Potatoes
I had a vivid dream about potatoes last night so the cosmos directed my attention to potatoes. Wikipedia, of course, has all you ever wanted to know about potatoes.
As of 2014, potatoes were the world's fourth-largest food crop after maize (corn), wheat, and rice.[8] Following millennia of selective breeding, there are now over 5,000 different types of potatoes.
Gardeners typically
dig up potatoes with spading forks or by hand. Commercial harvesting is typically done with large potato harvesters, which scoop up the plant and surrounding earth. This is transported up an apron chain consisting of steel links several feet wide, which separates some of the dirt. Humans do the final cleaning.
Dreams nearly always have a traceable stimulus. All I can think of is our commercial potato project at our farm…..early on. With a huge amount of hand labor we made a trench 500 feet long, digging in grassy pasture. We made the soil fertile and planted potatoes. As the plants grew we mounded up the soil around each plant to protect from sun damage and provide growing space for the tubers.
At season’s end we dug into the mounds, expecting a huge harvest. We even wondered how to market them. In 500 feet we found……..3 potatoes. Unnoticed by us, gophers had eaten them all! Learning curve; we converted to narcissus family flowers, which are poison to gophers.
To connect the dream to reality, two points. Inflation-potatoes are comparatively inexpensive, nutritious, and can be prepared hundreds of ways. And production: In 2020, world production of potatoes was 359 million tonnes, led by China with 22% of the total (table). Other major producers were India, Russia, Ukraine and the United States.
Many people get their potatoes in one form, ubiquitous with fast foods: 35% of the potato crop is turned into french fries, 28% is used for fresh, and 13% goes to chips!
How do y’all consume potatoes? Do you like them? What’s you favorite recipe? I once used a mandoline and made chips in the oven. A lot of work, but pretty good. Easier to buy a bag, for sure.