Interesting Facts

Surprise, surprise, fruit is good for you (I can hear my mother now - I told you so.) According to researchers at Harvard if you want to lose weight, you should stop eating peas, potatoes and sweetcorn, and start eating cauliflower, prunes and blueberries. (Surprisingly fruit was twice as good as veg, with every extra portion a day leading to around half a pound of flab being shed over four years. Prunes, apples, pears, strawberries, raisins and grapes, also scored high on the weight loss scale. Blueberries were actually the number 1 fat burner.  I can't stand them, but I need to shed some weight, so maybe I'll just have to take my medicine.)

According to research carried out by WRAP (the UK's Waste and Resources Action Programme ) , the average UK household throws away enough food to make 6 meals every week (The waste costs almost £60 a month per family, but, according to farming UK if you add it all together it's worth a whopping £12.5 billion a year.  The top three foods that we are throwing away uneaten are those every day essentials: bread, potatoes and milk. The equivalent of 24 million slices of bread, 5.8 million potatoes and 5.9 million glasses of milk are wasted daily.) Source

An international team of scientists has uncovered the full DNA sequence of the potato. (This should make it possible to develop improved varieties of potato, which at the moment takes about 10 years, much more quickly. I think I should ask them to analyse my potatoes, which from the size of them are really a species of pea.)

According to statistics from French media ratings agency, 2008 was the year of the one-minute hike in the couch potato syndrome. They found that in 80 territories worldwide people spent more time than ever glued to the goggle box. (Not surprisingly sport, particularly football, remained the firm TV favourite, followed by fiction. Perhaps we should try living more, and spectating less.)

The moon Phobos, which orbits the planet mars, is shaped like a potato. (Who knows? It might even be a potato, after all we've never been there.)

In the UK there are loads of words derived from the word potato. They include Scots: pitatie, pirtie, pirta, purta, purty, pitter, porie, tattie, tottie | Hiberno-English pratie, praitie, prae, prata, prater, pritta, pritty, pruta, poota, tater, tattie, totie | Irish: spud | Norfolk: tater.

The British eat potatoes about 10 billion times a year. (The UK ranks No. 11 among world potato producing countries, but we still have to import a lot to meet our tatty requirements.)

According to a survey for the Health Food Manufacturers' Association, two-thirds of Britons mistakenly think that eating chips, roasties and mashed potato contributes to their five-a-day recommendation. (The 5-a-day campaign aims to highlight the healthier benefits of eating more fruit and vegetables. The idea being that you should eat 5 portions of fruit and veg a day. Of course the kind of fruit and veg you eat does matter, and I don't think a packet of crisps counts.)

Traditionally vodka is made using potatoes or grain. (Modern production methods use less traditional materials, including sugar beet, citrus fruit and grapes. But there are moves afoot to define vodka as "a spirit produced from grain or potatoes" in order to protect its heritage.)

Potato crisps were an American invention (they call them chips), cooked up in 1853 by George Crum. (In the UK chips are what we have with Fish. Crisps come in packets with such delicious flavours as Salt and Vinegar, Cheese and Onion, Beef, Bacon, Prawn Cocktail, Sour Cream and Chives and even at one time Hedgehog.)

Scientists say that a single "mother" spud from southern Peru gave rise to all the varieties of potato eaten today. (I would like to thank her from the bottom of my crisp packet.)