USDA’s War on Potatoes

[Geee]

National Review:


Government bureaucrats can be dumber than Mr. Potato Head. The USDA has mounted an inexplicable attack on one of Americans’ best-loved and most-consumed staples: the potato.

Never mind that this venerable vegetable is one of the world’s leading crops — behind only corn, rice, and wheat — with 315 million metric tons produced in 2005, about 7 percent of which was grown in this country. Europeans consume daily more than a half-pound, and Americans about a third of a pound.

Potatoes sometimes get a bad rap as junk food because they lend themselves so well to being fried or served with wonderfully rich and unctuous additives — smothered in cheesy toppings and butter and sprinkled with crumbled bacon, for example — but the tuber itself contains no fat and is relatively low in calories. A boiled or baked potato supplies about the same nutrition as a banana, though bananas have a much better image because they’re a fresh fruit that is seldom fried or smothered in unhealthy toppings. (However, did we hear a distant voice say, “banana split”?)

[SrWoodchuck]

Thanks, Geee!

 

As a person of Irish & German ancestry.........shove it, Moochelle!

[Ghost]

from article

 

The Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine recently recommended that the potato should be, in effect, blacklisted from the variety of starchy vegetables to be included in the federally funded, state-provided Women, Infants and Children (WIC) welfare program. The proposed ban on potatoes is now trickling down into school-lunch programs, forcing them to turn to more expensive and less well-accepted substitutes.