Alittledistantshiningstar
85159
2151
22
Potatoes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine-Augustin_Parmentier
Jul 22, 2021 6:53 PM
Alittledistantshiningstar
85159
2151
22
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine-Augustin_Parmentier
TobiFuenke
You’re welcome, but thank YOU for the french fries. You opened our prussian eyes.
SlappytheDummy
He doesn't have the best grave in the world...it is just a tribute
HowardMoonsHotpants
Faites-les bouillir, écrasez-les, mettez-les dans un ragoût!
pinatafarmer
Baked, fries, mashed, roasted, tots, steak, hashed, shredded into ground beef, fuck I love taters.
DickWarlock89
What's taters precious?
HariboHeadhunter
They named a potato after him
Twrecks123
Patron saint of the hobbits.
BulletSponge7
DurendaI
Mm... Potatoes, lobster, and almonds.
kaiserkevin
Frederick the Great, leader of Prussia at the time did some potato advocacy as well:
PotatoCheesMonk
I would like to have my gravestone also decorated in potatoes
suiseiseki
Why settle for merely your gravestone? Decorate your house with potatoes! Throw them at your friends! Make sweet tender love to curvy spuds!
TiredSnowball
The amount of people that he saved with this must be huge. I know potatoes saved thousands in ex-URSS thanks to the ease of growth/calories
aerialtruckdriver
subrosaflorens
Mash 'em, boil 'em, put 'em in a stew!
Perizene
This gif is missing the first syllable and it bugs me
jrredneck
HandoB4Javert
Other health contributions by him included establishing the first mandatory smallpox vaccination campaign (under Napoleon) beginning in 1805
PoultryInMotion
Werd is he built a wall and had security around his potato field to increase the allure. Now that’s marketing!
Colopty
That was Frederick II of Prussia. Dude specifically ordered his armed guards to just let anyone get away with "stealing" his potatoes.
daimomusic
Was that Prussia? I remember reading this guy did the same thing, however, I could be wrong
th3grimlin
You can pretty much live your entire life on a diet of milk and potatoes. Provided you have some citrus every so often to not get scurvy.
ClearForks
Scurvy fun fact: Humans & Guinea pigs are about the only animals that get scurvy. Almost everything else has the genes to make Vitamin C
starlord56
The king of prussia to get his people to think they were valuble so he had guards guard his potatoe fields but let people steal or be bribed
pooFIinger
We (french) even named a popular dish after him : "hachis Parmentier". Basically mash+ground beef+cheese.
TisIChenoir
Viande hachée, sauce tomate et oignon, dinon c'est de la merde
IAmACyberneticOrganismLivingTissueOverEndoskeleton
Which is basically almost the same as shepperd pie minus the corn.
BoatswainsMate
Without the corn? Blasphemous
CaldariBob
And then he used his knowledge to survive being stranded on Mars!
davyclam
28th July 1586 potatoes introduced to UK.
TisIChenoir
And you should try a godd Hachis Parmentier. It's divine!
YesSorryIAmBack
Pot-8-os. Wasn't he an ancestor of Man'o'war?
SobchaksWorldOfPain
Snails good. Taters bad? No wonder they surrender so often.
FelonyFerret
As someone of Irish descent I am proud to be a stereotype because I fuckin' love me spuds...
Terayon
How do you feel about cabbage?
SaladinIskander
I grew up with spuds in every dish, sick and tired of them, prefer any rice dish these days. Spuds are very nutritious though.
martineb72
Tomatoes made sense with the lead poisoning, but why did people think potatoes were inedible?
DanielWhiffin
The Irish had a rep for being very healthy, despite mainly only eating potatoes. Lots of vitamins, very calorie dense.
EverythingIsBon
Is this the origin of the name French fries?
CeterumCenseo
No, because they were invented in Belgium.
ibuycrap
French fries.
seyne
People also used to think tomatoes were poisonous (part of why they got thrown at bad preformers). To be fair they are both nightshades,
MoonRiverFrost
If you allow a potato to sit in sunlight it can turn poisonous. That's why it's a relative of the nightshade family.
