Potatotwopointohto

November 9, 2014 12:28 PM

Understanding Millennials—How do Potatoes Fit into Their Lives? "Attitudes about potatoes among Millennials are very positive. Eighty-nine percent rate potatoes 'excellent' or 'good' for being a good value, and 88 percent rate potatoes 'excellent' or 'good' for being something everyone would enjoy. In fact, potatoes rate highest on what’s most important to Millennials." Via, the Achewood group on Facebook.
posted by codacorolla (83 comments total)

Can The Potato Be Disrupted?
posted by The Whelk at 12:31 PM on November 9, 2014 [9 favorites]

The potato is the last honest, sincere thing on this blasted hellscape Earth. Please do not disrupt the potato.
posted by codacorolla at 12:33 PM on November 9, 2014 [32 favorites]

Last time the potato was disrupted, it brought us the Irish.
posted by T.D. Strange at 12:35 PM on November 9, 2014 [31 favorites]

The USPB has nothing on the Toast Marketing Board.
posted by bswinburn at 12:39 PM on November 9, 2014 [4 favorites]

The Achewood Facebook group is truly wonderful. This is an excellent example of why they even got to do a thing.
posted by The White Hat at 12:41 PM on November 9, 2014 [5 favorites]

Can The Potato Be Disrupted?
posted by The Whelk at 3:31 PM on November 9

Tatr
posted by Chrischris at 12:43 PM on November 9, 2014 [34 favorites]

A peer-to-peer french fry delivery service. "Finish That"
posted by The Whelk at 12:44 PM on November 9, 2014 [8 favorites]

The five potato lifestyles chart is probably closely and rigorously studied by lots of people in the industry. I bet that there are lots of executives and MBAs trying to develop the next potato based product that fulfills the wants and needs of all five segments.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 12:44 PM on November 9, 2014

Can The Potato Be Disrupted?

The first genetically modified potato: "The Agriculture Department on Friday approved the first genetically modified potato for commercial planting in the United States, a move likely to draw the ire of groups opposed to artificial manipulation of foods. The Innate potato, developed by the J.R. Simplot Co., is engineered to contain less of a suspected human carcinogen that occurs when a conventional potato is fried, and is also less prone to bruising during transport. Boise, Idaho-based Simplot is a major supplier of frozen french fries to fast-food giant McDonald's."
posted by kliuless at 12:48 PM on November 9, 2014 [6 favorites]

The Potato - your primary food for reproducing that authentic 30s Depression party!
posted by Yowser at 12:48 PM on November 9, 2014

I stopped eating nightshades at about the same time I stopped eating lampshades.
I feel so much better.
posted by pipeski at 12:50 PM on November 9, 2014 [4 favorites]

Also, someone should lose their job over those horrible Marketing Segments. The "Nurturer" is weapons grade BS ("They also skew to the midwest" da Fuck??)
posted by Yowser at 12:51 PM on November 9, 2014

can the potato keep up with our fast paced cyber-lifestyle?
posted by The Whelk at 12:53 PM on November 9, 2014 [11 favorites]

fantastic post - my friend is a professor of potatoes, i'm very proud of him.
posted by sgt.serenity at 1:03 PM on November 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

I bet that there are lots of executives and MBAs trying to develop the next potato based product that fulfills the wants and needs of all five segments.

Madness. The all-seg tater is a dangerous myth - a unicorn with a venomous horn. The mental wards and graveyards of Idaho and Washington State are littered with the arrogant young ag execs who thought they could dig up the Worm With Five Segments.
posted by Iridic at 1:04 PM on November 9, 2014 [22 favorites]

Get back to me when they are changing the way potatoes are sold
posted by thelonius at 1:10 PM on November 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Awesome, I'm going to make a mint selling "Tater Hater" t-shirts to contrarian grandparents.
posted by Uppity Pigeon #2 at 1:11 PM on November 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

This press release is nearly a year old. The entire potato landscape has shifted. Can we really trust this information? Is "baked" still the second most popular preparation, in the wake of ISIS and the iPhone 6?
posted by theodolite at 1:11 PM on November 9, 2014 [76 favorites]

That woman in the photo is obviously holding a potato spice latte
posted by prize bull octorok at 1:14 PM on November 9, 2014 [19 favorites]

Is "baked" still the second most popular preparation, in the wake of ISIS and the iPhone 6?

