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POTATOES

There was nothing ordinary about my mother-in-law’s mashed potatoes. Betty Dooley whipped russet or Idaho bakers into fluffy mounds, turning them golden with plenty of butter and cream. Come summer, she steamed golf-ball-sized red potatoes to toss in a tangy mustard-dill dressing. Betty was a tiny woman with boundless energy who took potatoes seriously. A generation before, her “people” had fled Ireland for New Jersey to escape the potato blight.

The story of the potato famine provides one of the strongest arguments for preserving genetic diversity. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, all potatoes were descended from a small handful of varieties that were closely related. Through constant inbreeding new potatoes were created, yet genetically they were nearly identical. When the blight struck, no potatoes of this variety were resistant, so the disease spread quickly and lethally.

By the early 1900s growers understood the key to resilience, and crossed wild potato varieties from Mexico and South America with cultivated varieties. The resulting off-spring were the especially tasty potatoes—Colorado rose, Yukon gold, and yellow Finn—that I find in my farmers’ market today.

As a young mom, I told those family stories of the potato famine to my children as we planted potatoes at the Land School. In the late spring, those potatoes burst into pale-purple, pure-white, and candy-pink blossoms. Anchored in low mounds, their flowers nodded and bobbed in the breeze. At duskfall they’d close, and they’d droop at the faintest hint of rain.

Delicate and ethereal, potato buds belie the sturdy tubers they become. To this day, digging potatoes always fills me with a surprising tenderness. Gently brushing the soil from a freshly harvested potato’s paper-thin skin feels like wiping dirt from a child’s tender cheek. Potatoes are such an important food, a culinary staple and nutritional powerhouse; I’m grateful to have good fresh potatoes in all their splendid variety—delicate Colorado rose, buttery Yukon gold, nutty-tasting fingerlings.

Potatoes are loaded with protein, minerals, and vitamins. Since their development in the mountains of Peru, potatoes have broadened into more than five thousand different varieties that grow throughout the world. And while beetles, fungus, and mold make potato growing somewhat harder in our region than in others, our organic farmers grow tons of potatoes by saving some of the last year’s crop to plant for the future. Unlike lettuce or peas, potatoes can be stored for several months when properly handled, and unlike other vegetables, they are both food and seed. Year after year, crop after crop, good farmers are paid back in plentiful yields.

The potato’s essence relies on how and where it’s grown; the vitality of the soil will determine a potato’s texture and taste. When I lived in New Hampshire as a graduate student, I craved those tiny “salt potatoes,” with a briny savor, that thrive in the low-lying New England coastline. In contrast, our region’s potatoes taste of the sweet prairie and flinty limestone bluffs along the Mississippi River. Freshness determines quality, too. I once ordered a box of “gourmet” potatoes from New England, but when we served them alongside the potatoes from our farmers’ market, their flavor was flat and indistinct. Those Maine potatoes had been stored too long and flown too far to retain their character. You just can’t separate the quality, flavor, and general goodness of a potato from how and where it’s grown.

Is it any surprise, then, that the potatoes sold in five-pound plastic bags at the bottom of the produce bin have no flavor? They are grown with fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, and sprouting retardants. The plastic bags they’re stored in trap moisture and encourage mold. Potatoes sold fresh make up 40 percent of the commercial market. The remaining 60 percent are processed into fries and chips.

These commercial spuds are bred to size, weight, and starch specifications. To grow, they’re heavily sprayed with toxic chemicals that dull their leaves with a white bloom. Just recently, J. R. Simplot, the Idaho-based and long-established power in the potato business, was granted USDA approval for its new genetically modified potato. Engineered to stay white when cut, resist bruising, and fry especially well, the potato’s DNA has also been altered so that less of the chemical suspected of causing cancer is produced when the potato is deep fried in fast-food restaurants or processed into chips. This is the first GMO food to boast health benefits to the consumer. The Center for Food Safety, an advocacy group, responded to Simplot’s data with a statement calling the USDA’s approval premature and the technology used to create the potato not adequately regulated.

Potatoes are especially porous and absorb everything in the soil as they grow. Thus when we eat potatoes sprayed with toxins we’re ingesting compounds the Environmental Protection Agency has deemed dangerous. The Food and Drug Administration does not have jurisdiction over pesticides.

In June 2014 the British Journal of Nutrition found that potatoes treated with fungicides early in the season, herbicides before harvest, and sprouting retardants contained high levels of dangerous chemicals and metals. Organic potatoes, chemical free, were far higher in antioxidants, minerals, calcium, potassium, and zinc.

While organic potatoes constitute a tiny portion of the market at present, organic cultivation on a large scale is very possible. In collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund, Wisconsin potato growers have voluntarily cut the use of high-risk pesticides and switched to Integrated Pest Management (IPM) systems, reducing toxic chemical pesticides by 60 percent.

The first year in our new city, I landed a job as an account executive in a large marketing firm and was assigned to the Pacific Gamble Robinson account. PGR was once the region’s largest produce distributor, the first in the nation to brand apples. At my first meeting with PGR, Jim Kwitchak, the vice president of marketing, sat behind a bare metal desk in his dim office above the company’s warehouse while I nervously and earnestly presented the promotion plan and budget, employing every marketing cliché I knew. But before I could finish, he stifled a yawn, winked, and pulled a crimpled paper bag from his creaky desk drawer. “Do you like venison sausage?” he asked, flipping open a pocketknife to cut me a thick slice.

Kwitchak was a tall drink of a man with big ears and a lanky gait. “Folks call me the Norwegian bachelor farmer who married Ann,” he joked. He’d worked his way up the corporate food chain by sweeping floors and stacking produce for the old Red Owl grocery stores. “I grew up on a farm and couldn’t wait to get away from it. Long hot hours, nothing to do in the country. I wanted to live in the city, especially after the war,” he said. Despite his genius for selling potatoes from Idaho, Kwitchak’s pantry was stocked with the food he grew, caught, trapped, and foraged, as well as the fish, duck, and venison he smoked in an old refrigerator he’d converted and fired with applewood. He threaded wild mushrooms to hang and dry on attic rafters, and he put up pickles on an old stove in his garage while watching the Minnesota Vikings on Sundays.