9 Starch-tastic Facts about Potatoes!

This week Will and Mango revel in the beauty, majesty and immense grandeur of... the potato. From Ben Franklin's role as a potato influencer, to the strange reason part of a potato is preserved in a baseball museum, to the ridiculous parade float that inspired the word couch potato, Will and Mango are serving up an all-you-can-eat heaping of potato facts. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Part Time Genius, a production of I Heart Radio.
Guess What Mango? What's that? Will? All? Right? So I
know we both love Mr potato At least I remembered
that you loved Mr potato Head. Did you remember that
I love Mr potato Head? I did not remember that
at all. Yeah, big fans, big, And you know who

(00:26):
invented Mr potato Head. It was George Learner, created back
in nineteen So my favorite thing about Mr potato Head
was that it was initially just a bag of like
base parts, and kids would supply their own potatoes to
jab these face parts into it. Right, that is exactly right.
You could use any like use your imagination here. You

(00:46):
could use carrots, turnips, or really any root vegetable that
you want to But potatoes were chosen. This was interesting.
Actually I didn't know exactly why. But one, they're cheap.
Of course, they were affordable, and they were available year
round on plus. I guess you could argue they're funnier
than Mr turnip Head, but I don't know that. It
seems debatable. But the craze then took off when Hasbro

(01:08):
made this big TV commercial for the product and they
sold it was something like four million dollars worth of
these toy parts within a few months. Now, that was
a fortune then. And the interesting thing though, is that Mr.
Potato had actually wasn't the first potato toy on the market.
I don't know if you knew this. I did not
know that what was before it. Well, it was the
first with three D pieces, so they added a D

(01:29):
to what was being done out there in the world.
It was competing with these these potato head toys at
the time that we're using two D pieces, like more
like paper product type stuff, and so you would stick
these just onto the vegetable. But what's interesting is that
in nineteen thirty one, this was a full eighteen years earlier,
So think about this, like potato toy technology was not

(01:51):
fully evolved yet. But the Soviet Union, of course they
had to be first. They launched this guide for kids
on how to play with potatoes. So basically it was
like this. It was a pretty delightful guide on how
you could use a pen knife and match dicks and
you could turn a bunch of potatoes into these little playthings.
And so there's this illustration on how to make two

(02:13):
little potato kids and have them see sawing on this
bigger potato. And then there was another one on how
to turn five or six potatoes into a race car
with a tiny potato driver, or this little potato man
walking his potato pig on a string leash. It's it, honestly,
it is a pretty delightful guide. So but but you know,
seeing this charming guide made me think of how much

(02:35):
joy potatoes bring the world, whether it's through ridiculous Soviet sculptures,
this is not this is real megati potatoes. But we
there's now more than ever we need potatoes to bring
the world joy or a bag of supersized fries, which
I know you and I are both big fans of.
I don't know if you remember this in college when
you thought you were a vegetarian and yet then you

(02:56):
realize that the potatoes had been cooked in and animal fat.
But but I thought we'd make a whole show about potatoes.
I am all about this. Let's five in ye ai

(03:27):
their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson,
and as always I'm joined by my good friend man
guess how Ticketer on the other side of that soundproof glass,
wearing a shirt that says am my readings. I think
it says taters over haters. Is that what it says? Yes,
I don't know what that means, but I love it
and I feel like I need one as well. That's
our good pal Ramsey. So some ango, what's up this week?

(03:51):
So I want to apologize to the listeners for this tease.
We had a few I guess like a month ago
or and thank them for being so patient because you
and I got to make an episode right before my
dad passed away, and my dad just loved it and
he's listening from the hospital, and you know, I had

(04:12):
every intention of just plomming through and turning the show
weekly again. But your parents are incredible and we are
just so lucky, Like both our parents were so important
in giving us love and support, and we got to
go to this incredible college and then we chose the
dumbest possible career and I'm just grateful that we get

(04:34):
to do this. So so thank you for making time
this week to talk about potatoes whatever ridiculous topics. So
where do you want to start? Do you want to
talk about how the universe might be shaped like a
Pringle ship or how the Alaskan gold rush h during
a desperate miners used to actually trade gold for potatoes
because it was so nutritious. Or what are you gonna

