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.

 

 

 

 

POTATO DREAMS

 

I had a dream the other night that my friend Kirsty had invited me to a party, and all the guests had to come bearing potatoes.  This was a strange thing to dream, since Kirsty doesn’t look like one of the world’s great potato eaters.

 

I think the reason for the dream was that I’d been thinking about Henry Cueco, a French artist and writer who among many other things painted portraits of potatoes.  

 

He did lemons as well 

But it’s the potatoes that really move me.

 

He also wrote a book, untranslated into English as far as I know, titled Le journal d’une pomme de terre, 

in which (I think given my poor French) he imagines himself to be a potato. This is my own dodgy translation, with some online help:

‘My poor mother was not, strictly speaking, a potato. Yet I often dream that I am sprouting, my body covered in manure and earth, blissfully budding. My father was not familiar with potatoes, his preferred starch was rice. I never saw him look carefully at a potato, although he was interested in the voluptuous forms of women. ‘

 

There’s just something about potatoes. They have character, personality, they have eyes, and (especially if you draw on them) they even have faces.

It almost seems a shame to eat them

 

Almost.

NO TONIC FOR THE TROOPS

 

So the great Rodney Graham, conceptual artist, which in this case included being a 

photographer, filmmaker, sculptor, musician and much more besides, has become the 

late, great Rodney Graham.  He was 73.

 

You may remember him from such art films as Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong in which he sits on a chair and throws (or lobs) potatoesat a gong some distance away.  This was apparently inspired by Nick Mason of Pink Floyd.

 

Some of the potatoes hit the gong, some inevitably missed, and the ones that hit were supposedly distilled into vodka.

 

But I do wonder how, after the lobbing, anybody could look at all the potatoes on the floor and tell which had hit and which hadn’t.  Maybe there was a system. Or maybe that was the joke.

 

Anyway, the end result looked like this:

 

Now, some people might say that’s an awful lot of trouble to go to for a bottle of vodka. But then some people just don’t understand art.

 

 

 

 

THE FIVE SECOND RULE (NOT)

If you walk about ten minutes due south from where I live you come to a 

small public orchard, or anyway a small group of apple trees, planted I 

suppose in the interests of saving the planet. And there, at this time of 

year, on the ground are hundreds of apples that have fallen off the trees.  

I’ve been known to gather up a few of these wormy old fruits to put in my 

compost bin, and I’ve picked a fair number of apples off the trees and 

eaten them.  They’re crisp and a bit sour, and just the kind I like, though I 

couldn’t tell you the breed.

This reminded me of a recent walk I did, I did not very far from home, around some potato fields, where a good many discarded or rejected potatoes by the potato harvester machine, and could be snatched up from the ground, and they were, by me and my walking companions. Not the potatoes in this picture, obviously.

 

And OK, you may say, ‘Well of course there are edible things on the ground where you live, in a very slightly rural bit of Essex.’

 

And this is true enough, but a couple of weeks ago I was in London, in Spitalfields.some and there were ‘windfall’ potatoes to be had right there on the ground.  I imagine they’d fallen off the back of a lorry but they looked perfectly edible (apart from the odd one that had been run over) though I admit I didn’t swoop down on them.

And then, because I go around taking pictures of these things,  I remembered this perfectly good looking piece of bread, close to the rear tyre of a pickup truck in Los  Angeles. They have everything in that city!  But again I didn’t forage it.

SPUD WE LIKE

I’m sure you remember that for Christmas 2019 I was the lucky recipient of a big can of potato crisps (thanks Caroline!)

The company that makes them is Bonilla a la Vista, originally based in Spain, with a mission statement on their website that says, ‘Devotion is our main ingredient.’

Inevitably the crisps were soon gone but I held on to the can thinking I’d find a use for it, but I wasn’t sure what. Then earlier this year inspiration struck. I decided to use the can as a kind of plant pot and grow some potatoes in it. At first it seemed to be a success. The greenery came up and looked great,

but there were no flowers and then the greenery died. I thought ah well, it didn’t work, this is what happens, and so I turned out the contents of the can, to get rid of them, and there to my surprise was nature’s (rather limited) bounty.

