Ursula Vernon Tweet Kinkmeme (and other silliness)

This is archived off Xitter, originally tweeted on February 18, 2016

Ok, someone asked and also @KevinHearne set me off. BEHOLD MY POTATO WRATH.

The Incas had like 4000 varieties of potatoes. They had potatoes that no one has seen before or since. Most of them lost forever.

You can, if you hunt, grow maybe fifty or sixty today.

We have lost the true glory of the potato. It's like there were a zillion dinosaurs and now we've got pigeons. Just pigeons.

There were potatoes that only the royal family and the priesthood could eat. There were SACRED POTATOES, PEOPLE.

But now! Now, we grow the goddamn Russet Burbank.

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE RUSSET BURBANK

The Russet Burbank is a large potato with uniform flesh. Which means that you can make a perfect, glorious, McDonald's french fry from it.

That is the only function of the Russet Burbank. To make a perfect, LONG fry. That is what it does.

In order to achieve this miracle of modern cultivation, you must drug the soil into gray dust. Because EVERYTHING eats the Russet Burbank.

You may not have a fungus, a weevil, a blight, a microrganism of any kind. You must produce soil that is like the surface of Mars.

ANY OTHER POTATO will be sturdy! It will survive! But no other potato produces the McDonald's french fry. No other potato is PERFECT.

For the golden perfection of a fry, we pound the soil into a lifeless powder, and then we must pour every fertilizer known to man upon it.

It is a monoculture.

Do you know what happened the last time we had a potato monoculture!? DO YOU, INTERNET!?

It was a cultivar known as the Lumper. It grew in Ireland. It was reliable beyond belief.

If you drank cow's milk and ate the Lumper, you could survive indefinitely, which was useful in a Catholic country with no birth control.

And then came the Irish Potato Famine, and the Lumper turned black and rotted in the fields and people starved and emigrated.

The Incas would have laughed their asses off, for about five minutes, and then assuming that the Incas were as compassionate as anybody--

--would've sent better potato varieties not subject to the Lumper's blights.

But here we are! Growing the Russet Burbank! With no Incan potatoes to save us! And nowhere to emigrate to when the blight comes!

The day will come, my friends, when the Russet Burbank fails and the pesticides fail, and the soil fails, and then...then...

...we will have to accept a slightly shorter French fry with some gnarly bits, because commercial agriculture is STUPID.

The End. Tune in next week for when @KevinHearne  asks me about corn.