Erwin Bosman via Unsplash
From Germany comes the story of mountains of potatoes as far as the eye can see going to feed anyone and everyone in Berlin and nearby towns.
For German potato farmers, the early winter potato harvest has been a bumper crop—no, a banner crop—nay, it’s a full-on food-bank-buster crop.
The “potato flood” as it’s being called has crashed on Berlin, with food banks, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, schools, kindergartens, churches, and even zoos taking a free share of the bounty. Two whole semi-trucks were sent to Ukraine.
“At first I thought it was some AI-generated fake news when I saw it on social media,” Astrid Marz, a schoolteacher from Kaulsdorf, outside Berlin, told the Guardian. “There were pictures of huge mountains of earth apples.”
You can never be too careful these days, but the earth apple mountain was real: so real that Marz stopped counting after she stuffed the 150th potato into an old backpack. She had showed up at a distribution point, where a nonprofit organization called 4000 Tonnen was delivering them to whoever showed up.
Organized by a Berlin newspaper with the help of a German eco-friendly nonprofit search engine, Ecosia, the name 4,000 tons comes from a single Leipzig potato farmer who had a 4,000-ton surplus after a December sale fell through.
4000 Tonnen has visited 174 distribution points across Berlin and its suburbs, welcoming people with bags, boxes, and even wheelbarrows to carry off the spuds. Berlin has been gripped with freezing weather of late, exactly the kind of climate that welcomes a potato and leek soup, potatoes au gratin, or many other preparations that are being shared at the distribution points, the Guardian reports.
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Kate Connolly, reporting in Berlin for the outlet, notes that Germans consume more potatoes per capita than almost any other country—at more than 120 pounds per person per year. During the Prussian imperial days, the “potato edict” commanded farmers to cultivate the South American crop as a new staple, and ever since, kartoffel, has been the pre-eminent vegetable in the country.
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Celebrity Michelin-starred chef Marco Müller of the Rutz restaurant Berlin has already taken advantage of the event to put the spuds to work in his restaurant—using them to make a luscious potato broth made from the slow-roasted skins.
If not eaten, they will likely be sent to a landfill to decay away into methane gas, which while lasting a fraction of the time in the atmosphere as CO2, has a much stronger contribution to the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere.
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