I think theodolite might be a genius
posted by clockzero at 1:28 PM on November 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Anything But Scalloped.
posted by The Card Cheat at 1:42 PM on November 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

"Of course, not all Millennials think, act or look the same."
posted by adrianhon at 1:46 PM on November 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

The "Nurturer" is weapons grade BS ("They also skew to the midwest" da Fuck??)

Sure. It's the region known in marketing circles as the Tater Equator.
posted by dephlogisticated at 1:48 PM on November 9, 2014 [8 favorites]

The main thing millennials are doing with potatoes is making them fly around their rooms at night.
posted by chaz at 1:49 PM on November 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

The problem is that this generation wants to know what potatoes can do for them. "I have a sophisticated palate and graduated summa cum laude; this potato should be grateful I'm eating it.". In my day, we chose one preparation method of potato, stuck to it until we died at our stove, and loved every minute of it.
posted by tippy at 1:50 PM on November 9, 2014 [7 favorites]

Hmm, down there at the bottom they have a sort of myers briggs-ish system of millennial potato eaters.
posted by batfish at 1:54 PM on November 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Uber, but for potatoes.
posted by 0xFCAF at 2:05 PM on November 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

Tatr
posted by Chrischris at 8:43 PM on November 9 [+] [!]

Tatt.ie
posted by rollick at 2:07 PM on November 9, 2014 [6 favorites]

Spuds are fucking rubbish. Crumbly, mealy, starchy, flavour-scourged gallstones of bullshit. "Oh but hey they're really good as chips, oh but hey they're really good as mash!" You can deep fry anything and it's good. You can add half a cup of butter to anything and it's good. Spuds aren't worth the dirt that clods around them and gets into their pores. They are literally nothing better than impediments to perfect unbroken fields of dirt and shit and worms. Fuck spuds.
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:08 PM on November 9, 2014 [5 favorites]

See this, this right here is what "Best of The Web" means.
posted by Jimbob at 2:08 PM on November 9, 2014 [9 favorites]

Explorers are likely to be male, single and living in the Northeast.

Hm, perhaps the potato agenda could be advanced via export of Tex-Cajun poutine.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 2:09 PM on November 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

I've been asking myself for the last few months, "How do I connect with my students? What will inspire them? What do they really want out of life?" Now I know. Thanks, Metafilter!
posted by Saxon Kane at 2:11 PM on November 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

Matthew Bellamy scrolls through Google Images of potatoes on his kitchen iPad. Kindly blonde enjoys Starbucks Potato Latte. Look at these charts. Here are the three different things you can do with a potato. Our research clearly shows: potatoes. United States of Potatoes. "Oh Satan, you see, by the rocket's red flare, gave truth to the sight, uncountable acres of potatoes."
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:11 PM on November 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

Jusr remember to call them "dirt apples" to cut down on cravings
posted by The Whelk at 2:19 PM on November 9, 2014 [5 favorites]

Everybody loves tater tots tho they're the abba of potato preparation
posted by The Whelk at 2:28 PM on November 9, 2014 [7 favorites]

Sexual predators prefer pommes anna
posted by The Whelk at 2:36 PM on November 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Today I learned that Ore-Ida derives its name from the potato-growing Oregon-Idaho region. So, there's a truth-bomb from this millenial.
posted by Think_Long at 2:37 PM on November 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

I'm eating potatoes right now!
posted by allthinky at 2:38 PM on November 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

I spend a lot of time thinking about mesoamerican crops and being amazed that the world survived without them. It's great because there are so many of them I can be amazed by a new one (or occasionally a product of them actually not existing until their importation, currently I am being amazed about potato vodka) every month or so, and then by the time I've been amazed by all of them it has been long enough that I've forgotten the first thing I was amazed by and can start over. This is how I maintain a perpetual state of, if not childlike wonder, at least the average amount of mind-blown amazement of a college freshman.

