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.
At 5:04 p.m. on October 17, 1989, two decades after he served as a combat soldier in Vietnam, Lance Johnson felt the tremors of San Francisco’s Loma Prieta Earthquake from his apartment in Marin County. He took his cup of coffee to the couch, switched on the news and saw a live feed of the fire and destruction happening 40 miles south. Suddenly, he was hit with some of the common symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As he recalls: Someone tripped a switch in my head, and instantly, I was back in Vietnam. In my mind, the concept of time suddenly meant nothing, and I traveled a wormhole in space from San Francisco to twenty years earlier in Southeast Asia. Panic. I didn’t know what to do.*
