Friday, March 7, 2008

The Potato Eaters

I ate a tiny bit of boiled potato for lunch today and figured how much I've grown to like these lovely tubers. I used to ignore them when I was younger. Now, I eat them with my chicken, my pork, my veggies, my fish, and my spicy burger.

This space on the web may not always talk about patata, but this first entry is in honor of the world's most widely grown tuber crop, which has come a long way from its simple beginnings in the area of Lake Titicaca in Peru. Potato's etymology is traced to the Nahuatl word potatl. But you can call it Kartoffel in German, tartufoli in Italian, ziemniaki in Polish, pomme de terre in French, aardapel in Dutch, peruna in Finnish, or kentang in Indonesian.




In 1885, Vincent van Gogh finished his breakthrough painting The Potato Eaters. This work is considered to be his first ever "masterpiece". It shows five people, four women and one man, intensely eating potatoes in a dim dining area. I'm genuinely glad that one of the masters of the brush I look up to the most would consider potato eaters like me a subject.


All hail potatoes!

1 comment:

StrangeBird said...

apa ata kaa mia mia
diri mapa daog basta basta
pa ta tatatatatas
po te teteteteto!