Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Spuds U like
Humble potato is still the UK’S favourite vegetable
That’s because potatoes are related to deadly nightshade and the greenery contains the poisonous compounds solanines and glycoalkaloids. So do green tubers but cooking kills the toxins. However, potato juice (they are 80% water) is a good remedy for gastritis. And an old-fashioned headache remedy is sliced raw potatoes on your forehead.
UK brand Smash arrived in the 1960s and was famously advertised on TV by robot Martians mocking the way earthlings “peel potatoes with their metal knives, boil them for 20 of their minutes, then smash them all to bits”. The slogan “For Mash, Get Smash” is still one of the bestknown ever. Spuds can be deadly weapons. In 2015 a 55-year-old Danish man killed his older brother by force-feeding him with potatoes. And in 2015 Daniel Burgess, 38, from Newlyn, Cornwall was jailed for killing a neighbour with carbon monoxide poisoning by stuffing a potato into his gas flue. than 125 countries and eaten by more than a billion people daily. China grew 88.9 million metric tons in 2013 alone. India, Russia, Ukraine and the USA are the next biggest producers. Potatoes have inspired art. Van Gogh painted The Potato Eaters in 1885 and Prayer for the Potato Crop in 1857 was artist Jean-françois Millet’s reaction to a famine in Europe.
In 1995 the first spuds grown off the face of the earth were germinated on the Space Shuttle Columbia. Then in 2016 scientists at Peru’s International Potato Centre grew a plant in a container mimicking conditions in space.