and he won a contest for proposals for what were called plants that could, in times of scarcity, be substituted for regular food to nourish man. They were so good at titling things back in the day. No consideration for economy of language. It was just all the words that apply.

The more, the better. Yeah, and it was like writing or printing was laborious. And they were still like, the title of my book will be 50 words. Here we go. Maybe that's why. It was like a flex to be like, look how many words I had time to print at the top of this page. Like, that's how Franklin does. People are like, yeah, okay, man, that's pretty cool. So he wins that, and then from there starts to get to know the French monarchy. And in 1773, the new king is Louis XVI, who will be beheaded later. But he decides to say, hey, I'm going to lift price controls on grain. That raises bread prices.

And then France goes through what's called the Flour War, which is more than 300 riots in 82 towns over the price of bread. And so then Parmentier says, hey, potato can be used as flour to make potato bread. You can just eat potatoes and starts working through the monarchy to promote potatoes all over France, and is pretty successful. By the end of his time doing it, potatoes are popular in France, and also the rest of Europe is starting to get on board. And this Parmentier guy had like, funny ways of promoting potatoes. He did like the standard science stuff of publishing tracts about it. But he also held a fancy dinner party for French aristocrats and visitors where all of the food was potatoes, just different potato courses over and over again.

And he then at the party convinced Marie Antoinette to start wearing potato blossoms in her hair. he had was he was given a piece of land by the king near paris planted a field of potatoes in it and then hired armed guards to patrol the fields and tell people well i'm defending the very valuable potatoes like they have to be under armed guard otherwise they're going to get taken in order to convince people to steal them and get into eating potatoes. Like just forming a line outside of a club that you're opening. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very smart.

Very smart. And that worked. Yeah. This guy like made it his job to be a club promoter for potatoes. For potatoes. Yeah. And did it. Like it became a very, very popular food in France and they drastically increased the

food supply of France and he was a national hero there's always somebody who like some very strange person that we can thank for all our great modern like this dude just being like i must make potatoes the thing like was he trying to get rich off potatoes did he have a patent on potatoes or he was just like for the sake of my of future humans i will uh make sure that this is popular yeah it seems like he i i don't think he was a noble but he was like he made a living doing this and was just really passionate about it and i think especially that pow experience would leave me never wanting to eat potatoes again but also very very into their powers as like this like it's this super food they've been giving to hogs and then they realized oh people can eat this and uh and and that will

help our country eat that would be very good yeah yeah that's awesome and there's also we'll have a link to atlas obscura because parmentier has this huge memorial at perlache cemetery in paris and there's a ring of potato plants planted around it so nice flowers and then also in the pictures uh you'll folks will see that uh people like leave potatoes on top of his monuments as a little like tribute to his work promoting this food in his country wow it's very sweet true national hero yeah wow but they are really pretty flowers the potato plants look at that yeah i'm surprised that they've never been presented to me before it's it's like very nice and it's just this bonus of growing potatoes like the farms must be beautiful yeah i don't know but uh must be

nice yeah i like the the way that you're kind of passively challenging your fans to present you with more exotic flowers i like that it's like hello i shouldn't have to ask i'm a little surprised actually that nobody's given me any any potato flowers because they're very beautiful and, you know, befitting of what's more befitting than a beautiful plant of me, Alex Schmidt. Noted flower fan, Alex Schmidt. This guy. Yes. Next thing here is a big trumpet sound for a big takeaway. Before that, we're going to take a little break.

We'll be right back. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney.

I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. And from here, I think we can get to the next takeaway,

because it's in many ways related. But takeaway number two. Europe doubled its food supply and took over the world by eating a tiny group of cloned potatoes. And, you know, it's not really a good thing that Europe took over the world, but Charles Seaman and others, but Charles Seaman and others paint this picture that Europe fully doubled the amount of food it had just by introducing massive potato cultivation. And then from there, that brought an end of hunger and stability in a way where they were able to

not be in such a turbulent situation and proceed to thrive as a continent. I mean, yeah, we rarely see flower wars anymore. Because we got good at growing food, making food. Yeah, truly. In 1493, Charles C. Mann cites a French historian named Fernand Braudel who says that the 1400s all the way through the 1700s in Europe were a time of just constant hunger. There would just constantly be crises of running out of food.

