The fail-safe answer is: absolutely not. Climate change is already leading to mass migrations and decreasing food security due to greater variance in floods and droughts, and heat waves and cold snaps. We should be doing all we can to holistically improve food security by:
- expand fresh water reservoir, flood control, reclamation, and RO water generation capacity
- increase diversity of crop cultivars because monoculture is a liability, e.g., Gros Michel banana
- increase geographic distribution of farming
- improve long-term food preservation technology
- increase strategic food storage capacity rather than relying entirely upon for-profit, just-in-time-delivery and inventory minimization cost-optimization
- cut net GHG emissions and gradually return to pre-industrial levels
> “There were pictures of huge mountains of ‘earth apples’,” she recalled, using the word Erdäpfel, an affectionate term for the potato sometimes used by Berliners
Fun fact: the Hebrew translation of potato, תפוח אדמה, is the portmanteau of "earth" (אדמה) and "apple" (תפוח).
If you should ever be so fortunate as to have too many potatoes, see if you can shred them with a food processor and combine with onion, egg, salt, and pepper to make potato kugel, which freezes exceptionally well.
This is a massive missed opportunity for financialization. We need a 3x Leveraged Bull Potato ETF immediately. Tokenize the crop, lock it in a vault and trade futures against the harvest. Why feed people for free when we could create artificial scarcity and pump the price 10x by next week?
McDonald’s fries pricing suggests the market has already priced in a massive supply squeeze. They are generating better margins on a sliced potato than the Central Banks get when they print fiat.
I know it's fashionable to blame capitalism on everything, but dealing with excess produce is legitimately a hard problem because they have a shelf life and someone has to harvest them and move them to where consumers are.
I'm glad someone pointed that out. They even have call and put options, and thousands of FPGAs in Chicago trying to arbitrage deviations from put-call parity from market open to market close.
I am not sure if flooding the market is something really doable. At least in short timeframe. Demand is mostly inelastic. And buyers have their own predictions. They won't buy more than they can pass on how matter cheap it is. So price will likely drop, but demand will not go up much.
All I want to know is if they are the floury kind or the waxy kind, or some in between hybrid. Floury potatoes are so hard to find these days. Almost everyone is growing these "allrounder" hybrids that cannot really be fried or roasted. I imagine these are also some kind of in between hybrid.
Crops are a commodity where you can't instantly ramp up or down the supply to meet demand. Most require the better part of a year from seed to harvest. If it grows on trees, it can take years before they produce.
Forecasting crop output can also be tricky. Weather conditions, pests, or other things can lead to failed crops or bumper crops.
The life of a farmer can literally and figuratively be 'feast or famine'.
Food abundance is crazy to have. Preservation techniques are incredible right now as well. They're no match for a fresh fruit, but if I can get thawed grapes through the year without seasons having significance I'll take them. I am constantly impressed by these seemingly mundane improvements to our lives over the years that have advanced science and development behind them.
Surprisingly (for people who never lived in USSR/Russia :) Belarus and Russia have very tight supply of potatoes (after outright shortages in 2025) with Russia importing Chinese potatoes.
Chop into fries, wash, quick boil 3 minutes, rinse with cold water, dry ( salad spinner works well). Fry in beef tallow and never use veg oil. Remove when crispy and place in drip basket. Season
37 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 46.9 ms ] thread- expand fresh water reservoir, flood control, reclamation, and RO water generation capacity
- increase diversity of crop cultivars because monoculture is a liability, e.g., Gros Michel banana
- increase geographic distribution of farming
- improve long-term food preservation technology
- increase strategic food storage capacity rather than relying entirely upon for-profit, just-in-time-delivery and inventory minimization cost-optimization
- cut net GHG emissions and gradually return to pre-industrial levels
Fun fact: the Hebrew translation of potato, תפוח אדמה, is the portmanteau of "earth" (אדמה) and "apple" (תפוח).
If you should ever be so fortunate as to have too many potatoes, see if you can shred them with a food processor and combine with onion, egg, salt, and pepper to make potato kugel, which freezes exceptionally well.
This seems very similar to a hash brown breakfast casserole in the US.
4k tons of potatoes to be given away for free in Berlin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618544 - Jan 2026 (141 comments)
McDonald’s fries pricing suggests the market has already priced in a massive supply squeeze. They are generating better margins on a sliced potato than the Central Banks get when they print fiat.
:-D
It's real btw. I got a whole wagens worth and distributed amongst my neighbors
- Fresh Aldi potatoes are like 0.5 Euro per 1 Kilogram - basically the same price as 25 years ago when Euro currency was introduced
- Our national TV channel now shows a great collection of "potato recipes" videos on demand on its main page
- Price of McDonalds/BurgerKing fries is around 4 Euro, and 5-6 Euro as a street food
- Crisps like Pringles are like 15 Euro per 1 Kilogram (a typical 2.50 Euro for 175gm pack)
I think it is great to ensure the product gets used but I also heard that it puts many other potato farmers under price pressure in the area.
Forecasting crop output can also be tricky. Weather conditions, pests, or other things can lead to failed crops or bumper crops.
The life of a farmer can literally and figuratively be 'feast or famine'.
And also:
https://www.4000-tonnen.de/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/viral-free-potatoes-post-cos...
Good to see that not everything is awful all of the time.
... And those little boxes of instant au gratin.
Best case it will bankrupt well-meaning potato farmers.
Worst case, someone does it with malicious intent to grow a monopoly.