Now, you will say that by supermarket standards this is at most 50 pence worth of spuds, but can you put a price on being friendly with the earth?

IN A SPUDDING GROVE

As you probably know by now, if there’s one food I think I couldn’t live without it’s potatoes. There are rumours, maybe urban myths, that you can live quite happily and healthily eating nothing but potatoes.

I’m not sure that this is true, but even if it is, I’m not sure that it applies to potato crisps (chips to my American readers), and I suspect it may apply even less to Chilli and Lemon Grills, Flavoured potato snack, made by Cofresh - ‘proud to be No.1 Indian Snack Brand.’  They’re based in Leicester.

The ‘grills’ taste perfectly good, but look on the back of the pack and check out the list of ingredients: the first three are ‘native potato starch, potato solids, and modified potato starch.’ That’s three forms of potato! Not too shabby.

Also, another of the ingredients is ‘Lemon Juice Powder.’ I suppose I must have encountered this before, but never knowingly, and it takes a strong man not to think of Lemsip. 

But it turns out you can buy lemon juice powder all over the Web.  I had no idea. I’m not sure why you would, but it’s probably good to know you can.

MORE SPUD ACTION

 Want to see some potato imagery from the Simpsons?  Of course you do. 

Homer Simpson as a potato man:

Marge and her sack of potatoes:

Tom Wolfe eating mash at the Wordloaf Literary Festival:

And do you want to see a picture of Agnes Varda dressed as a potato?  Sure, why not?

MORE SPUD LORE

So I went back to Franklin and Company to have their waffle cut duck fries.  They were good, although you could easily have imagined something gamier and more duck-intense.  I suppose I was thinking of goose fat, which I know costs more than duck fat, though I’m not entirely sure why: roast yourself a goose and the fat just pours out - enough to   satisfy most of your fat needs for at least the next year.

Even so, it’s really it’s all about the potatoes, and my idea for a grand and quixotic book titled something like The Secret Life of the Spud hasn’t been completely abandoned.  And so, being the freewheeling researcher that I am, I Googled “potato+porn.” In a world of “food porn” and “ruin porn” I thought this might be quite innocent, and in the main it was.  

There’s even a (rather neglected) tumblr site:  
http://potatopornpotatoporn.tumblr.com
It has very few words, though there are links to recipes and pictures like this one:

But the world being as it is, my googling also brought up quite a few pictures (more of men that of women) doing ill-advised things with potatoes – pretty much the opposite of eating them.  Here is a more decorous image (which I suppose is actually selling the handbag), by James Piatt and Ted Walton, though those names took some finding.

And I did discover that there’s a (completely unpornographic) Potato Museum in Munich - Das Kartoffelmuseum.  I’ve been to Munich – how did I miss that?  In that museum they have one of these things:

       It’s a ceremonial vessel, dedicated to, possibly in the shape of,  "Axomama" – the Andean potato goddess.  There’s a lot to be said about these things, and The History and Social Influence of the Potato by Radcliffe Salaman says a fair amount: human sacrifice and mutilation of the upper lip seem to have been involved.

       It now seems that I might not get to the Idaho Potato Museum, after all, so here’s a picture of their prime exhibit, what they say is the world’s largest potato chip, measuring 25 inches across - though in fact as you can see, it’s actually a giant Pringle: 

Now I’d have thought Pringles were so “constructed” you could make them any size you wanted. Why stop at 25 inches? You could have one ten feet across.  But more than that, the Honorable Justice Warren, British High Court Judge, has declared that Pringles do not met the legal definition of a “potato crisp” at all, since they’re made from potato flour, corn flour, wheat starch and rice flour together with fat and emulsifier, salt and seasoning, with a potato content of a mere 42%.  Quite right, Judge.