He said that from 1500 to 1778, France had 40 national food crises where the entire country stopped because there wasn't enough food. He also says this understates the problem because it omits hundreds and hundreds of local famines. And he also has stats on England and the city of Florence just being kind of out of food most of the time for a couple centuries. That was just sort of the norm was people being out of food most of the time for a couple centuries that was just sort of the norm was people being out of food and angry at their government in a way that was not uh helping progress what did uh vodka maybe you're gonna cover this but did vodka exist before potatoes were popularized i don't know actually yeah i didn't i should have thought about vodka is potato based isn't it i

think most of it is yeah yeah huh interesting yeah so also they were stone sober they hated that it was a very difficult time yeah nobody likes that nobody likes that that's for sure yeah because you can you can turn potatoes into so many things and and as we were talking about it's this magic superfood it turns out like it was really a game changer for the continent of Europe when it showed up. Yeah, you wouldn't, because it's so, it's just like whitish yellow and all mushy. And it's not, I would have never suspected that it is like a superfood that is packed with all these vitamins. Yeah, and it's also very high calorie because that's that's another thing like yeah we as modern people will be like die too many chips or fries or whatever but in the past when they were starving

they were like good this is right packed with calories and that's very that's a very very good thing right now right yeah i don't have to eat for another 12 hours because i just yeah hammered three handfuls of baked potato and also with the the takeaway i said it was a tiny group of cloned potatoes yeah when you're growing potatoes i learned that there's two ways to grow it either you can take the potato fruit and plant its seeds and then that creates a new plant genetically or you can cut a piece off of a potato tuber like a potato you and then that creates a new plant genetically or you can cut a piece off of a potato tuber like a potato you'd cook with cut a piece off of that plant that in the ground and then it will grow a clone it'll be exactly the same genetically just like human

reproduction right wait no actually that doesn't work that way and the other alex's are on the phone guys chime in uh it's been great to know you uh but that is presumably why when i forget that i have a potato in a drawer somewhere and then open it up there's another potato growing out it's like trying to self-clone yeah yeah like those those uh things we call eyes are the points where a new plant wants to come out of. So if you plant a piece with a few eyes in it, you'll get a new plant. Wow. But it'll also be kind of the same plant. And then in Europe's case, in the early 1500s, they were not thinking about advanced genetic diversity of their crops.

So the couple of potatoes that a couple Spanish guys brought back, just all of Europe planted it and mostly cloned it over and over and over again. And so you had this continent full of basically one or two plants. I'm exaggerating with one or two, but it was an extremely limited sample of South America's potatoes became what Europe ate, and then Europe kind of spread it everywhere else. Yeah, I'm looking at this picture you sent me uh what they describe as a kaleidoscopic variety of heirloom potatoes and yeah they don't they don't look they look like they could be like different types of jewel uh jewel not jewel the vaping product but the the valuable rock like they yeah look totally different colors different shapes like even different yeah they they look like different plants one some of them look like pine cones

very cool some of them look like big blueberries yeah there's like green ones and red ones and and orange it's amazing like this set of potatoes you can get in peru if you know the right people and they were the spanish guys who brought it back were like, we'll take the ugly brown one that looks like it just got coughed up by something. Yeah. And it's also a long-running thing. Like we'll link,

it's called Finding the Faces of Farming by Jim Richardson for National Geographic. And he meets a farmer named Uva Calupe who has a field that's, quote, the size of a decent American living room. That's her field she's farming. And she uses it to grow 50 to 70 varieties of potatoes. It's this whole very different approach to farming. Basically, every food we grow in America, it's one field of one thing, and we do it that way. Right. Yeah. Which is the best way to do it, right? field of one thing and and we do it that way right yeah yeah which is

the best way to do it right just the same thing over and over repeated uh soullessly and then robotically harvested it's good for us i'm sure yeah punishing sameness that's what i like and yeah and so then these cloned tiny sample of potatoes was a very high yield crop. It was easy to grow on hilly land, on worse land. What they would also do is plant it in between cycles of planting grain, so they could use the same land for both things. And in terms of calories, potatoes effectively doubled Europe's food supply, bringing political stability, also bringing a higher population. There's also a thing where they were a good food to grow during wars because in past centuries in Europe, armies would invade a place and just eat whatever they found and they didn't want to dig up potatoes. Like farmers could leave those under the ground

because it's a lot of labor to get them out. A lot of times you would get invaded and they would eat your silo of grain or eat your cows or whatever and then leave the potatoes so it also helped that way yeah i'm always eating people's silos of grain just going in there grabbing handfuls of grain and then the the other way potatoes really grew in europe is that they were a superfood that like poor people really wanted to grow and then apparently the wealthy saw it as a food that they could like let the poor have without giving up anything national geographic says that the british royal society quote saw potatoes as a brilliant solution to the perennial food problems of the poor the army the jails the orphanages and the insane asylums cool but from there you ended

up with a few countries where, because it's this food that's so nutritionally complete, by the 1800s, about 40% of Irish people were eating no solid food besides potatoes. Wow. And then a lower but similar number in the Netherlands, Belgium, Prussia, and part of Poland were also just this place where the lower classes would just eat potatoes and drink milk. And that was how they lived. That was what they had. I see no problem strategically. Sounds like a good system that they set up for the