Spuds are fucking rubbish. Crumbly, mealy, starchy, flavour-scourged gallstones of bullshit. "Oh but hey they're really good as chips, oh but hey they're really good as mash!" You can deep fry anything and it's good. You can add half a cup of butter to anything and it's good. Spuds aren't worth the dirt that clods around them and gets into their pores. They are literally nothing better than impediments to perfect unbroken fields of dirt and shit and worms. Fuck spuds.

(slaps turbid dahlia with glove and throws it at their feet, unable to bear this affront to the honor of potatoes)
posted by NoraReed at 2:59 PM on November 9, 2014 [12 favorites]

PEI taters all up in your grill.
posted by Yowser at 3:01 PM on November 9, 2014

I only have eyes for you, potato.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 3:02 PM on November 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

0xFCAF: Uber, but for potatoes.

tUber
posted by univac at 3:03 PM on November 9, 2014 [38 favorites]

Meanwhile, in New York
posted by slater at 3:05 PM on November 9, 2014

Awww sweet tater, I love this so much. Remember, junk in, junk out. You are what you eat.
posted by Oyéah at 3:06 PM on November 9, 2014

Studies like this only serve to perpetuate the stereotype of millenials as total russet-hounds.
posted by univac at 3:07 PM on November 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Future potentatos of America.
posted by Oyéah at 3:09 PM on November 9, 2014

tUber
posted by univac at 6:03 PM on November 9
[2 favorites −] Favorite added! [!]
And its well-funded competitor, Spyd
posted by Chrischris at 3:14 PM on November 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

Tatr
posted by Chrischris at 8:43 PM on November 9 [+] [!]

Tatt.ie
posted by rollick at 17:07 on November 9
[2 favorites +] [!]

Would You Like Fries With That: (WYLFWT)
posted by oceanjesse at 3:43 PM on November 9, 2014

I've been asking myself for the last few months, "How do I connect with my students? What will inspire them? What do they really want out of life?"

Wrong! Conan! What is best in life?

Potatoes.
posted by ennui.bz at 3:56 PM on November 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm disappointed that Carrot didn't show up in Related Posts.
posted by zamboni at 3:59 PM on November 9, 2014

Don't you see? They've won. We're all talking about potatoes (although in general I think we're slightly outside of the target demo here).
posted by killdevil at 4:01 PM on November 9, 2014

Just remember to call them "dirt apples" to cut down on cravings

Ok, that worked, but I have now gorged myself on delicious sugary crisp sky potatoes
posted by Jon Mitchell at 4:04 PM on November 9, 2014 [14 favorites]

Chrischris: "Can The Potato Be Disrupted?
posted by The Whelk at 3:31 PM on November 9

Tatr"

"I like me summa dem french fried tatrs...mmmhmmm..."
posted by symbioid at 4:14 PM on November 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm making baked potatoes right now too.

And a 2 pound t-bone.

And baked apples filled with maple syrup, whiskey, and golden raisins.

just thought I'd share that.
posted by spitbull at 4:17 PM on November 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

Tuber's Two Step. This was amazing, back in the day.
posted by SPrintF at 4:19 PM on November 9, 2014

Tread carefully, potato lovers. Can't be sure yet, but caution is advised:

González S, Huerta JM, Fernández S, Patterson AM, Lasheras C.
Differences in Overall Mortality in the Elderly May Be Explained by Diet.
Gerontology. 2008 May 26.
PMID: 18503250

Background: Although a relationship between diet and mortality is well
recognized, there is little information on the extent to which different
food sources contribute to survival in elderly people.

Objective: To examine the effect of individual food groups on mortality in
institutionalized elderly people from Asturias (Northern Spain) after 6
years of follow-up.

Method: The dietary intake of 288 elderly people aged 60-85 years was
assessed using a semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire (FFQ). Age,
gender, energy intake, chewing ability, hyperglycemia, hypercholesterolemia,
physical activity, smoking habit, self-perceived health, education level and
the institution from which participants were recruited were covariates in
Cox regression models analyzing the effect of food on survival.

