It’s not that I have not thought about the national holidays of the day, it’s just that I have been sooooo very busy with other things that I have not written about them.  Trust me, there is a national or international “something” for every day of the year.  Today is August 19 and it is National Potato Day!

I, for one love potatoes and so I will include at least one in my daily consumption of food today.  Perhaps I will have pototoes with breakfast, lunch and dinner!  That would suit me just fine!

A bit of history about potatoes is no doubt something you want to know.  Potatoes are the fourth largest crop grown in the world!  4th!  That should tell you about the importance of the potato in the world.  Everyone seems to be eating them.  I read about a diet of nothing but potatoes to be eaten for 60 straight days.  And the guy claims to have lost weight without suffering from any malnourishment of other daily essentials.  I question that one.

Potatoes have always been in my diet and I just love them.  Potatoes for breakfast in the form of hashbrowns or cubes, potatoes for lunch in the form of potato chips or french fries, potatoes for supper cooked either boiled or baked.  I am not going to have any trouble celebrating todays national holiday at all.  There is still some potato salad in the fridge from yesterdays lunch.

I cannot imagine a world without potatoes.  Spuds!  Grow them, weed them, water them, dig them and eat them!  Heck, some people even shoot them out of home made guns!  And when I was much younger we could buy little guns that you poked the end of the barrel into the potato and then shoot that little bit that stuck in it.  There was even (and probably still is) plastic inserts that made a potato look like a character “Mr. Potato Head”.  There are hundreds of uses for potatoes besides just eating them, but it seems like such a waste of a good thing.

Growing up in the 60’s my friend and I would make beer from his grandpas famous recipe and it contained cut up potatoes.  To this day I do not know the purpose of the potatoes in that recipe, but it called for them and so we put them in it.  By the way, the beer never did turn out tasting anything like beer and we had more bottleS blow up than we ever had stay in tact.

In Ireland once there was a “great potato famine”, where the potato crops all got a disease that yielded them inedible and so the entire crop for a few years had to be destroyed!  A terrible thing.  Can you imagine your St. Patricks day celebration without potatoes?  Green beer, Corned beef, Onions and Carrots.  The thought of no potatoes in that pot of goods just isn’t right.  I think I need another beer to wash down that thought.

I also read where there was a movement of a bunch of short sighted folks who banned together to try and keep potatoes from being imported and grown in Britain.  They called themselves “The Society for the Prevention of an Unwholesome Diet” (TSFTPOAUD).  With an acronym like that it’s no wonder they failed.  And it’s obvious by the popularity of the spud and all of the nutritional value we know is in a potato today that they did not do their homework before making up their signs and marching around.  In actuality the acronym was shortened to “SPUD” based on this groups name.

If I was to form a group it would carry the same acronym but the groups name would be “Society for Potatoes Used Daily”.  Sort of makes more sense to me.

Well, there you have it.  National Potato Day, I reckon I’ll go stir up a batch of hashbrowns, bacon and eggs.  Maybe even burn some toast!  You enjoy your day and have a baked spud on me!

Bears Butt

August 19, 2012