Column: New Zealand faux-potato story is worth keeping an eye on

You say potato, I say tuber. That was essentially the message that Colin and Donna Craig-Brown of New Zealand received from the Guinness Book of World Records after they petitioned for recognition of a 17-pound … a 17-pound something that they grew in their vegetable garden. "It looked like a tater, it tasted like a tater, it grew like a tater," Colin told The Washington Post. "So I figured it's a tater." Yeah, well, figuring doesn't get you very far these days. There's always some Poindexter sitting behind a desk somewhere to shatter your dreams. "Sadly the specimen is not a potato and is, in fact, the tuber of a type of gourd," a Guinness World Records spokesperson wrote. "For this reason, we do unfortunately have to disqualify the application." Bummer. The only one happy about this development is Britain's Peter Glazebrook, whose 11-pound potato, grown in 2011, is the current record holder. Colin and Donna had proudly shown the potato off to media from around the world, verified its authenticity with local experts, and even gave it a name: Dug. But the spud was a dud. Before you peel yourself away from the story, however, you should be aware that the truth may be even more terrifying. Because something is au gratin in Denmark. The Post writes that "DNA testing conducted by scientists at the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research, as well as analysts at Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture (SASA), disproved Dug's purported identity. Rather than a spud, the results stipulated that the sample was a tuber — the underground stem of a plant. In this case, the plant was a gourd, which could be any hard-shell fruit, such as a pumpkin, cucumber, or squash." It didn't stop there. "We tried running multiple tests on samples of (Dug), but he just wasn't behaving like a potato should," said Samantha Baldwin, a researcher at the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research. "We then sent samples to Scotland for more in-depth analysis." You admire the authority's commitment to following the science — if the coronavirus had been subjected to this much testing, we'd have had a vaccine six months earlier. Still, you don't need a convoy of truckers to tell you that scientists make mistakes. So before they go and mash Colin's dreams, I wish they would answer a couple more questions. Like, how is a potato supposed to "behave"? Far as I know, they just kind of sit there on the ground. It's not like they go out for drinks after work and make unwanted sexual advances. At least not that we know of. (How do you know if a potato is misbehaving? It ends up in the soup. But seriously.) And OK, so it failed a DNA test, but did anyone think to give it the Lay's test? Sorry Dug, but it's off to the fryer. If the attending scientist can only eat just one, then fine, Dug was a gourd. Seems to me there's an easy way to solve this. The trouble was, Colin couldn't remember ever growing gourds in his garden. Then he remembered, the Post said, that "At one point, they did grow some hybrid cucumbers — which are made from crossing two standard varieties of cucumbers. Crossbred cucumbers can sometimes produce unpredictable plants." Whoa, whoa, whoa. Unpredictable plants? Talk about burying the lede. The Post story just traipses merrily on, as if there was nothing to see here. I don't know about everyone else, but especially with everything else going on in the world, I like my plants to be predictable. Their job is to surrender meekly, not to evolve into some 17-pound New Zealand death gourd. Maybe I'm overreacting. But I fear that this faux-potato story is one that's really worth keeping an eye on. — Tim Rowland is a columnist for Herald-Mail, a columnist and staff writer for Sun Community News, and a New York Times bestselling author. His books include "High Peaks; A History of Hiking the Adirondacks from Noah to Neoprene" and "Strange and Unusual Stories of New York City".

Signup for our newsletter

Column: New Zealand faux-potato story is worth keeping an eye on

COMPANY

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

SUBMISSION FORMS

BEYOND THE NEWS