Results: Fruit intake was found to be inversely associated with overall
mortality. Multivariate adjusted mortality rate ratio (95% CI) per 1 SD
increase in fruit intake was 0.714 (0.519-0.981). On the contrary, each 1 SD
of potato intake led to a 32% higher risk of death (RR (95% CI) = 1.319
(1.033-1.685)).

Conclusion: A high intake of fruit late in life was associated with a longer
survival. An inverse association between potato intake and survival was also
observed, but further research is necessary before any firm conclusions
about the possible harmful aspects of potato consumption can be drawn.

[...]

While the intake of fruit was inversely
related to the risk of mortality among the elderly,
potato consumption had a negative effect on average survival
time. It is important to note that many confounders
were controlled for in our analyses: in addition to age,
gender and energy, we adjusted for hyperglycemia, hypercholesterolemia,
physical activity, self-perceived health,
smoking habits and chewing problems, all of which have
been shown to be related to mortality in previous studies
[17, 18]. We also controlled for a potential institution bias,
as some of the centers were private whilst some others
were public facilities, even when we had previously ascertained
that there were no significant differences in the
food provided by these institutions (data not shown).

[...]

We found that consumption of potatoes increased the
risk of mortality. In the last few years, several authors
have reported harmful effects associated with potato
consumption [21, 30, 31]. Also, results from large epidemiological
studies show a borderline statistical significance
for the consumption of potatoes on mortality, with
ORs ranging between 1.01 and 1.07 [32, 33]. In a previous
study performed by our group [34] , potato intake accounted
for a sizeable proportion of the variation of plasma
malondialdehyde concentrations (a biomarker of lipoperoxidation),
which we have shown to be correlated
with mortality [28]. Therefore, oxidative damage may
mediate this association of potato intake and mortality.
Also, because potatoes are a 'starchy' food, their high glycemic
index (leading to a high postprandrial insulin demand)
might be responsible for their reported effect on
mortality, as proposed by Skuladottir et al. [21] in lung
cancer patients. Although controlling for plasma glucose
did not significantly modify the effect of potato intake on
survival in our study, we cannot fully discard this possibility.
The cooking method also needs to be taken into
consideration because acrylamide (a known carcinogen)
occurs at relatively high levels in fried carbohydrate-rich
foods [30]. Unfortunately, we cannot evaluate the effect
of the method of preparation of potatoes because these
data have not been previously separated in our database.

[...]

As mentioned in the study, this result (potato consumption being harmful) has been shown in several studies now. Nutritional science being what it is, it is seldom that we get ironclad results, but there is enough persistent smoke to warrant worries that there may be some serious fire there.
posted by VikingSword at 4:24 PM on November 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

POTATOES OF DEATH
posted by winna at 4:36 PM on November 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

THE WORLD'S MOST DEADLY ASSASSIN!
posted by winna at 4:38 PM on November 9, 2014

Anything But Scalloped.

You are a bad person.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:43 PM on November 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

YOU ARE MY LOVE MY ANGLE
DON'T TREAT ME LIKE POTATO
posted by Strange Interlude at 4:54 PM on November 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

For a few months in my almost-twenties I worked in a potato peeling factory.

Actually, it wasn’t so much a factory as it was a small, over-air-conditioned, sterile room built as an afterthought beneath a block of horribly random and depressing suburban shops. There was a butcher, a dingy Chinese restaurant, a fish and chip place that had gone bankrupt but you could see through the window that they still had soft drinks in the fridges, and like an asthma charity shop that was likewise never open, and some kind of specialist dental place, and a greengrocer.

The place I worked was technically concerned with “produce”, meaning all vegetables, but it was easily 90% potatoes. Sometimes the boss would come back from the market – we were fairly close to the Brisbane Markets, but not to anything else – with a vanload of pumpkins to dice, or 200 kilograms of onions or carrots to slice or julienne, sort of as a treat, but our primary focus was potatoes. (It says a lot about the sort of person you are when you ask the boss if you can manually chop up 20kg of onions as a break from your day job.)

