I’m surprised when people ask the internet questions like: when does a potato go bad?

I’m surprised because it seems like the kind of knowledge any adult American should possess. We’ve all eaten potatoes prepared in so many ways: chips, French fries, hash browns, baked, mashed, fried, homestyle, roasted, and sliced or diced in soups or potato salad. We eat potatoes, but when we meet one, it’s like the potato is a stranger. What if its flesh is green beneath the skin? What if its skin is wrinkled, or it has sprouts (known as eyes), or it has a suppurating wound? 

If your potato is liquifying, rotting with mold, and putrid, it’s bad. Or at least the bad spot is bad. If only part of a potato is bad, you can hack it off with a knife and check the flesh of what’s left. It matters how many potatoes you have, how hungry you are, how many people you need to feed, and when more potatoes will become available. Potatoes are a staple food, especially in literature written by hungry people.

There’s the desirability of a hot, fluffy potato in Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, and yam culture wealth in Things Falls Apart by Chinua Achebe. If you’re curious about “bad” potatoes, reread The Diary of Anne Frank. In the entry for March 14, 1944, Anne wrote, “Our potatoes have contracted such strange diseases that one out of every two buckets of pommes de terre winds up in the garbage. We entertain ourselves by trying to figure out which disease they’ve got, and we’ve reached the conclusion that they suffer from cancer, smallpox, and measles. Honestly, being in hiding during the fourth year of the war is no picnic.” She added a month later, “If you’re trying to diet, the Annex is the place to be! Upstairs they complain bitterly, but we don’t think it’s such a tragedy.”

The Frank family did not consider bad potatoes a tragedy because at least they had something to eat. In an April 3, 1944 entry, Anne wrote about the “food cycle” that fed the eight people hiding in the Annex:

“In the twenty-one months we’ve lived here, we’ve been through a good many “food cycles”—you’ll understand what that means in a moment. A “food cycle” a period in which we have only one particular dish or type of vegetable to eat. For a long time we ate nothing but endive. Endive with sand, endive without sand, endive with mashed potatoes, endive-and-mashed potato casserole. Then it was spinach, followed by kohlrabi, salsify, cucumbers, tomatoes, sauerkraut, etc., etc….Because of the bread shortage, we eat potatoes at every meal, starting with breakfast, but then we fry them a little….There are brown beans in everything, including the bread. For dinner we always have potatoes with imitation gravy and—thank goodness we’ve still got it—beet salad. I must tell you about the dumplings. We make them with government-issue flour, water, and yeast. They’re so gluey and tough that it feels as if you had rocks in your stomach, but oh well!

The high point is our weekly slice of liverwurst, and the jam on our unbuttered bread.

But we’re still alive, and much of the time it still tastes good too!”

Starvation was not the tragedy revealed in Anne Frank’s diary; the tragedy was genocide. On the other hand, starving humans to death, destroying their metaphorical potatoes to create a deadly famine, has a long history. Crop destruction was used was by English colonists against indigenous people, for example. In Mary Rowland’s captivity narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,  published in 1682, Rowlandson reports that the English colonists destroyed native crops because, “It was thought, if their corn were cut down, they would starve and die with hunger, and all their corn that could be found, was destroyed, and they driven from that little they had in store, into the woods in the midst of winter.”

Starve the enemy, save a bullet. Rowlandson’s nomadic captivity cast her as a starving subject along with her captors. She developed what she called the “wolvish appetite persons have in a starving condition; for many times when they gave me that which was hot, I was so greedy, that I should burn my mouth, that it would trouble me hours after, and yet I should quickly do the same again.” A couple of weeks later, she reported that one night she stole a piece of boiled horse foot from a child because the boy “could not bite it, it was so tough and sinewy, but lay sucking, gnawing, chewing and slabbering of it in the mouth and hand. Then I took it of the child, and eat it myself, and savory it was to my taste.”

