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Category: Local Traditions (Page 1 of 10)

Spud Sunday: Spuds in Space

Sunday, October 10, 2021 /

For those who may have wondered – and with good reason – whether this week’s resumption of service was but a flash in the proverbial frying pan, herewith a new installment in the Spud Sunday series.

Included below is a podcast from the fine folks at the Eden Project, featuring (among other things), an interview with my good self on all things spud. Though this dates from a few years back, it never got an official airing here.

In it, they consider the matter of boldly going to a new planet, and the set of plants that you might want to stash in your spaceship before you go. And yes, long before Matt Damon popularised the notion in The Martian, spuds have been on NASA’s radar as space-worthy starches. In more recent years, experiments conducted by the International Potato Centre in Peru in growing potatoes in simulated Martian conditions have shown positive results.

So, without further ado, here’s the episode (you’ll hear me from about 7 minutes in, on spuds, space and why an extra-long thumbnail can be a very useful thing).

Spud Sunday: Salt, Butter & Scratting Spuds

Monday, February 16, 2015 /

If there’s one thing I have learned about spuds over the past 6+ years, is that there’s always some new spud thing to learn.

Be it natural curiosity, or because – slowly and imperceptibly over time – I have become attuned to spud wavelengths, or because others, knowing my predilection for all things potato, pass snippets my way, there is, in my head, a steady accumulation of spud stuff. The recent few months – though they may have been largely quiet on the blog front – have been no different.

There was the friend from Mayo who, a while back, asked me to give him a call, if I were not “too busy scratting spuds.” When I rang later, he explained that in the ’70s – and, I’d imagine for many years before that – when farm workers from the West of Ireland would travel to England for seasonal work, locals would say that they were “scratting spuds in Scunthorpe.” Scratting meant digging potatoes by hand – not to be confused with apple scratting, which is the process of grinding apples up before fermentation into cider – but technology and the times we live in mean that “scratting spuds” is a phrase – and an activity – that has fallen into disuse.

Evacuees

Scratting spuds:
WW2 evacuees on a farm in Pembrokeshire, digging potatoes the old-fashioned way, circa 1940
(public domain image from wikimedia commons)

On the other hand, modern times have brought us new ways, not just of harvesting, but of growing potatoes and of bending them to breeders’ wills. An article in the Observer last October told of a Dutch project – winner of an award under the USAID Grand Challenges for Development initiative – which is investigating the possibility of using salt-water to grow potatoes (and other crops).

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Spud Sunday: 50 Ways To Say Potato

Monday, August 25, 2014 /

So, having spent the last few (admittedly sporadic) posts waxing lyrical on the spuds of Prince Edward Island – a subject with which, I must admit, I’m not quite done yet – it has finally come time to shift focus closer to home – namely to Stradbally in Co. Laois, which plays host to the Electric Picnic this weekend.

electric picnic '14

Though music may be the big draw for the festival, wander down to the Mindfield area and you’ll find the Theatre of Food, with a diverse program of talks, demos, tastes and debates. And – for those Picnic enthusiasts who actually manage to arrive and get set up by that time – you can catch me (yes, me) opening the weekend’s Theatre of Food proceedings on Friday 29th at 4.30pm with my own little Theatre of Spud, a talk MC’ed by food writer Aoife Carrigy.

Theatre of Food

I’ll be looking at the place – or places, even – that the potato occupies in Irish food culture, from your Mammy’s boiled spuds, to the devotion that inspires a collection of 200+ heritage varieties of potato, to the all important bread and butter layering of a crisp sandwich. I’ll also be discussing just how many ways we Irish have of describing our potatoes (of which more below).

thank potato url

When I’m done with that, I’ll be wandering off to check out what the Dublin Urban Farm crew are doing with their roving Thank Potato exhibition in the Picnic’s Global Green area. Back in the Theatre of Food, on Sunday 31st at 12.30pm, I’ll be on stage again, in the knowledgeable – to say nothing of opinionated – company of Ernie Whalley, Leslie Williams and Mei Chin, participating in what should be a tummy rumbling discussion on Food in Literature, moderated by Caroline Byrne.

It is, apparently, a matter of some debate as to whether Eskimo languages really have an unusually large number of words for snow, but it is an oft-quoted example when discussing how a language may reflect the environment in which it has developed. We use language to describe what surrounds and affects us, so it seems only natural that the ways in which a language is used to describe a given entity can tell us something of its cultural significance. So it is, I think, with the Irish language and potatoes.
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