The way it worked was you would get up at 4:30 in the morning in winter to be there at the produce place by 5:30 and once you were there you would find that about a hundred kilos of potatoes had been pre-rumbled – I’ll explain in a moment – and were already sitting in their solution. The solution was some kind of mystery powder – I never asked what it was because I didn’t give a shit because I wanted to kill myself – that you dumped into these big rectangular tubs of water that were arranged in a sort of frame table, I think it was six tubs across, and then you had this sieve shelf that sat across them.

What you did was reach into the bitterly cold solution bath that bleached your hands and made them itch until they just went completely numb, get one of those slimy little potatoes, and you would run your peeler over them (they were actually really ace peelers, specialist peelers, that I had never seen before and have not been able to find since) to slice off the last scraps of potato skin and gouge out the eyes. This disgusting matter went onto the sieve shelf, and once the spuds had been cleaned you dumped them into this other bucket that was next to you. And you did this for 12 hours a day.

Once your bucket had reached critical mass, usually about twenty kilos of spuds in there, you would manhandle it to the end of the line – potato starch and solution water draining and slopping all over the place and your eyeballs fucking frozen – and angle it to kind of funnel/shake the spuds into these sturdy, transparent plastic bags. You had to guesstimate five kilos per bag – they had scales there for another guy to confirm the weight – and then the guy sealed the bags and piled them into a huge crate and that stuff sat there until the crate had ten bags and then you hefted it on top of another already-full crate and the crates either got taken out for delivery (to restaurants all over the city) or it went up into the coldroom behind the greengrocer’s and was stored there for delivery the next morning.

And that was your lot, basically. You’d do that and ABC Classical Radio would be playing – which was nice, I appreciated that – but the owner and his brother (friends of extended family, which is how I got the job when I first got to Brisbane from Townsville) were fundie Latin Catholics with Protestant work ethics and didn’t believe in things like morning tea, afternoon smoko, or indeed lunch breaks. It was graft from 5:30 to 17:30. There was a little bench with a kettle and cups and coffee and tea and sugar and milk and these industrial tubs of peanut butter and margarine and a loaf of the cheapest white bread they could find, and your lunch would literally consist of standing there near the provisions, eating a peanut butter sandwich and drinking Blend 43 or International Dust. I made a cup of tea for the brother once and used the same spoon I had made my coffee with and he told me he could taste the coffee in his tea and I told him I didn’t believe him. Fuck that guy – whenever the main brother, the boss, was out on a run, he’d sit at the computer in the corner and play solitaire for as many hours as the boss was away, and then leap back onto the line when he heard the van coming back.

So, uh, where was I? Oh, right, the rumbler. Like I said about the potatoes being pre-rumbled when we got there in the mornings. In order to leverage efficiencies in produce preparation, there was this big bit of industrial kit in the corner that we referred to as “the rumbler” and which might as well have been officially called “the rumbler” and may indeed even have been. When you got a 20kg sack of spuds from the market, you would dump them into the sorting table just outside the “factory” itself (another nice change of pace, standing around in the corner of a freezing underground car park, sorting potatoes that were at least dry so you felt warmer). You sorted the potatoes into Idahos (anything that wouldn’t fit through the mesh) and “rumblers” (everything that fell through the mesh). Those you took inside to “rumble”.

The problem with rumblers is that, as the day dragged on (like this anecdote), the quality of the potatoes being brought back to us declined horrifically. What started out in the morning as clean, fresh sacks filled with promise, deteriorated gradually until the whole enterprise just fucking nosedived at around two or three o’clock. That was when the boss – who was shuttling back and forth between the factory and the markets all day long, bringing back ten or more loads of shit a day – became desperate, because there were still orders to fulfil, still restaurants that needed their three or four or ten crates of potatoes (FIVE HUNDRED KILOGRAMS OF POTATOES) for the evening and the next day.

That was when the markets had been tapped dry, so the boss would start coming back with the two dollars sacks, the dollar sacks, and the fifty cent sacks. These were the “wet bags”.