(04:56):
start with these? That's there's some good teases there I
feel like should be considered. But I'm actually going to
start with a fact about France back and then seventeen
hundreds when the potato mango it was actually declared illegal.
M okay, yep. So potatoes came to Europe by way
of the Spaniards, who themselves had brought the vegetables back
from the Inca Empire in South America, of course, and

(05:20):
immediately there's this real distrust of the vegetable. Distrust. Yeah,
I mean partially because potatoes are not mentioned in the Bible.
I don't know if you know this fact, and partially
because they grow underground, so people are weirdly suspicious of
them and at the time they're mostly fed to pigs. Wait. Wait, yeah,
you've done like a word search and found that potatoes

(05:41):
aren't aren't found in the Bible. That they are not. No,
I did the full search. No, I actually just read
through it. I should have done a search all but
I just kind of read through the whole thing. I
didn't find it once. So anyway, basically nobody will touch
these things, even hungry commoners. And then potatoes get blamed
for things like when leprosy spreads, of course everybody blames

(06:02):
it on the potatoes. And in all this mayhem, the
French Parliament decides to ban the vegetable. Now this was
around seventy and the potato is actually banned until seventeen
seventy two, So good twenty four years of no potatoes.
So I've actually read this thing in medtalphilast years ago
that early farmers would plant potatoes on Easter and sprinkle

(06:24):
them with holy water because they wanted the plant to
grow safely and not be dangerous. But how do potatoes
make their way into favor in culture? So there's this
army officer, Antoine Parmentier, and he gets captured by the
Prussians in the Seven Year War and so basically he's
fed potatoes at this prison, and he doesn't notice any

(06:45):
ill effects, like he's supposed to get leprosy and get
all sick and all these other things. He stays healthy
pretty much the whole time. But also he notices that
France at the time has stopped exporting grains, and the
Prussian army actually uses potatoes as a replace he spent
for it in their diet. So Permentier looks at all
of this, and as he learns more, he realizes that

(07:05):
potatoes don't take that much effort to grow. So when
he's released back to France, he starts this campaign to
rehabilitate the potatoes image. He throws these dinner parties where
he serves all these potato courses to celebrities, like then
Franklin came to one of these things. He gives potato
flowers to Marie Antoinette, and she then popularizes these things

(07:26):
by wearing them in a hat. So people start getting
curious and you know, trying to figure out what's going
on with this leprosy fruit, which is the potato. But
then he pulls off his greatest stunt, which I haven't
even mentioned yet. So what's his greatest stunt. He plants
a potato patch. He puts a ring of armed guards

(07:47):
around it, so everyone starts thinking of them as like
this luxury. I mean, this really is pretty smart. I
think of them as this, you know, very valuable thing.
But then he quietly tells the guards to accept bribes
and allow people to start stealing the potatoes. So in
seventeen seventy two, all these peasants steel potatoes and treat
them like this precious food. And then the Paris Faculty

(08:10):
of Medicine finally declares the potato edible and makes them
legal Again, isn't that amazing? French science is just on
top of it. I know what they're doing. So its
Parmentier like famous in France for doing this. I mean,
I guess kind of and he, you know, the potato
helped France get through some difficult famines, and Louis the

(08:32):
sixteenth rewarded him for his work, actually declaring how important
Parmentier was keeping the masses fed. And when he died,
Parmentier's casket was actually placed in a plot circled with
potato plants, and in the middle there's this bronze statue
of him handing a potato to a commoner who's standing
below him. So, just so you know, I would also

(08:56):
like a statue of me handing out potatoes to commonders,
just so I can remembers like a man of the people. Yeah, no,
I kind of expected this. So there's already one in
the works. I've started up paying thing and in installments
so that it will be ready. It's going to be
very expensive. But anyway, enough about Parmentier. What fact are
you going to start with? I've got one about baseball.

