An old Yiddish joke: A poor yeshiva student visits a local family every evening for dinner. Each night, the family serves him potatoes: boiled potatoes, fried potatoes, potato soup, potato pancakes, potato kugel, and so on. After a week or two of this splendid spud-fest, the student asks his hosts to tell him the correct blessing over potatoes. “What?!” they reply. “You, a yeshiva student, don’t know the blessing for vegetables that grow in the ground?” “Of course I do,” he replies. “But what do I say when they are coming out of my ears?”
I thought of this joke when I read about Chris Voigt’s “20 Potatoes a Day Diet,” which I read about on that excellent web site, potatoes.com. Voigt, the executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission, aims to prove that he can remain healthy while eating nothing but potatoes and potato products for 60 days, starting October 1.
Voigt’s goal, he says on 20potatoesaday.com, is “to show the world that the potato is so healthy that you could live off them alone if you had to without any negative impact to your health.” To maintain his body weight, he calculated that he needs the equivalent of 20 averaged-sized potatoes a day, baked, boiled, pan fried and steamed. The diet allows oil for cooking, as well as ketchup, hot sauce, herbs and spices, but no sour cream, butter, chili, cheese, or gravy.
This sounds colossally dull, but potatoes have been getting some bad press lately, so I give Voigt credit for his efforts to rehabilitate the humble tuber. The New York Times, in a September 24, 2010 article on American disdain for veggies (“Told to Eat Its Vegetables, America Orders Fries,”) reported that according to the Centers for Disease Control, only 26 percent of the nation’s adults eat vegetables three or more times a day, adding, “And no, that does not include French fries.”
True, French fries are heavy on the fat, but the potato itself is highly nutritious, according to Voigt. Citing statistics based on the Food and Drug Administration’s recommended daily allowance, he estimates that his twenty potatoes per day will provide him with all the protein he needs, plus more than 900 times the recommended daily dose of Vitamin C, and plentiful amounts of other vitamins, as well as minerals, fiber, and folate (but alas, only one percent of the Vitamin E and Vitamin A required per day.)
Voigt’s diet has a precedent: as Michael Pollan relates in The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, the Irish survived and even thrived on a diet of potatoes and cow’s milk (which latter provided Vitamin A). That is, until the 1845 attack of the potato blight, a fungus called Phytophthora infestans, which led to a catastrophic famine and the emigration of nearly a million Irish to the United States during the years of starvation. Prior to the plague, a working Irishman man might eat up to fourteen pounds of potatoes each day, which also helped stave off scurvy.
So I wish Voigt blessings and all the best for his upcoming spud orgy. You can follow his progress on his blog, which also includes a few entertaining videos. I particularly recommend What Foods I Will Miss, which features an amusing scene of the man kneeling and wailing beside a supermarket stack of cases of beer. And I’ll be interested to know how soon those taters start sprouting out of his ears.
Van Gogh image courtesy of Minke Wagenaar. The painting appears in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
Mr. Potato Head image courtesy of Ian Muttoo.