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Food and drink: A little r-e-s-p-e-c-t

Potatoes come into their own as big shooters on the world food stage

Here it is, almost the middle of November in the Year of the Potato and I’ve yet to pay tribute to this ubiquitous tuber. So please allow me, the original half-Polish quarter-Irish mad potato junkie from Edmonton, to redeem myself.

Granted, it’s not quite the same as the Chinese lunar years devoted to the pig, the rabbit, the monkey and the rest of the menagerie, although this might be a concept worth pursuing. (I can picture it now — the post office issuing commemorative stamps and everyone divining their inner nature depending on which of the vegetative lunar years they are born in: Year of the Turnip; Year of the Sweet Onion, or the Crookneck Squash…)

No, in case you’ve been asleep all year, this is the International Year of the Potato, as declared by the UN. And it’s funny how adding the word “International” elevates the concept from mockery to mighty serious. Heck, the little ol’ potato even has its own trendy website now, dubbed “Hidden Treasure” (www.potato2008.org).

Maybe it’s the UN designation or maybe it’s the fact that the potato has finally come into its own as a food item worth paying attention to, but it’s being elevated to something of an edible celebrity.

“The potato is getting a little respect,” says Bruce Miller, co-owner of Across the Creek Organics in Pemberton. “And so are the farmers growing them.”

Around the Millers’ place, a mere 800,000 pounds of certified organic potatoes are nestled in the root cellar right now. That’s more or less the annual harvest from the 500-acre farm that has been in his family since 1895. Three generations, all of them growing potatoes.

Pemberton, of course, is rooted in potato history and culture, pun intended. It was the first area in the world to grow virus-free commercial seed potatoes, mainly due to its once relatively isolated location — the tentacle of Highway 99 reached it only in 1975.

But, thankfully, some 10 years ago, Bruce and his family decided to move into organic, and what I call cream of the crop potatoes for eating rather than seeding.

Now at better food stores across the south coast you can find a bag of the Millers’ certified organic German butter potatoes or russets or Russian blues (check out the antioxidant levels in those purple babies) with their cute little “peas gowing a pod” logo that always makes me smile.

I cradle that bag of patooties in my arms like a baby to get it home, anticipating some pretty precious potato moments ahead (a nice, firm German butter potato on a cool autumn night melts in your mouth, well, just like butter).

It strikes me as pretty ironic that “sophisticated” North American diners are finally getting into potato varieties that have been around hundreds or even thousands of years. Farmers in Peru, from whence the potato cometh, have been cultivating some pretty wild-looking varieties — try more than 4,000 of them — for more than 8,000 years.

A friend of ours in Prince George has been into growing his own potatoes big time and shared some early, as in historically early “proto-potatoes” with us. You could barely imagine these were potatoes. Tiny, pink, finger-like and dense but wet in texture, they were actually kind of weird by my Albertan books.

But tiny and weird or luxurious and buttery, potatoes remain a pretty impressive food source. Not that anyone anticipated the global economic meltdown or the rising food prices we saw earlier this year, but someone at the UN must have been prescient, for even with all these factors in play, potatoes remain one of the least expensive, nutritious foods in marketplaces around the world.

They are the number four food crop after rice, wheat and maize; they’re high in vitamin C, protein and nutrients, and low in fat; and they are great for fighting poverty in urban settings because your can grow them even on a tiny plot of land.

All in all, Mr. Potato stands as a tasty part of diets round the world and a great tool for meeting one of the UN’s millennial development goals: reducing by half the number of people living in extreme poverty and hunger around the world.

 

IT’S A FACT

The United Nations has been designating certain years as “International” years since 1959 to draw attention to major issues and encourage international action on them. To separate the really important issues from your everyday riff-raff, not every year is an “International” year of something or other.

Here’s a sampling of some of the “International” themes the UN has chosen over time, displaying quite a range of topics and gravitas:

1959-60: World Refugee Year

1967 International World Tourism Year

1975 International Women’s Year

1978 International Anti-Apartheid Year

1983 World Communications Year

1986 International Year of Peace

1995 United Nations Year for Tolerance

1998 International Year of the Ocean

2001 took the cake, though, for the theme year with the longest name: International Year of Mobilization against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. I can’t blame you for not recalling it — no media outlet in its right mind could feature it because the name took up half the article.

While the International Year of Potato theme has caught on like (potato) hotcakes this year, it’s not the only UN theme. 2008 is also International Year of Planet Earth, International Year of Sanitation and International Year of Languages. What a year!

Not to be alarmist or anything about the state of our world, but the UN’s “International” year designations have been occurring at a greater and greater frequency as we approached the millennium.

In fact, every year since the year 2000 has seen multiple themes to take international action on, but 2008 is the first time that four themes have been chosen for a single year.

So much to pay attention to in terms of world development, so little time to do it.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-wining freelance writer who urges you to celebrate International Year of the Potato and farmers like the Millers by buying a bag or three of Across the Creek certified organic potatoes.