4k tons of potatoes to be given away for free in Berlin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618544 - Jan 2026 (141 comments)
- 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)
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.
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.
why does endstage one starts to feel like the other..
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.
When I learned German the word for potato was Kartoffel.
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...
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.
This seems very similar to a hash brown breakfast casserole in the US.
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'.
It is a very risky profession and unless you want to depend on other nations for your continued survival is absolutely needed.
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.
There's some storage of special products (dairy, pork, famously maple syrup) but those have ad-hoc storage.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/viral-free-potatoes-post-cos...
Good to see that not everything is awful all of the time.
It's real btw. I got a whole wagens worth and distributed amongst my neighbors
God forbid the price of food ever goes down. That would kill millions.
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.
It was discussing how crops are bred specifically for life span and storefront appeal, at the expense of other attributes like taste and nutrition. It focussed on tomatoes, but I'd assume it is true for all crops.
Also fun fact: a kg of tomato seeds can be worth more than a kg of gold.
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.
Basmati rice: -25% (2.5 Euro/Kg)
Pork: -25% (7-8 Euro/Kg)
Butter: -33% (4 Euro/Kg)
Coffee beans: -25% (10-12 Euro/Kg)
Chocolate: -15% (20-30 Euro/Kg)
... And those little boxes of instant au gratin.