(09:16):
So you've heard of the old baseball trick where a
first baseman might walk up to the picture and fake
hand in the baseball, but actually he keeps the ball
in the glove and when he walks back to the
bag of the base runner steps off the base tick
lead he sort of tagged them out. Yeah, of course,
and it's it's it's like this old trick that mostly
gets used. I don't know, I feel like in kids
movies about baseball, Like you remember this Rookie of the Year,

(09:38):
I mean, one of the greatest films of all time.
I think, yeah, it is a very Rookie of the
Year play. But but this minor league catcher for the
Williams Sports Bills, his name is Dave Bresnahan, he was
completely obsessed with this trick play. And this was in
the late eighties, and Bresnahan was actually obsessed with a
variation of that trick using a fake base ball. I

(10:00):
love that anybody was obsessed with this trick. But anyway,
how does that work? Yeah, so in this case, the
catcher replaces the ball in his glove with the potato,
because you know how people always confuse like baseballs for
potatoes always, So the way the trick works is that
the catcher accidentally throws the potato into outfield like it's
an error. And then you know, when the base runner

(10:22):
tries to steal home, the catcher shows that he actually
has the baseball hidden his glove the whole time and
tags him out. And do people they actually did this
in baseball games. So according to the l A. Times,
which is where I read about the story, I guess
a few people got away with it in their earliest
days of baseball. It was called the Tator trick um
and anyway, So so Presenthan decides he's going to pull

(10:43):
off the Tator trick in a real game, and he
goes all out. He pays an artist to carve a
potato and paint seems on it like it's a real baseball.
He even picks the perfect game. He wants to do
it against the Phillies farm team in reading because the
Philly fanatic will be there and that means still be
more of a crowd, and he starts trying to lay
the groundwork. Like in games before the big one, he

(11:06):
starts trying to pick off players at third, so he's
kind of getting this reputation as a catcher who picks
off players. Anyway, the big day arrives and in the
sixth inning he gets into the perfect situation. There are
two outs and a man on third, and Presidenthan knows
this is his moment, so he comes up with this excuse.
He tells the Empire that the webbing on his glove

(11:27):
is off and he needs to replace his glove, and
then he walks the dugout, grabs this ridiculous carved potato,
and then walks back. So does anybody notice that he's
doing this? The whole team like, I don't think the
manager new, But the whole team starts laughing, and they're
having a hard time like controlling themselves because they know
what's up. And Presidenthan himself is trying to keep it together.

(11:49):
But but when the runner on third takes a lead
and the pitch lens in his glove, he snaps into
action and he makes the switch and he throws this
potato to third, but in dead of overthrowing the potato
past the third basement into the field, he accidentally underthrows
it and it bounces and the potato breaks into three
pieces and it lands right in for the third base umpire,

(12:11):
but the player doesn't notice, and you know, he charged
his home and Resonahan shows him the ball and tags
him out, and then he walks to the dugout. And
here's the thing, right, reson Han assumes if his team
follows him, the other team will walk off too and
the game will just move on and continue. So does
this work? Not at all? The officials are super confused.

(12:34):
His teammates stay on the field, and the meantime, the
third base goes to inspect this you know, broken up potato,
and when he realized what's happened, the officials just award
the runner home plate. And then Reresonehan gets pulled from
the game for his shenanigans and the next day he's
fined fifty dollars and cut from the team. Oh my gosh,
that we have way more sad than I expected. That's

(12:55):
a funny trick. Presdonhan actually didn't mind that much because
he was not that great a player, and the fans
loved it, so he became such a like fan favorite
or this legend that the team ended up retiring his
jersey at the sold out game and uh, and they
charged a dollar for tickets where not only could you attend,
but you also got a potato with your ticket and

(13:18):
uh and actually the largest chunk of that potato he
threw uh in that Phillies game is in a jar
of alcohol sitting on display in a baseball history museum
in California. So, like, I think the actually feels like
he went out and end. Yeah, he came out on top.
That's pretty fun. So what do you have this next? Alright?
How about um a quick one from the Farmer's Almanac.

(13:41):
I know you're a fan of the Farmer's Almanac. I
feel like that's where my favorite of almanacs. Oh, definitely, definitely.
So if you've got a knife with some small rust spots,
you can actually use a potato to fix that. So
how's that work? Do you like, use the potatoes sproper
way the rust or what I mean? That would be
one way, but according to the Almanac and had a
few other online sources, it's actually even easier than that.