the poor in Ireland. Yeah, I feel like when I was thinking about potatoes, one of the first things I thought of is the Irish potato famine. And I wish potatoes were more famous for feeding people and helping hunger ends. But then also we have this story where in 1845, the potato blight reaches Ireland. And by the end of the famine, at least a million people starve and at least 2 million emigrate, mostly to the US ands and canada right and the population of ireland is still below what it was pre-famine wow right now wow definitely not the potatoes fault more the fault of you know poor agricultural practices and uh monarchs uh treating people in distant lands like they aren't people yeah yeah yeah it's a right it's a king thing

yeah basically king thing and then we have one more takeaway that does not have much to do with agriculture let's get into it takeaway number three mr potato head yeah started out as an unpopular and dangerous toy that wasted actual potatoes. Yeah, you sent me a picture of the original. I don't know if this is the original, but one of the early Mr. Potato heads. Yeah. And it looks like a Furby with its face melted off. There is no potato there?

Is the idea that these are things that would go in the potato exactly yeah and i this is so astounding to me and our main sources are pbs american experience in the national toy hall of fame in 1949 an inventor named george learner creates the idea of mr potato head the original toy is you receive a box of like limbs and face parts and accessories and a little torso and then you provide an actual potato as the head like you like the food you use up food to play with this toy that's wild at a time that yeah it was probably yeah food waste was probably not as in fashion as it is these days. Yeah, truly. I guess you could always eat it afterwards, right? I guess you could, yeah.

Basically, the two immediate problems with the toy are that one of them is that it's 1949, this toy is being invented, and World War II rationing is a really recent memory. Right. Apparently, the last rationing in the U.S. was for sugar, and it didn't end until 1947. So two years later, they said, why don't you just use up potatoes for a child's toy? And people were like, no, I'm not interested in that. I remember the war.

We were all here. Here, take the most nutritious staple of your diet and uh stick a bunch of plastic in it get your kids grubby hands all over it and yeah yeah like the dogs licking it and stuff like i don't know it just seems tough to sell rolling around on the ground yeah but yeah again it is a thing that came out of just being packed with dirt so it's tough to make a potato too dirty to eat yeah that's true i i couldn't find if people were still eating them i guess that would be the sensible way to have the toy and then replace the potatoes but the other the other problem with the toy was a safety issue

where like if you have a mr potato head today it's a very rounded plastic peg going into plastic but at the time every accessory had like a spike on it basically so it could go into a potato because you have to like puncture the potato and it has to stick so it was an incredibly dangerous toy just a bunch of meat thermometers yeah yeah it's more it's one of the worst ideas for a toy i've ever heard of i think very and then it worked out it was okay yeah yeah gosh history is really full of people with seemingly terrible ideas that then go on to shape our world. I bought, that was one of the first toys I bought my kid when they reached toy buying age. And he only ate like three of the accessories.

Right. And it like, it's fine now. It's totally fine. Like enjoy Mr. Potato Head potato heads it's a good character and toy story and everything yeah but the progression of it working out involves safety fixes because now it's now it's pretty safe but also this guy george learner initially failed to sell it to any toy companies and then he finally like settled for a deal with the brothers henry and meryl hassenfeld and the hassenfeld brothers were running a very small And then he finally settled for a deal with the brothers Henry and Merrill Hassenfeld.

And the Hassenfeld brothers were running a very small Rhode Island toy company called Hassenfeld Brothers. And they shortened that to Hasbro and then took over the world. They and they also made Mr. Potato Head the first toy ever advertised on TV in 1952. Wow. And the sources describe it as a time when like, just TV commercials were thrilling in 1952. Like that they existed.

People were like, I'm going to pay attention to this message. This is the best. And then they did 4 million in sales in the first few months after the TV commercials. Like it just took off from there. Was this a version with like a fake potato that you bought or was it one of the ones was it still you stuck uh still a potato still a potato wow yeah huge hit wow that's unbelievable right and they leaned into it because they also then started

selling pete pepper oscar orange katie carrot and cookie cucumber which were further waste of also then started selling Pete Pepper, Oscar Orange, Katie Carrot, and Cookie Cucumber, which were further waste of produce toys that were like spinoffs. They really wanted America to do this. To play with your food. I'm sure that was the pitch. What do kids love to do? They love to play with their food. And then i can also see the resistance to what you're gonna put a fake potato in there like that's absurd you know the idea that we because it is sort of reverse engineered from a it's it is strange that well why is it a potato? And this is an explanation for that. It's just a very, very dumb one. I never questioned as a kid why there was a toy where it's a potato that you put stuff on, but it's all fake.