MoonRiverFrost
Ah, read as potatoes, not tomatoes. How leave it though for PSA
theguywiththevoice
Tasty, tasty nightshade.
ExTechOp
I understand there was initially some confusion about potatoes, and there were attempts to eat the solanine-containing "fruits" they grow.
Colopty
Also people used to eat on lead plates, which the tomatoes absorbed, giving people lead poisoning.
bigeasy44
Tomatoes came from the Americas & weren’t introduced to Italy until the 15th or 16th century. So the quintessential pasta & pizza sauces you
ExTechOp
It's a bit like spicy oriental foods didn't have chili in them until it was also brought from the Americas. Peppers were used before that.
bigeasy44
Think of when imagining Italian food is actually relatively “new” to the culture that dates back thousands of years.
IamMelonLordeYaYaYa
It’s Italian-American immigrants who used and popularized them, since they were cheap.
seyne
Yup, same thing for peppers. Capsaicin was not available outside of the Americas until the same timeframe, so everyone had to rely on
seyne
stuff like peppercorn, ginger, horseradish, etc. to make foods "spicy"
jessavader
And yet they mastered them instantly…
seyne
so closely related to some actually dangerous plants and do contain small levels of not-great chemicals (the bits we eat are safe for anyone
TheHolyFatman
Tomatoes are awful and should be eradicated. They taste like rotten barf to me. Cooked is worse than raw.
seyne
without a sensitivity or allergy though)
ScufflingTurnip
I have a mild allergy to tomatoes something in them that breaks down when they get cooked. Ketchup and raw tomato juice cause an aching rash
seyne
Yeah, there are a few low dose poisons in them. Not enough to actually hurt you, but maybe enough to set off a reaction in sensitive folks
IDidSawABear
Well unless you mix its acid with something like silver or pewter... Which was what lots of nobility used for their cutlery...
LordNergal
Something in pure tomato juice causes me to throw up every time I eat a raw tomato. I can have ketchup, have tomatoes cooked, etc.
monkey484
They are also highly acidic which is a bad mix for the pewter plates they used to use, this would cause the tomato to leach lead
InkyBlinkyPinkyAndClyde
They're an issue even now when canned, because they can leach BPAs out of the can. Buy your tomato products in glass jars instead.
goodisunpopular
That part is exaggerated. The average person ate off of plates made from wood or bread. Even royalty ate off bread plates called "trenchers"
BigTex1
Lead in the food, arsenic in the hats, Mercury in the Johnson, and tobacco smoke up the rear. History was fucking wild.
LordNergal
You have ghosts in your blood. You should do cocaine about it.
joleeen
Ha ha ha this is great! You should make it into a meme or a comic or something
pr3viso
Little know fact:
STEVIERAYK
I dropped a 10 pound potato in the terlit earlier.
woozle
it's a good thing that guy told them it's okay to eat a food people ate all the time.
GrassssssssTastesBad
They used to be a much different plant. Humans have cultivated and bred all modern fruit and veg since they started farming
Myconid
People in France literally thought eating potatoes gave you leprosy. It was a new world crop that was unfamiliar to most peasants.
byohzzrd
They were considered poisonous and not regularly cultivated back then. They're a member of the nightshade family and weren't "Idaho 1/2
byohzzrd
Russets". People didn't eat them. https://humanities.oregonstate.edu/039deadly-nightshade039-gained-favor-victorians 2/2
prettydumb
someone doesnt know about this particular part of history and likes making easy assumptions
EmailFail
Totes safe to eat bananas too
LeSethX
Potatoes were still relatively new to Europe (only ~200 years) at the time. And Prussian King Frederick had to trick his subjects to eat
LeSethX
them by guarding them, making people think they were valuable enough to steal.
