My Love-Hate Affair with Potatoes

I love potatoes. That's one of the things that attracted me to the McDoguall program many decades ago. I was the only kid I know who loved potatoes as much as I did, even if they were served boiled with nothing on them except salt and pepper. In fact, I liked them plain better than fancied up or even deep fried and served as french fries, like other kids did. All of my grandparents and my friends' parents said that I was the only kid they knew who ate them like that. My grandfather said it was the Irish in me that made me that way. (He was 100%, my grandmother 50%)

When I hit my adult years and my widowed grandmother moved 50 miles away, she knew that every time we were invited to dinner she didn't have to make much food, just make sure there were plenty of veggies and plain old mashed potatoes. She could get away with one pork chop each for her and my husband, but as long as there were taters, I was fine, and that was even before I started McDougalling officially.

Years went by and I never had a problem purchasing my beloved spuds. Then about 2 years ago, a lot of potatoes I bought were green and inedible. When it first happened I tried to return them to the grocery store but was told once the package is opened they can't accept fresh produce back. I'm sure that was BS and I was probably the only person that ever tried to return potatoes, but how could I argue? I tried buying them from another store, then another, and another, and the same thing kept happening. I thought my quest for the perfect potatoes ended in 2012 when I got the most perfect, tasty Yukon Gold potatoes at one of the big discount department stores, who shall remain nameless. Then I made a meal with the fourth bag I purchased and ate 2 of the tiny baked Yukons with my lunch and got nauseous after about the fifth bite. Within 5 minutes I was running into the bathroom with the worst vomiting and diarrhea I ever had in my life. It went on like that for about 5 hours, and at the end I looked like I was severely attacked by a madman who tried to strangle me, because my entire face and the whites of my eye had those pettichial hemorrhages all over like they talk about on police procedural shows to prove a person was strangled. 

August 2012

I never bought potatoes - or any fresh produce - from that store ever again and went back to my first store. I also bought potatoes from a mom and pop grocery store that's within walking distance to our apartment. 

Since I started going back to these 2 stores, I've run into another problem. Besides many potatoes from each bag being green, many of those that weren't green were rotten in the centers:

Russets - March 2014

These particular ones came from the bag of russets I bought last week. Out of the 10 pound bag I bought on that Sunday, I managed to salvage 4 potatoes on Tuesday, 2 days later. I promised my son mashed potatoes for dinner and luckily I found a few Yukon Golds in the crisper drawer of the fridge that I was saving for the next day's dinner. Unfortunately, out of the 4 potatoes in the drawer, 2 turned out to be green. I wound up making a batch of instant mashed potatoes to go with the freshly made ones. Everyone agreed that the instant tasted better than the fresh, less like dirt.

This isn't new. I've been getting potatoes that were rotten inside like this for a few years now, but it used to be a rare occurrence, maybe just once a month. Now it seems every bag has a few, and a greater percentage of them with each new bag I buy. If there was some hint of what the insides looked like, I could blame myself for buying the bad ones, but on the outside these potatoes look perfect! I've even bought them loose, thoroughly inspecting each one before popping it into the plastic produce bag. I'm tired of wasting time and money on bad food, especially since the organics have been worse than regular ones!

I know some people on the McDougall forums, especially a few of the Stars, look down their noses at all packaged foods, even those on Dr. McDougall's allowable packaged foods list, but if this is the future of potatoes, it looks like frozen and freeze-dried is where I'll be looking for all my spuds from now on.