Right. It could be anything. Yeah. It could be Mr. Funny Face, and it's just like, there's no potato element. Yeah, I had. Yeah. Yeah. But they sold it this way, and they didn't start blunting the pegs until

1964 so uh more than a decade in they also had to make the accessories bigger because apparently they were very sharp and very small starting out wow but america loved it and got way way into it and part of the tagline was potato head people look different every time you make them because potatoes vary and they're weird yeah so that was part of the hook that's nice and also it was like before we were putting calcium in our salt so like actual people had weird lumps on their heads and so uh it actually matched the reality of what people looked like i guess there's like a a good message hidden in there, right? That, hey, this guy looks different every single time. It doesn't matter what you look like.

Yeah. Also, if you leave these around, not only are they painful for your parents to step on, but they will be embedded in their foot. Oh, God. Yeah. We have Legos now that are just the worst to step on but could you imagine a tiny thumbtack uh is just left around the house just walking around with your uh

sleeping cap and your candle as people used to with your giant sleeping robe. I guess they all wore sandals, I was going to say sandals, but slippers back then, right? Yeah, the classic Scrooge or Santa is coming pajamas. Yeah, exactly. Hello. What's my impression of that guy? It's pretty good.

Are we good? Yeah. Thank you. Hello, who's there um ah damn you potato head that guy has a young child somehow right even though he sounds like he's 95 years old well and then and then hasbro we know the company hasbro today this was their very first hit it was slightly before they were even called Hasbro. They now own Transformers, G.I. Joe, Power Rangers, Furby, Nerf, Twister, My Little Pony,

every Parker Brothers game, every Milton Bradley game, and more stuff from there. Mr. Potato Head was their first hit, even though it was a terrible idea. And Furby, they went on to... Yeah, I was saying the original mr potato head looks like have you ever seen that picture with the furbies like face stripped off and it's just the robot underneath yes yeah that yeah they they have a thing for that because this this very early mr potato head really looks like that it will haunt your dreams they're they're in the boardroom like i don't want to do more scary stuff but look at this graph where the line goes up i just you know right that's it

we're gonna build ghouls and stuff that's our new toys i don't know they got the guy who designed the original ventriloquist dummy just has the most terrifying imagination hurrying the tour group past him like anyway the rest of hasbro headquarters is very fun uh really good folks that is the main episode for this week. My enormous thanks to Jack O'Brien, who probably hung up that Zoom call with me and then went off and made two or three more Daily Zeitgeist things

because he's very busy in addition to making fantastic shows, and I'm extra grateful to him for making space for this. Just really appreciate it. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is potatoes on Mars. That's right, potatoes on Mars. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of nearly two

dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring potatoes with us. Aren't they neat? They are. And here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, a creative French scientist made potatoes popular worldwide after surviving on them as a POW. Takeaway number two, Europe doubled its food supply and conquered the world by eating a tiny group of cloned potatoes. And takeaway number three, Mr. Potato Head started out as an unpopular, dangerous toy that wasted actual potatoes.

Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guest. He's great. Jack O'Brien is on Twitter at Jack underscore O'Brien. And every weekday, you can hear multiple shows from the Daily Zeitgeist, or as it is often said, the Daily Zeitgeist. And that's an iHeartRadio podcast available everywhere, available often. Every day is a great time to check it out, dive in, join the Zeitgang and get into that show. Also going to link other iHeartRadio podcasts in the links because Jack manages a number of fantastic podcasters who are doing other fantastic things. There's a whole great network going on there. And also it feels worth adding in general here, like if I could put a link to Jack O'Brien has meant a whole lot to me in

getting to do this, I would put a link to that. I don't know how to do that exactly. But I got to have a lot of incredible experiences and meet amazing people and do stuff in other countries occasionally, because Jack O'Brien launched a good website with an amazing viewpoint. And so I'm very, very thankful to him for letting me be part of that. And for everything that came from it. It's just been great. I think I'm not the only person who feels that way too, but I don't know. There's no way to link to it or capture it in a podcast outro. So I'm just saying it and I hope you can figure out how much I mean it from there. And kind of speaking of that, that leads us into there being many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. Because an amazing book was foundational to this entire Potatoes episode,

and the book is called 1493, Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. That book is by historian and science writer Charles C. Mann. It is a follow-up to his amazing book called 1491, which is about the pre-Columbian New World. I'm pretty sure I first heard of that book from Jack. It's going to cover lots of stuff beyond this podcast episode. It's not just a book about potatoes, although that is a big thing in it. But I highly recommend just get your eyes and ears on a book like that one if you want to. This episode also leaned on National Geographic in particular. A few of the National Geographic sources here are the article,

Are Potatoes Depressing? by Rebecca Rupp, the article, Finding the Faces of Farming, a Peruvian Potato Harvest by Jim Richardson, and the article Get a Taste of Peru's Hot Potatoes by Rebecca Wolfe. Many more sources from there, including some truly bizarre Mr. Potato Head pictures, in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that,

our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I am so thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that?

Talk to you then.