The True Enemy is Among Us

The enemy sleeps among us, sits in kitchens, waits, hidden in sacks in dark rooms. The enemy is celebrated in the glossy pages of places like Chili’s, McDonald’s and in every single eatery in America.

Golden tanned, secured in a crisp encasement, it is gently coaxed to a glossiness that brings it ever closer to its layouts in the menus mentioned above. Whether salted or “ketchuped”, the French-fried potato, the home-fried potato and simply “some fries” invade virtually every meal consumed in a restaurant in America today.

The size of these portions of the “enemy” grow ever larger, at a time when prices are rising on the other participants of the meal (meat, fresh fish, etc.), and the subsequent role in the meal of the potato grows in importance, drawing our attention away from healthier vegetables like broccoli, carrots, asparagus and even spinach.

Americans of all walks of life sidetrack culinary explorations, deprive themselves the luxurious strolls across their tongues of rosemary, fresh basil, sun-dried tomatoes, thick and cloudy olive oil the very moment they hurl a fried potato into their mouths.

Meals commence with potato skins lost in cheddar and bacon. Hamburgers, embedded in massive, white-bread buns, gets lost in mountains of “fried shoestring potatoes.” The most intellectual, most esteemed, the most classical conversationalist finds himself falling prey to the pleas of piping hot potatoes.

As if on auto-pilot, conversations not lagging for a second, bottles of Heinz snaps to life, bottoms are gently spanked, hinting at gurgling glee; and then, the ketchup, as if satisfied with its coyness, its mastery of subtly oozes out on to the fries. The audacity of the over-reaching crispiness tamed, cooling oil mixing with tomatoes, the ketchup rises in the escaping steam and taunts the lunching professional: locks and gates in the brain triggered, hands move forward in clock-like precision searching for the perfectly-coated fry.

In a whirl and a whir of hands flitting and flailing across piles and mounds of fries, both French and home, from 6 AM to 10 PM each day, 7 of them a week, and 365 of them a year, we Americans lose ourselves in oil-filled blisters of bliss, wordlessly consuming hundreds of thousands of tons of potatoes. And, the single most nutty thing about this slow-suicide is that few eaters can even recall the moment they began eating the first fry of any given meal and when the last finger-licking potato slid off the fork and down the hatch.

The French fry is the single greatest money-making item on any menu, the profit margin hovers between 90% and 98%. Like white mice, we are enticed by properly-instructed waiters and waitresses to forgo veggies and salads and to tuck into ever larger and more intriguing portions of fries.

The potato is as guilty as corn in the DNA of obese America. It is time we listened to Nancy Reagan’s advice and just said: NO MORE POTATOES.