Spud Busting

Ardent readers know that I am a big potato booster. The humble tuber has provided welcome starch-laden succor in my gluten-free hour of need, its well-known fibrousness proving a boon in these breadless times. I admit, however, that I don't think too much about my spuds and their provenance - I buy them (Russets at this time of year, mostly) in batches of eight or nine and they usually cost around ninety-nine cents per pound. I bake 'em and mash 'em and sometimes get fancy, but most of the time we eat them and forget them. We love them the way we love the sunrise, or Spring daffodils, or the twists and turns of Lost - while appreciating their fabulosity, we also tend to take them for granted.

Recently, however, potatoes hit my consciousness like a 50 lb. burlap sackful falling unexpectedly off the back of a pickup truck. It happened like this. Finding that the NYTimes online was updating me on Julian Assange and the marvelously scandalous Wikileaks commotion with insufficient celerity, I was reluctantly forced to log onto CNN for the breaking story. Would Blondie turn himself in? Would the British judge offer bail? What about extradition to Sweden? Gripping stuff - and my rapt attention was such that I almost missed the wee promotional link off to the side, promising with some urgency to reveal what seven foods I must never, ever, under any circumstances feed my family.

I saw the link just in time and duly clicked. Now, I have written before (and at some length) that I have not traditionally been into earnest food as a rule and that is still the case. However, I must admit that all of this watching-what-I-eat business has wrought a few changes in my life: I cook brown rice now and consume chia seeds for breakfast. My intake of saturated fat is way, way down and I'm feeling slightly better, I suppose, as the Nutritionist predicted. For some time I've tried to buy organic proteins where possible and I've always kept processed food to a minimum. Seven foods one must avoid like the plague? I guessed that, in a typical week, I didn't buy any of them. I prepared to scan the List of Doom and congratulate myself on my canny shopping habits and healthy lifestyle.

Well, campers, you will have guessed the cataclysmic truth. Of the seven foods most likely to kill you and destroy the planet (as identified by Prevention magazine, brought to us by the very sincere folks at the Rodale Press just up the road), four to five are regularly (if not commonly) to be found in my recycled Wegmans shopping bag.

Good news first. I never buy canned tomatoes or microwave popcorn. At least I'm off the hook there. Farmed salmon is something I already knew was evil evil evil, but sometimes I can't bring myself to pay $24 per pound for wild-caught fish and one can only eat so much tilapia in a given week, am I right?

This leaves milk, corn-fed beef, apples, and potatoes. It is potatoes about which I am choosing to vent my spleen, because that is the thing on this list of which I eat the most. Milk makes me gag (except in tea or coffee); beef we eat only on the rarest of occasions; and I'm more of an Anjou pear girl, anyway. Tatties, now - that gives me serious pause.

Here's the scoop. According to Jeff Moyer, Chair of the National Organic Standards Board, most commercial potato farmers will not eat their own product, preferring to grow their families' supplies in separate organic plots. This is because the tubers (underground growers that they are) absorb the herbicides, pesticides and fungicides that are spread in the fields to increase yields. In addition, spuds are treated after harvesting with chemicals designed to keep them from sprouting during storage. Quite apart from the sad impact this treatment must inevitably have on bonsai potato artistes worldwide, it is claimed that no amount of scrubbing can remove these noxious substances once they have been absorbed into the taters' flesh.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I am not usually an alarmist where food is concerned, so in addition to all my other kitchen experiments (gluten-free baking, molecular gastronomy, and no - I haven't forgotten that the pasta situation is still unresolved) I will be testing the theory that you cannot sprout a commercially-farmed, chemical-filled potato. I currently have three specimens strategically placed in the basement: one organic russet, one non-organic russet, and one strange waxy potato I bought by mistake last week that I'm sure is full of fungicides and DDT (it has that look about it). I will check on their progress regularly and update readers with the results when I have them. I will be most relieved if the malevolent potatoes do, in fact, sprout - organic potatoes cost $1.40 per pound and I'm not sure the bank balance can stand them for long.