Berlin: Record harvest sparks mass giveaway of free potatoes

Post by hilios » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 11:10 PM UTC

BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #39

dauertewigkeit wrote: post #29

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.

In my super market we usually have three kinds of potatos: festkochend (probably what you mean with waxy), vorwiegend festkochend (somewhere in between), weichkochend (maybe what you mean with floury, they fall appart easily)

Post by riffraff » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 11:14 PM UTC

novaRom wrote: post #49

pixl97 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why nations tend to have things like large stores of long lasting foods, and do things like crop insurance, so that they actually have farmers after a bad year to feed their people. It is a very risky profession and unless you want to depend on other nations for your continued survival is absolutely needed.

But how do they store and preserve that surplus for a longer time cheaply? Probably dehydration helps, but it adds some energy and storing costs.

Post by arjie » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 11:20 PM UTC

Post by Flavius » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 11:39 PM UTC

yongjik wrote: post #42

Flavius wrote: post #5

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 o…

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.

Post by kwanbix » Sun, Feb 01, 2026, 12:04 AM UTC

yongjik wrote: post #42

Flavius wrote: post #5

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 o…

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.