Have you ever had a potato go bad at the bottom of your cupboard or pantry, but it still looks okay on the outside or the top, and you go to pick it up, and it just fucking disintegrates in a rupture of pus and rot and gore, and the smell hits you and you want to vomit (and maybe you do), and then the smell is everywhere and on everything and you can never get it out and you wonder how it is that everything in your life has just gone so catastrophically wrong?

The wet bags were bags of those. Twenty kilograms of pus potatoes, which you pretty much MASHED through the sorting table, because inside every cancer potato you can still find a little bit of normal potato, and sometimes that little bit of normal potato is just enough to be considered a food potato on a plate, so long as it is kind of potato-shaped and intact.

“These will rumble up a treat!” the boss would say, sliding an oozing sack of end-of-day potatoes out of the back of his van.

Because that was what the rumbler was for. They are big machines with a hole in the top that you tip unwashed and unpeeled potatoes into. Once inside they are spun and bounced around in a big spinning bucket that has what is basically sandpaper on all inside surfaces, and water jets in and the violent motion of the sandpaper-bucket just shreds all the skin and dirt off the spuds, and you turn it off and open the hatch and the rumbled spuds fall out and then they go in the solution bucket for their final makeover.

That’s all fine with normal, healthy potatoes. But at the end of the day you are basically tipping boils and cysts into the rumbler, and then this decayed matter gets spun of through the sluice gates or whatever the fuck, and you empty out the traps and it’s just a slurry of poison and rot.
To my credit, I never vomited once while I worked there, but I was always pretty close to it (just generally, because of how much I hated the world).

At the end of the day you take all the peelings and eyes and slurry in waste buckets up to the shared industrial bins for disposal. I quickly learned that this was fucking dangerous as hell, because those bins were used by the butcher as well, and it turns out that butchers use what probably has a proper name but which I just called “saw tape” – massive, springy lengths of serrated metal that I can only assume they would pull off a coil of the stuff like a length of cable or tape, and cut to attach to their butcher’s saws for cutting through bone and cartilage and tendon. And these butchers didn’t give a shit, they would just tightly wrap the saw tape into these spring-loaded coils of death that would explode from the bin when you opened the lid. I once nearly had my eye eviscerated by saw tape – covered in congealed blood and fat – when lifting the lid to dump our slurry.

So anyway, that’s where I learned to hate potatoes. I’m also always vaguely repulsed by the sight of people eating potatoes in restaurants, because I wonder if they were dollar sack rumblers.
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:27 PM on November 9, 2014 [368 favorites]

I love potatoes and am offended, but also that was a real good story

so conflicted
posted by threeants at 6:00 PM on November 9, 2014 [12 favorites]

Add toasted almond flour to those baked apples!
posted by Oyéah at 6:04 PM on November 9, 2014

This reminded me of a sublime bit from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

“Well, you’re obviously being totally naive of course,” said the girl, “When you’ve been in marketing as long as I have you’ll know that before any new product can be developed it has to be properly researched. We’ve got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them.”
The crowd were tense. They were expecting something wonderful from Ford. “Stick it up your nose,” he said.
“Which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know,” insisted the girl, “Do people want fire that can be applied nasally?”
“Do you?” Ford asked the crowd.
“Yes!” shouted some.
“No!” shouted others happily.
They didn’t know, they just thought it was great.
“And the wheel,” said the Captain, “What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project.”
“Ah,” said the marketing girl, “Well, we’re having a little difficulty there.”
“Difficulty?” exclaimed Ford, “Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It’s the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!”
The marketing girl soured him with a look. “Alright, Mr Wiseguy,” she said, “you’re so clever, you tell us what colour it should be.”
The crowd went wild. One up to the home team, they thought. Ford shrugged his shoulders and sat down again.
“Almighty Zarquon,” he said, “have none of you done anything?”

posted by dialetheia at 6:09 PM on November 9, 2014 [7 favorites]