(14:03):
So you just insert the knife into the potato, let
it sit, and the oxalic acid and the potato will
work on the rust and soften it so that it
then rents his away. How great would it be if
that was like the best way to clean all your utensils,
Like you sad them into potatoes and leave them overnight
to clean them. Be the best feeling. Just get to
keep stabbing potatoes. I'd have so many potatoes around. Um.

(14:27):
Speaking of a lot of potatoes, here's a trend I
kind of want to bring back from two thousand twelve
in Japan, and it's the McDonald's potato party. I mean,
we've established you do love McDonald's french fries, I know,
with sweet and sour sauce's. It's like one of the
many works and loves I have. But about a decade ago,
the McDonald's in Japan started running a sale kind of

(14:48):
like the dollar menu, where large fries were suddenly deeply discounted,
And so some teens ordered twenty three large fries and
made a mountain of them on a bunch of trays
and posted to social media. People just went crazy, I guess.
And and this is according to give moto. The McDonald's
Japan use a more polite form of Japanese, so even

(15:09):
though it's not fancy, you're supposed to act with like
a little bit more decorum, I guess. And the photo
gets retweeted thousands of times, and people are angry that
kids are acting silly and being a bother to the McDonald's.
And some people are just stunned to see that many
fries in one place. But the biggest chorus around these
photos is this argument that if you order that many fries,

(15:31):
you have to eat them or is disrespectful. And I
would agree with that, but but did this become a trend? Yeah,
Like potato parties started popping up all over the place,
and some kids saw the twenty three fry order as
a challenge, obviously, so in Okinawa, some kids ordered forty
large fries. At the McDonald's near Okayama Station, a small
group of kids ordered sixty large fries, and that photo

(15:54):
got retweeted tens of thousands of times apparently, And so like,
you know, the kids are supposed to finish these fries,
and they actually do, like like I think it takes
them about three hours, but the employees get super upset.
Apparently the fries took up a whole large table on
their own, and then all the people watching these kids

(16:15):
house these fries take up another large table, so you know,
it felt like they were losing business. And and one
employee from the restaurant took to Twitter and just asked
for it to quote please stop, please stop. That said,
if you are handing trays and trays of fries over
to kid, you've got to expect there's gonna be a
little chaos. When you said the three hours, though, the

(16:38):
only thing I could think of is like, while the
fries are delicious, after about thirty minutes, if they're sitting there,
they go from really good to pretty gross pretty fast.
I wonder they must have just kept ordering them rather
than ordering a bunch at one time, because I don't know,
I'd have to see how that works. But how did
the trend finally die down? So McDonald's just up the

(17:00):
price on the fries to their regular price and it
kind of stopped really soon after that, which is a
pretty simple fix. Yeah, alright, so here's a weird. When
I was watching this little documentary about potato chips and
ed her from hers potato chips, and he said that
if they still made potato chips the way they used

(17:20):
to this was about fifty years ago when the company started,
they would have to charge twenty five dollars a bag bag.
Why why is that? I mean, that's just how much
the industry has automated since then. It's actually kind of
amazing to to watch how it all works. So when
a truck full of potatoes goes to the Hers factory,
the trailers pulled onto a scale where the potatoes are

(17:40):
then weighed, and then it lifts the potatoes and dumps
the potatoes onto a conveyor belt, and the whole process starts,
kind of without humans. The whole thing is starting there,
and instead of watching to see which potatoes are colored
green and which ones are good, this computer sorts all
of this out and the imperfect potatoes and chips are
all weeded out along the way. Ed Her actually says

(18:02):
that when his mom was involved in the business and
used to supervise the bagging of these chips, they would
bag five the ten pounds of chips every hour, and
now with fewer people, more computers on the line, they
bag five to six tons of potato chips every hour,
which is insane. That is amazing, you know. Speaking of
potato chip bags, here's a quick interesting one. So people