AllOutofNut
Not everyone ate it then. Back in the 16th and 17th century, if you are potatoes, you were seen/treated as nothing more than an animal
IbuprofenIsASometimesFood
In Europe. Potatoes had been a staple of the Andean diet for millennia before then
mithiwithi
Prussia was actually ahead of the curve on taters. Probably why Parmentier didn't object too much. http://scihi.org/frederick-great-potato
woozle
ackshyually
GoGoGadgetBinoculars
ShadowSquids
You know autism isn't a synonym for dumb right?
GoGoGadgetBinoculars
no one said it was autismo
BigTex1
But if you are potatoes then you’re a plant, not an animal.
derscur
The dude literally invented all potatoes, show some respect.
Giant2179
Then why don't we call them Parmentiers?
Bossco20
Peru invented potatoes
SuicidalBallsack
*The Inca Indians in Peru were the first to cultivate potatoes. iirc, around 8000-7000 BC
CanadianMadCow
DIDN'T YOU READ THE PICTURE?!
goodisunpopular
To be fair, potato is in the nightshade family, poisonous raw, & not native to Europe.
swattyKnotts
Raw potatoes are not poisonous.
goodisunpopular
swattyKnotts
That's a terrible reference. I've eaten potatoes raw to no poor effect. Even the green ones aren't toxic enough to hurt you.
Mithi
Modern varieties are bred for lower solanin amounts.
ByThePowerOfSCIENCE
Wild and green potatoes are toxic. Parmentier did several stunts to get the people to try domesticated varieties.
swattyKnotts
Potatoes have been domesticated for a very long time. Normal people will never encounter a "wild" potato. Even green ones aren't very toxic.
ByThePowerOfSCIENCE
Yup, but the cases of intoxication in Ye Auld Tymes gave them a lasting fame. Some even thought they were aphrodisiac (some Shakespeare ~
WilliamWeird
How long it took these ding-dongs to learn you can boil or cook a potato.
Trunkmonkay
Welcome to france: culturally 300yrs behind everyone else since 700AD
WilliamWeird
Tut tut, it took Tzar Peter to make a fake forbidden garden of potatoes so that the people would poach his garden and eat them.
Trunkmonkay
Are you really gonna tout Tsarist Russia as a justification for France being 300yrs in the past?
WilliamWeird
As opposed to being a thousand years in the past? Totally, yeah.
mithiwithi
Frederick of Prussia used that trick less than 20 years before the incident in OP.
WilliamWeird
Russia was culturally a thousand years behind until 1890
darsebas
Its the same thing as lobsters. It used to be considered inhumane to feed people lobsters as they are the insects of the sea >>>
madeejit
In fairness, prison lobster was just the whole thing, mashed up with a rock. Shell and all. Nobody in Cell Block H was getting Thermidor.
SerialChickenLover
It’s not like it was served with a lemon slice and melted butter… I also doubt it was thoroughly cooked, if at all.
Terayon
I'd guess overcooked sooner than undercooked, which is far worse for lobster IMHO
darsebas
It was fed to prisoners and through a giant PR rebrand campaign its now considered fine dining.
cobrien77
Chilean sea Bass isn’t sea bass, that’s another pr job
Mithi
Laughing in "Seelachs" (sea-salmon)
Flustercuck
Not a stretch cuz they probably didn't try and cook it perfectly and dry or undercooked lobster sucks
Terayon
Here let me chew on this for an hour
7oxicity
Insects are a delicacy around the world lol
GoGoGadgetBinoculars
so are dogs. what's your point?
Pseudomenos
They are in some parts of the world
Strangedays2026
Yes but that doesn't mean all cultures take that point of view at the same time.
bobquznie
Ribs were considered horrible scraps and were thrown to the slaves.
mcshady
Most of the barbecue cuts started that way. Brisket shoulder ribs. All cartilagenous and chewy and gross. Poor ppl & slaves figured it out
InkyBlinkyPinkyAndClyde
My MIL served some ribs to some friends from Ireland, without really thinking (she's Irish and moved to Canada 50 years ago). Afterwards /1
madeejit
Ireland here, y'all got any more of them sweet sweet ribs?
InkyBlinkyPinkyAndClyde
she realized they were probably insulted. Ribs are typically considered delicious here though. /2