Potato Use: All About America's Favorite Vegetable

You see, as a magazine journalist, I’ve had the unique opportunity to visit and write articles about potato growers across the country. One memorable fall a few years ago, I spent a week interviewing potato growers in Oregon, Washington and Idaho, then traveled to New England the following week to interview potato growers around Presque Isle, Maine.

Sometimes I bring my wife a souvenir from my trips. During my trip to the Pacific Northwest, I decided to bring her … potatoes. I packed my travel bag with two of the biggest potatoes I could find from a field in Washington State, then added two more from a farm in Idaho. When I presented them to her the weekend after I returned home, she was … well, I guess you could say she was amused.

If my first gift of potatoes amused her, then the giant-sized spuds I brought back a week later from northern Maine left her practically speechless. They were monsters, about two pounds each, big enough that each potato produced a filling meal for two.

You think $10 is too much to pay for one of my fancy gift boxes, a sampler of eight perfectly matched potatoes? After all, they’d be wrapped in gold foil. Perhaps we could create a special, half-baked holiday. 

Jerry Schleicher is a country writer and cowboy poet in Parkville, Missouri, who savors a bowl of potato soup on a cold winter’s day.