QUARANTINE BLOG # 320

February 13, 2021

Let’s Eat! French Fries and Potato Chips

Beginning in the early 20th century, potato fries were occasionally served in American eateries, but they required considerable effort to prepare. The frying fat had to be kept at a constant temperature of 340-370 degrees. If too many potatoes were dropped into the fryer at once, the fat would cool down, resulting in greasy fries. And working around a vat of boiling hot fat could lead to disastrous accidents.

But, during World War II meat was rationed and restaurants had to serve something to round out their downsized or unavailable meat items. Potatoes were plentiful, affordable, and never rationed, and French fries became a staple.

French fries, which are more profitable than hamburgers, were a flagship item at the fledgling McDonald’s restaurant chain. The founders of the chain, Richard and Maurice McDonald, perfected the frying process and promoted the relationship between hamburgers and fries. 

When Ray Kroc acquired McDonald from the brothers in 1961, he began looking for better ways to prepare and distribute French fries to his franchises.

In 1953 Idaho potato-grower J. R. Simplot started producing frozen French fries. He concluded that the real market for his frozen fries was the booming fast-food business, and he sought out chains that might be interested. He met Ray Kroc in 1965, and the French-fry world was changed forever. 

A small cult of condiments has built up around French fries. Salt is a universal, but other condiments vary with the locale.

We talked about the creation of potato chips and their inventor George Crum in QB 287, so I won’t repeat that information here, but here is the link, if you'd like to refresh your memory.

Potato chips were first mass-produced during the 1890s, and sold in barrels to grocery stores. Proprietors dished out the chips into paper bags for customers, who warmed them in an oven before serving. The chips were often stale, and the product never really caught on. The packaging problem was not solved until the 1930s, when potato chips were sold in vacuum-sealed bags.

In 1937 Herman Lay, a businessman from Nashville, Tennessee, began manufacturing potato chips, and his advertisers bet we couldn’t eat just one. In 1945 Lay met Elmer Doolin, who produced Fritos Corn Chips. Doolin also made Ruffles. The two companies merged in 1960 to form Frito-Lay.

In the 1960s Proctor & Gamble introduced Pringles, which are made from dehydrated and reconstituted potatoes. The potato chip industry sued to prevent P & G from calling Pringles potato chips. The FDA said Pringles are potato chips.

Americans purchase $6 billion of potato chips annually – at a rate of 1.2 billion pounds – which works out to about 17 pounds of potato chips per person. Someone is eating a lot of potato chips!

The Potato Becomes Cultured

It addition to its historical, culinary and commercial significance, the potato has appeared in artistic works, plays, songs, games and politics (Do you remember the idiotic media kefluffle over spelling and Vice President Dan Quayle?).

Potatoes migrated into paintings.  Some of them are showcased in this video I created for the cruise talk.

In 1952 a novel plaything, Mr. Potato Head, arrived on the market. It was a set of prong-backed, cartoonish plastic facial features, along with arms and legs that were intended be stuck into a real potato to create a man (like Eve, Mrs. Potato Head came along later). 

The use of a real potato as a plaything was seen as wasteful, and it ran against the maternal injunction not to play with your food. So in 1964 a plastic potato became part of the Mr. Potato Head kit, and the pleasure of randomly sticking those funny features into a knobby, bulbous, real potato was gone for good.

Since then, potato heads have survived and thrived in a variety of new dimensions. Check out these Star Wars salutes.

Pop vocalist Dee Dee Sharp’s top-selling record “It's Mashed Potato Time” hit the airwaves on May 5, 1962. The Mashed Potato was something like the Twist but with the addition of smashing foot movements. It hit #4 on Billboard’s chart seven weeks later.

The Future

When astronauts venture beyond the Earth’s orbit to visit Mars, potatoes, freshly harvested, will be a regular feature of their meals. The round trip will be a three-year enterprise and since carrying a sufficient weight of ready-made meals is impractical, the crew will grow their own vegetables, thanks to the Bioregenerative Life Support System that NASA has been developing since the 1980s. 

The BLSS is a self-sustaining system that recycles the output of one generation of crops into the production of the next. It will provide astronauts fresh produce, including radishes, onions, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers and strawberries, but the potato will be the main crop.

And food is not all that the potato will give the planetary explorers. In space a sustainable oxygen supply is vital, and here the photosynthetic process in which plants absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen as they grow makes the potato invaluable. In the enclosed environment of a spacecraft, a stand of potatoes large enough to provide as much food as each person needs per day will also supply all the oxygen they must have and remove all the carbon dioxide they exhale.

That these commonplace and down-to-earth tubers should be a vital component of humanity’s venture into space is a statement of their worth. Trillions of dollars, billions of man-hours and the success of humanity’s most ambitious and complex enterprise will ultimately depend upon the astronauts ability to grow potatoes.  Here is a fictional look at potatoes in space.

During the past 50 years, potato production has increased more than any other crop. It is one of the most important commodities in the world, grown commercially in more than 130 countries, with annual production exceeding 320 million tons. It is a staple food for more than 1 billion people.

Not bad for the vegetable once deemed the cause of leprosy and forbidden because it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible.

👉   Today’s close is from Praying With Jesus, by Eugene H. Peterson.

“Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to testify about anyone; for he himself knew what was in everyone” (John 2:24-25).

Jesus did not plot his course on the basis of popularity polls.  The response of the crowd played no part in guiding his ministry.  God provided the compass points for his journey.

Prayer: All things that, in my naivete, seem so important to me – acclaim, enthusiasm, success, acceptance – are on the periphery of your ministry, Lord Jesus.  You march to a different drummer.  Give me ears to hear that drum beat, too.  Amen.  

-30-