Metafilter: I never asked what it was because I didn’t give a shit because I wanted to kill myself
posted by Saxon Kane at 6:14 PM on November 9, 2014 [6 favorites]

This is BULL SHIT. Goddamn spoiled generation xers ate all the potatoes & thanks a lot assholes now we can only afford fUcking plantains. None of my IRL friends has ever had a baked potatoe or knows what a fax is. We just want to stay in our rooms, stream all American content ever produced for free while doing addy bumps+dubstep, and to have a clean real honest interaction with this pure gorgeous earth melon, preferably mashed, preferably served by Zach Ephron or T.Swift. How is that so hard?
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:30 PM on November 9, 2014 [8 favorites]

Thanks to this thread for introducing me to the Achewood Facebook group. These are my people. I have found my tribe.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 6:36 PM on November 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

What's the suicide rate among marketing professionals in the food industry? Cause if I spent my life writing stuff like this I'd be first off the bridge.
posted by gottabefunky at 6:36 PM on November 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

tatr.club
posted by compartment at 6:40 PM on November 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

This fpp is almost as good as the recent Ask that directed me to a powerpoint focused on the shape of cat kibble.

No, this is better.
posted by Tandem Affinity at 6:59 PM on November 9, 2014

The root of their discontent.
posted by Chitownfats at 7:04 PM on November 9, 2014

Guys! Come quick! I found the son of a bitch that invented tater tots!
posted by benzenedream at 10:09 PM on November 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Just what the United Nations were hoping for when they declared 2008 as the International Year of the Potato.
posted by moorooka at 3:07 AM on November 10, 2014

#mashtag
posted by Damienmce at 6:15 AM on November 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Just what the United Nations were hoping for when they declared 2008 as the International Year of the Potato.

Wait, that was about literal potatoes? I thought it was a gesture of gratitude for The Potato, the many-eyed vigilante who saved the UN from the unspeakable machinations of Doctor Parsnip.
posted by Iridic at 8:04 AM on November 10, 2014 [4 favorites]

Can't believe of everything in that gorgeous and epic comment I'm choosing this to respond to, but:

and it turns out that butchers use what probably has a proper name but which I just called “saw tape”

these are probably bandsaw blades. Used pretty much exactly as you describe, except that they come in loops.
posted by KathrynT at 8:41 AM on November 10, 2014

We should have whipped them, at least a little..I mean, the potatoes, of course. It is too late now, they are planning the senior events, none of us will attend, including the end of the whimpering world, picked apart by commentary regarding one obscure cheese after another, and lessons on the proper pronunciation and spelling of brioche.
posted by Oyéah at 10:15 AM on November 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

KathrynT, those are exactly them. Bandsaw blades. Argh.
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:04 PM on November 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

turbid dahlia is god, reincarnated as a humble anonymous community blog commenter.
posted by infini at 8:15 AM on November 11, 2014

Because that was what the rumbler was for. They are big machines with a hole in the top that you tip unwashed and unpeeled potatoes into. Once inside they are spun and bounced around in a big spinning bucket that has what is basically sandpaper on all inside surfaces, and water jets in and the violent motion of the sandpaper-bucket just shreds all the skin and dirt off the spuds, and you turn it off and open the hatch and the rumbled spuds fall out

Ah yes, that's the exact same machine as we used in the chip shop I worked in which made their own fresh chips. First the rumble to get the potatoes peeled, then through the slicer. The first year I worked there, I spent six-eight hours a day doing that in the height of summer.

Even with, you know, liberally sampling the products of the chip shop, I lost a lot of weight.
posted by MartinWisse at 8:56 AM on November 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

Really well written and a testimony to how much shit jobs sometimes treat you so much more than more enviable ones. Well done for surviving it.
posted by tanktop at 9:39 AM on November 11, 2014

Hm, maybe they're onto something:

A Potato Flew Around My Room is the world's catchiest new meme.
posted by Sara C. at 5:13 PM on November 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

I just ate a raw unpeeled (but well washed) potato.

Besides, without spuds, where would we Devo fans be?
posted by Samizdata at 11:00 PM on November 24, 2014