What's This

I've been complaining for years about the state of the standard cooking potato, whether it's a Russet or an Idaho. To me, a 'tater's a 'tater. If I can boil it, bake it, fry it, or nuke it I'm happy. What I haven't been happy with is the state of my potatoes.


Several years ago I would find little black spots in my potatoes. I kept trying to figure out what was causing the little black spots but couldn't figure it out. I hadn't ever seen anything like it. Over the years I saw it from time to time. Finally, one time, I saw a little stick of wood in the middle of the potato and realized it was a dirty tooth pick. I was shocked and revolved. How disgusting! Some filthy sorry excuse of a person, who could have been riddled with disease, decided to stick a filthy splinter of germy wood into a potato to corrupt the crop. The person had no regard for the fruit of his labor, or respect for his employer, much less the people who eat the potatoes. It finally made sense.


I can imagine a bunch of migrant workers resting after a day of toil and pain in the backbreaking job of bending all day in the boiling sun scratching out potatoes from the soil. They probably sit their bags of potatoes together to be loaded. It would be easy to pierce a few sticks of dirty tooth picks into potatoes every day before they are picked up from the fields. Someone like that would have to be trying to rot the potato, I guess.


I have been having a new problem with the potatoes I have been buying recently. I've bought a total of three bags of potatoes with something awful wrong with them. I think it is some kind of blight but you can't tell there is anything wrong with them until you cut them open. They look fine on the outside but they have big black spots inside. I guess you could say they look like they have an inky dark spot throughout the potatoes. 


I was upset when I bought the first bag of potatoes but I used the ones that weren't bad and threw away the bad. By the time I bought my second bag of potatoes from the same roadside stand, I told the ladies about the bad potatoes. They said nobody else had mentioned them. I bought more potatoes after those which were good so I thought, 'okay, that's good'. I picked up the last bag of that brand of potatoes the other day. 


I was peeling potatoes for dinner when I saw the same rotten, nasty looking potatoes. I cut another potato and saw a bigger bad place in it. The whole bag was probably diseased. I took them up to the roadside stand to show them to the two ladies who were there. I cut one open in front of them and it had a little black spot. I wondered if it could be a toothpick blemish.


One lady told me that another customer mentioned the potatoes being bad besides me. They told me they would like to have the potatoes to show their boss. I readily agreed. I didn't want them. They offered me another bag of potatoes and I said I'd pass, thank you. I didn't want any more potatoes from there. One lady got a bag of Dole potatoes and said they weren't the same brand so they should be fine. I thanked them and came home.


I read and hear about this gene splicing and animal-plant hybrids all the time. I got to thinking what if these nasty toothpicks have some germ or something that could mutate. That's just creepy. What do you think?

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g o o d  ' t a t e r ' s

    

As Always

PIO
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Chow Baby!