(18:26):
absolutely hate that potato chip bags are over. In fact,
Korean college students in two thousand fourteen protested this fact
by taking a hundred sixty potato chip bags, finding them
together with plastic and tape, and using them to build
a raft to float across the river. And apparently plus
people watched that feet But um, the question remains, why

(18:47):
do potato chips have so much air in them? Yeah?
And do you do you have an answer to this? Yeah,
it is intentional. It is called Slackville, and that's the
industry term. Sasically, those bags are pumped full of a
little extra nitrogen to both keep the chips preserved, but
also because if the bags are packed with air, they

(19:08):
won't get mishandled and you won't end up with a
bag full of crumbs. It's basically a way to protect
you from getting a half bag of like fully round chips.
Oh that's interesting. I guess we always assume that it's
just too to you know, be cheap or cheat us
out of a certain number of chips or something. But
that's pretty interesting. All Right, We've got a couple more
facts to go, but let's pause for just a quick break.

(19:43):
Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're talking about
a really important summer topic, potatoes, of course. So Mango,
we've each got one fact ago, what do you want
to close with? Well, I know you're probably a little
late to celebrate this, but I want to point out
to you that in two thousand eight, the UN declared
it the International Year of the Potato. Okay, well, we're

(20:04):
just what fourteen years behind celebrating this historic event that's
never never too light, It's okay, Well, it's kind of
interesting why the UN decided to do this. Uh As,
as they put it, they wanted to shed new light
on a hidden treasure. And part of the reason is
that growing potatoes is surprisingly efficient in combating hunger. Because
potatoes aren't really traded across borders, because they're so easy

(20:27):
to grow across climates from low to high altitudes, and
because they're not really globally traded like most cereal crops,
they offer a lot of food security and farmers don't
have to worry about the prices fluctuating because of global markets.
Apparently that year, places like Peru encouraged locals to use
potato flour to reduce the reliance on wheat imports, and
both the Chinese and Indian governments leaned into potato production

(20:50):
to feed their growing populations. And I kind of like that,
after all that time, the UN finally gave the potato
it's due in this giant report. I agree. I kind
of like that to So how are you going to
close this up? All? Right? Well, I was torn. There
were a couple of facts I was looking at, but
I'm gonna save one of them for this. I think
we need to do a follow up with nine more
great facts about potatoes, because there's they're just so many.

(21:12):
But how about a fact about couch potatoes? So unlike
most etymology, which can be pretty frustrating because the origins
are always, you know, pretty murky, we've dealt with that
on on several topics before. There is an exact start
date for the word couch potato. It first appeared in
print back in nineteen seventy nine that you're both you

(21:33):
and I were born. This was in the l A Times,
while referencing afloat on a parade route. According to the
article quote the couch potatoes will be lying on couches
watching television as they are towed towards the parade route.
According to the excellent site Today, I learned a man
named Tom Lacino was the first to coin the phrase.

(21:55):
He had this good buddy named Bob Armstrong, and they
had already started this little group called the boob Too
Uber's and it was kind of this ridiculous protest against
the California health craze at the time, and the boob
tubers were basically committed to sitting in front of the
TV and snacking instead of jazz er sizing or whatever
the fad was at the time. So after recruiting their friends,

(22:16):
they launched this float in the Duda Parade. None of
this sounds real, uh, this joke parade to parody the
Tournament of Roses Parade. But one day in Latino called
up Armstrong and when his girlfriend answered the phone, he asked, Hey,
is the couch potato there, And apparently she looked over
saw her boyfriend just planted on the couch and started laughing.

(22:39):
And after that they rebranded as the couch Potatoes and
tried to trademark the word but it actually became too
popular in pop culture for them to protect the mark.
I had actually never heard the story before, you know,
doing the prep for this episode. So that is so
funny that there's actually a person who invented that phrase.
Tom Latino, I think you deserved this week's trophy for

(23:00):
best Fact, but since I don't actually know you, I
think will you should accept this award in his honor.
All right, I guess I'll do that. Thanks so much, Tom,
I appreciate it, buddy. That's it for this week's Part
Time Genius. Will be back with more very important facts soon.
Thanks so much for listening. Part Time Genius is a

(23:32):
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
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