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Potatoes Are the Perfect Vegetable—but You’re Eating Them Wrong


The humble potato is a miraculous vegetable, but Americans are eating less of them than ever before and have ditched fresh potatoes for frozen. Is it time to rebrand the spud?

Voigt adopted his unusual diet in protest against a recommendation from the National Institute of Medicine to exclude white potatoes from a federal voucher program for women and children on low incomes. “They’re pretty amazing in my opinion,” says Joanne Slavin, a nutrition professor at the University of Minnesota who helped come up with the 2010 federal dietary guidelines for Americans, which counted potatoes in the recommendation that people eat 2.5 cups of vegetables each day. “No food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality, or of its being peculiarly suitable to the health of the human constitution,” wrote the philosopher Adam Smith in his influential treatise The Wealth of Nations.

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