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Preserve
Planet Potato Throughout
history, potatoes have been revered.
The Spanish took the potato back to Europe where it spread far and wide.
Englishman
John Forster's 1620 booklet
England's Happiness Increased: a sure and easy remedy for all succeeding dear years by a plantation of the roots called potatoes.
Eventually potatoes became so essential that monuments were erected to those who were thought responsible.
This German statue honored Sir Francis Drake, an Englishman who was mistakenly thought at the time to have introduced the potato to Europe.
Home gardeners saved many families from starvation during wartime.
This post World War One medal depicts a Belgian father and daughter planting potatoes. In England during the same war, people were asked to avoid eating potatoes, so more could be shipped to the troops in the trenches.
People sent potato postcards to each other instead. The English botanist John Gerard was one of the first to study the potato. He was so proud of the plant that he chose to be portrayed
holding a sprig of potato flowers. In
the early part of the 20th century,
So
what happened, The answer is tied to our fast-paced modern society that has more time than money. So businesses developed tasty, cheap, fast food, much of it cooked in fat. French
fries began to dominate.
and the concept of "Couch Potatoes" was born. Potatoes
were some of the first foods to be
Once again, potatoes became the cover subject
as articles warned of possible disastrous consequences of such experimentation on our food supply. It's not enough that the noble potato's image has been ruined, but the potato itself is endangered. A host of diseases are always threatening the annual crop, but now a virulent new strain of the blight that caused the infamous Irish Potato Famine of the mid 1800's is poised to do serious damage.
Over the past 30 years The Potato Museum has closely monitored the potato's many ups and downs while fulfilling our primary mission to preserve the plant's fascinating history. And we have done this without any support from the potato industry. Here
are some of the things we have done ---started the world's first museum collection about the potato, in 1975. ---been the voice of the potato giving hundreds of media interviews. ---appeared in tv documentaries about the potato in Japan and Ireland. ---served as guest curators for the potato section of The Smithsonian Museum's largest two-year exhibit,"Seeds of Change." ---acted as primary source for "The Amazing Potato" exhibit at Canada's National Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa. ---written two books, and a major article about potatoes published in Smithsonian Magazine. --- lectured in Belgium, Peru, China and numerous places in the USA on the history and social influence of the potato. ---been a resource for documentaries about the potato at WGBH, Boston. ---presented programs about the potato in hundreds of schools, libraries, museums, senior centers, lecture halls, including two USA tours. ---provided research and editorial assistance for major articles about the potato in The New Yorker and The National Geographic Magazine. New Projects: ---
several books featuring potatoes
"SOS: Preserve Planet Potato" Exhibit Credits : "Can the Humble Spud Feed the World?" by Truman
Becker Photo: "woman standing in sack of potatoes" "Jim Cantalupo" photo by John Zich "Supersized"
Zits Treasury cover The Cultured Glutton by John Goode England's Happiness Increased "Tulelake, CA potato experiment field trials photo"
by George Olson NY Times Magazine cover, October 25, 1998 The Economist cover, June 19, 1999 Other images are from The Potato Museum collection. Resource: The One and Only
Original Belgian Fries Website
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The council argues that potatoes are "inherently healthy". Protests are due on Monday outside dictionary publisher Oxford University Press and in Parliament Square, London. "We are trying to get rid of the image that potatoes are bad for you," said council head of marketing Kathryn Race. "Of course it is not the Oxford English Dictionary's fault but we want to use another term than 'couch potato' because potatoes are inherently healthy." The campaign is backed by dieticians who say the vegetable is low in fat and high in vitamin C, the council says.
The
dictionary defines a couch potato as: "A person who spends leisure
time passively or idly sitting around, especially watching television
or video tapes." "Dictionaries just reflect the words that society uses." Words were never removed from the 20-volume, 650,000-word main dictionary, but little-used ones could be taken out of the smaller dictionaries, Mr Simpson added. The first recorded use of "couch potato" was in the Los Angeles Times in 1979 and it entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1993, he said.
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