This Spuds for You: The Maligned Potato by Jerry Brainum 2/23

 

 

In the 2015 film The Martian, Matt Damon portrays an astronaut who is alone on Mars and runs out of food. Every type of food that he attempts to grow or cultivate fails in the hostile environment of Mars due to a lack of water and fertile ground. Damon is about to give up hope when he comes up with an idea. Since his poop was processed in a freeze-dried manner free of bacteria, Damon opts to use his own waste material as a fertilizer to produce a particular crop: Potatoes. In one scene in the movie, Damon is jubilantly proclaiming," I've now grown 400 potatoes!" Potatoes may seem like a heroic crop in the film, but in real life, to paraphrase the great comedian Rodney Dangerfield, "They get no respect."

It's hard to imagine a more maligned food than potatoes. When I interviewed countless elite bodybuilders years ago, potatoes were never mentioned as being a part of their diets, even in the offseason when they weren't preparing for a contest appearance. Potatoes are thought to be particularly fattening and while some people will freely eat pizza and other highly processed carbohydrate foods, they will staunchly refuse to eat potatoes, with the possible exceptions of sweet potatoes and baked potatoes. The reasons for such distaste for potatoes are unclear, other than the notion that potatoes are pure starch. And while potatoes are rich in starch, of the two types of starch found in a white potato, one of them is resistant to digestion. That means it acts like dietary fiber and passes right through you. From a caloric standpoint, potatoes are no more fattening compared to other vegetables, with a white potato providing only about 100 calories. Potatoes likely earned their nefarious reputation from the items that are often added to them. Examples of this include adding huge amounts of butter and sour cream to baked potatoes or eating greasy french fries, which by the way were not developed in France, but rather in Southern Belgium. But because the people who first produced them were French-speaking, they were dubbed "french fries." 

Potatoes played a central role in history, too. In 1845, a fungus spread among the potato crops in Ireland. This was serious because the Irish people depended on potatoes as a mainstay of their diets. The fungus ruined about half of the potato crop that year and about 75% of the crop over the next 7 years. This became known as the "Irish Potato Famine," also known as the "Great Hunger," since without potatoes, the Irish people were starving. Before it ended in 1852, the potato famine resulted in the death of a million Irish people from starvation, along with the migration from Ireland of more than a million others. The fact that the Irish people were so dependent on potatoes for nutrition offers mute testimony to the nutritional value of . . .