THE SPUD IS IN THE HEART

 

There has apparently been ‘outrage’ in parts of the crisp 

eating community because certain Marks and Spencer 

crisp packets marked ‘British potatoes’ are overstamped 

on the sell-by label with the words ‘contains non-British 

potatoes.’

An M&S spokesman said: ‘An unprecedented industry-wide shortage, caused by drought last year, meant we – and other businesses – were forced to source some potatoes from outside the UK for a few weeks ahead of this year’s British potato harvest.’  So it’s only temporary anyway, supposedly.  

 

However, it’s said there’ll be another shortage this year because of a wet spring, plus rising costs of machinery and fertilizer.  In other words British farmers can’t make a profit growing potatoes, and when I see how cheap it is to buy a bag of supermarket spuds, I’m amazed they can make any money at all.

 

And so we come to Agnès Varda (1928 -2019) French (Belgian born) filmmaker, screenwriter, photographer, artist and so on.

 

She’s best known, to me anyway, for Cléo from 5 to 7(1962) about a woman waiting to hear the results of a cancer test, with appearances by Jean-Luc Godard and Eddie Constantine.  I don’t believe it features any potatoes.  Unlike her film The Gleaners and I(2000) in French Les glaneurs et la glaneuse.

 

‘Glaneurs’ as I understand it, gather crops left in the field after harvesting, so it has connotations of foraging, scavenging and collecting.  Historically they’ve usually been women, as in Millet’s ‘Des Glaneuses.’ I believe it’s also currently a brand of combine harvester.

 

In the movie, Varda goes to a field where imperfect (though perfectly usable) potatoes are dumped, and identifies with the discarded and misshapen tubers.  She takes home some heart-shaped spuds and lets them grow wrinkly and sprout, sees a resemblance with her own wrinkled hands, and compares her aging body with the far more rapidly aging potatoes, and thinks that she too has been discarded. So it’s all about death and decay and patriarchy.

 

Also I hadn’t realized heart-shaped potatoes were so easy to come by.

 

Later Varda did an exhibition and dressed up as a potato. Potatoes can get you obsessed like that.

 

And then today, life being the synchronicitous thing it is, my Instagram pal Barbara Lounder put up pictures of two different kinds of basket for gathering potatoes. Her captions reads ‘One from Norfolk, one from Unama’ki. These are currently in my exhibition “Family Gathering/Gathering Family” in Sydney NS at Eltuek Art Centre. The exhibition is on until August 18.’  Brava.

More locally, here in the Nicholson archive, we have lately taken possession of a plate featuring the ‘Baked Potato Man’ by John Finnie – 1985, Wedgewood – one of series of street food trades that includes ‘The Street Seller of Hot Green Peas.’  But it’s hard to get obsessed with hot green peas, I'd say.