Berlin: Record harvest sparks mass giveaway of free potatoes
(theguardian.com)105 points by novaRom 10 hours ago
105 points by novaRom 10 hours ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
4k tons of potatoes to be given away for free in Berlin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618544 - Jan 2026 (141 comments)
Meanwhile, Russia is importing potatoes because of record low harvests.
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 2.50 Euro for 175gm pack)
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.
In the US, a rule of thumb for restaurant economics is that only about 25-35% of an item's price is the cost of ingredients, when you average over all menu items (of course some items better margins than others). The rest goes into labor, fixed costs, etc. It varies a bit by region and by market segment (e.g. fast food vs fast casual vs fine dining), but not by too much.
Of course! That is why I qualified it as "averaged over all menu items". The expectation is that higher-margin items are purchased in a volume that balances out lower-margin items.
Also sodas/fountain drinks are famously high-margin. Depending on the size, as much as a third of the COGS comes from the disposable cup.
Japan: McFry S Size ¥ 200~ (1.09 EUR) M Size ¥ 330~ (1.80 EUR) L Size ¥ 380~ (2.07 EUR) * Prices may differ at selected restaurants and for delivery.
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.
Crop futures are already a thing. Potatoes are traded on EEX for example: https://www.eex.com/en/markets/agriculturals/potatoes
With advanced preservation techniques, we can extend the shelf life of food almost indefinitely. This flexibility extends to the farm level as well: farmers have the agility to pivot production annually, switching from low-demand crops like potatoes to more profitable alternatives as the market dictates.
Leave it to [capitalism|socialism] to organize artificial scarcity..
why does endstage one starts to feel like the other..
> “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.
The French term for potatoes is also ‘earth apple’: pomme de terre
Kartoffel is the standard German word.
Erdäpfel is used in many dialects and has plenty of variants.
Actually the various different words for potatoe and their distribution across Germany, Swiss and Austria is linguistically quite interesting (see this map [1]).
The legend is in German and roughly translates to (from top to bottom):
- Potatoes
- Ground pears
- Earth apples
- Earth pears
- Hearth apples
[1]: http://stepbysteplingue.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/karto...
It also makes more sense when you realize that 1) pomme in older French meant fruit generally, not apples specifically, and 2) sweet potatoes were introduced to Europe well before white potatoes were. So "earth fruit" seems fitting.
Diverging but funny: "pommes de route" is a french-canadian colloquialism for horse droppings (on the street - "road apples")
Dutch is aardappel. Fun fact: there's a programming language called Aardappel: https://strlen.com/aardappel-language/
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.
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.
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.
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.
So this is a legit version of the Polish farmer who was robbed of 150 tons of potatoes after a fake social media post saying they were free?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/viral-free-potatoes-post-cos...
Good to see that not everything is awful all of the time.
> God forbid the price of food ever goes down.
They did give it away for free...?
And not letting farms go bust is not the worst idea. Crops are not like industrial products, how much gets produced has a significant random component. Relying on market forces alone does not appear to be the best solution in this field, no?
That's independent of how much big agro-businesses benefitting from policies they asked politicians to create for them is a problem too.
Anyway -
my recommendation for potatoes is "Kartoffelpuffer"! Can be combined with a large number of things, applesauce is the most simple and laziest choice.
https://youtu.be/obs5MhNA4Rs (German Potato Pancakes | Kartoffelpuffer | Reibekuchen Homemade)
This is very easy to make, the only problem is that you may end up with a lot of oil splashes around your pan. I cover everything around the pan with kitchen paper towels, carefully leaving a few millimeters of space around the heating circle, so that afterwards all I have to do is collect them at the end, no other cleanup necessary.
They need to be as brown as shown at the beginning of the above video for best taste, and not too thick.
They do it all manually in the video, but I just use a mixer, which is much faster and the resulting texture is more to my liking anyway compared to having solid stripes of potato in there. It is also the more common method. Do it like in the video if you prefer them made out of small solid stripes.
Your sarcasm is valid, up until you dig past first order effects.
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.
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)
They were Agria, mehligkochend (not waxy): https://4000-tonnen.de/faq.html
'Maris piper' are very common in the UK that I'd say are floury.
I heard the potato harvest was generally good in Germany. This particular company is rumored to transition to organic farming in the next season.
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.
And then I went to the supermarket today and they wanted like €1.50 for a cucumber. A cucumber! That is essentially crispy water.
I foresee a busy year for potato flour and MRE processing plants.
... And those little boxes of instant au gratin.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618544