In spite of the colonist’s intent to starve the Nipmuck Indians to death, Rowlandson writes that “the Lord preserve[d] them for His holy ends.” Not once did she see any of the company starve, though she claims, “a hog or dog would hardly touch” what they ate:

“They would eat horse’s guts, and ears, and all sorts of wild birds which they could catch; also bear, venison, beaver, tortoise, frogs, squirrels, dogs, skunks, rattlesnakes; yea, the very bark of trees; besides all sorts of creatures, and provision which they plundered from the English. I can but stand in admiration to see the wonderful power of God in providing for such a vast number of our enemies in the wilderness, where there was nothing to be seen, but from hand to mouth.”

The English colonists’ attempt to kill by famine failed, though the strategy of intentionally starving people to death continues to have currency in twenty-first century conflicts. Recently, Putin has weaponized food in the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. According to John Feffer, director at the Institute for Policy Studies, the Russian military has bombed grain terminals, blown up silos, burned fields, hijacked grain, stolen or destroyed agricultural equipment, and destroyed bridges that lead to markets. Feffer contends, “Putin clearly targeted Ukrainian agriculture as part of his overall assault on the country,” and Putin is not the only despot who wields starvation in his arsenal.

Multiple reports of starving displaced citizens in Gaza surface every day. The United Nation News reported that “Everyone in Gaza is hungry! Skipping meals is the norm, and each day is a desperate search for sustenance.” Stephanie Nolan, global health reporter for NYT, asserted a month ago that “the situation in Gaza is not environmental but human-made. But Gaza is unusual for the speed with which people have been pushed into malnutrition,” by Israeli forces. At the beginning of the offense, Israel’s Minister of Defense Yoav Galiant announced, “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly. This is the ISIS of Gaza.” The near-famine conditions inspired by his dehumanizing rhetoric has been denied by various Israelis, however the UN’s emergency relief chief says that the majority of 400,000 Gazans “are actually in famine.”

What will hungry, displaced people deign to eat and feed their starving children? Out of Gaza come stories of slaughtered horses, a slaughtered mule, bread made of donkey pellets and ground bird seed, boiled stick soup with grass or leaves, overpriced flour or other commodities, if you can find them, and for a treat, rotten corn. No surprise that the South African accusation of genocide by Israel was not entirely dismissed by the international court of justice, who instead issued an “emergency interim ruling” in late January. The ruling demands “provisional measures to be implemented to protect Palestinians, including orders for Israel to prevent death and destruction and enable the provision of basic services and humanitarian aid,” including healthcare, food and water, according to Bethan McKernan, Jerusalem correspondent for The Guardian.

Israel has been ordered to stop preventing food from reaching displaced Palestinians, who suffer malnutrition, disease, and death, due to intentional neglect of their basic human needs. I need to see bushels of potatoes delivered to refugee camps, or lentils or rice, tomatoes, onions, whatever is available today, and reports that the food has been received. What we need is a global humanitarian Instacart that gets food to the mouths of the hungry and dying.

SOURCES:        

Feffer, John. “The Weaponization of Food,” Foreign Policy In Focus, July 27, 2022, https://fpif.org/the-weaponization-of-food/

Frank, Anne. The Diary of Anne Frank: The Definitive Edition, edited by Otto Frank and Mirjam Pressler. Translated by Susan Masotty, Doubleday, 1995. E-book. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/AnneFrankTheDiaryOfAYoungGirl_201606

Haq, Sana Noor and Rosa Rahimi. “‘We are dying slowly:’ Palestinians are eating grass and drinking polluted water as famine looms across Gaza,” CNN, Feb. 1, 2024,  https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/30/middleeast/famine-looms-in-gaza-israel-war-intl/index.html

McKernan, Bethan. “Israeli officials accuse international court of justice of antisemitic bias,” The Guardian, Jan. 26, 2024, https://archive.ph/20240126183324/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/26/israeli-officials-accuse-international-court-of-justice-of-antisemitic-bias

Nolan, Stephanie. “What Happens When There Is No Food: Experts Say Severe Malnutrition Could Set in Swiftly in Gaza,” New York Times, Jan. 11, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/11/health/gaza-hunger-starvation.html

Rowlandson, Mary. Captivity and Restoration. E-book. Project Gutenberg, 2009. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/851/851-h/851-h.htm