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Berlin: Record harvest sparks mass giveaway of free potatoes

theguardian.com

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Re: Berlin: Record harvest sparks mass giveaway of free potatoes

#61

Post by abecode »

docdeek wrote: post #6
solatic wrote: post #3

> “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, sa…

The French term for potatoes is also ‘earth apple’: pomme de terre

In Chinese one word for potato is "earth bean" 土豆 (the other word is "horse bell tuber" 马铃薯)

Re: Berlin: Record harvest sparks mass giveaway of free potatoes

#62

Post by themaninthedark »

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.

It's not always stored, sometimes it is spoiled.

https://www.thecooldown.com/outdoors/mississippi-delta-farme...

At one point more was sent to developing countries as aid but that practice was curbed as it was undercutting local farmers.

Re: Berlin: Record harvest sparks mass giveaway of free potatoes

#63

Post by _frkl »

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.

They were Agria, mehligkochend (not waxy): https://4000-tonnen.de/faq.html

Re: Berlin: Record harvest sparks mass giveaway of free potatoes

#64

Post by gruez »

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.

Not to mention it's factored into future prices. Futures for the same commodity, but for delivery on different dates can vary wildly in price. The most notable examples are oil and electricity prices going negative occasionally.

Re: Berlin: Record harvest sparks mass giveaway of free potatoes

#65

Post by throwup238 »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #34
novaRom wrote: post #24

Fun facts from Germany: - 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 2.5…

Small fries at McD had been lately around 2,99 EUR, that was very expensive given that the "small fries" are actually really small :-D

They’ve been driving people to use their app for years now. The menu prices isn’t what one pays if they use the app, since it has a constant stream of coupons and discounts that bring the list price down.

Re: Berlin: Record harvest sparks mass giveaway of free potatoes

#69

Post by wiml »

card_zero wrote: post #58
notepad0x90 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potatoes originated from the Americas, so I suppose that word was created in the past 500 years. But even for modern computer names, I would thing old languages would just use amalgamations like that.

Checks Wiktionary says it was in Old High German a thousand years ago, but defines that word as "pumpkin, squash, melon", which is strange since pumpkins are New World too.

Squashes are New World, but gourds and melons were grown in the Old World (Wikipedia says brought to Europe during the Roman era).

Re: Berlin: Record harvest sparks mass giveaway of free potatoes

#70

Post by president_zippy »

didgetmaster wrote: post #31

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'.

My grandfather was a farmer in the 70s-80s, and he used futures on about 50% of his crop every year. Just enough to make sure a bad year can't wipe out the farm.
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