The Humble Potato

To tell you my story I have to start with the history of the potato because the history of the potato is the history of imperialism and poverty and perseverance. Thanks to 16th century Conquistadors, potatoes made their way across the Atlantic Ocean from their home in South America and soon were adopted across the European continent. And across Russia.

That’s where I come in.

Unlike grains that grow above ground and are sensitive to the elements, potatoes grow underground and are relatively simple to cultivate. They grow from tubers (not seeds), and tubers are, essentially, sprouted potatoes ready to grow more potatoes. Baby spuds can withstand the extreme temperatures of the Andes and the bitter winters of Eastern Europe. And because these starchy root vegetables are packed with Vitamin C, they quickly became a staple crop for peasants and laborers of the Western world. Indeed, by the 1800s, the Irish were so reliant on the nightshade vegetable that when a fungus took over their crop, famine broke out.

Like Ireland, the mostly poor, agrarian country of Belarus where my family is from is potato-reliant. In the Soviet era, when other foods were unavailable, the potato persevered. Sometimes Belarusians are called “Bulbiachy” which translates to “potato people.”

In Belarus, Bulba is life.

My mother and father have consumed the humble potato every single day from the day they could first eat food. They boiled it, broiled it, mashed it, fried it, made it into latkes, ladled it into soup bowls, baked it in the oven with mushrooms, ground it to a pulp to make babka—which is pretty much just a giant, gooey, skillet-fried potato pie.

And naturally since I was born a “Bulbiachy,” I was raised on the potato, which means I should love it.

In 1992, my parents, maternal grandparents, and I fled Soviet Belarus for the United States. We immigrated to Los Angeles where my mama’s brother and sister and their families had settled in the ‘80s. We came later, after the collapse. Part of the Sausage Migration. Chasing the American Dream. It took Perestroika, the total disintegration of communism, and long lines for bread and potatoes, to finally convince my grandparents to leave the only home they had ever known.

Up until I was about seven, I ate only Belarusian food. We lived where we worked. My Papa was an apartment manager in a six-story brick building in an affluent part of West Los Angeles. On Fridays he would drink. He would invite our relatives over or his band-of-misfits friends for 100-gram shots of vodka and a plate of piping hot, oven-roasted potatoes and mushrooms, generously topped with dill.

Of course, from the time I landed at LAX as a toddler, I knew other food existed based on the commercials I saw on TV and the billboards on the side of the road urging me to try something else. All the food in advertising glistened. It was all so melty and bright, unlike our Belarusian peasant food made for cold dark winters. After seeing all that gleaming, mouthwatering food, when I looked at the food of my motherland on our kitchen table, it seemed as if it were under a matte sepia tone filter: beige potatoes, earth-toned mushrooms, egg-battered chicken, brown-brown bread.

One day my cousin Natalya, who was seven years older than me, decided to take me to KFC.

Natalya and her parents lived in the Pico/Robertson neighborhood in a fourplex surrounded by a vibrant Orthodox Jewish community. She was somewhere between a friend, a sister, and a babysitter. Back then, I would’ve followed her off a cliff if she led the way. We spent most of our time together memorizing Spice Girls song lyrics and making home video horror movies on my papa’s precious camcorder. She had never been to KFC either, but she had heard it was good, finger-licking good—sorry.

At the time, I could barely read, so Natalya looked up the directions in her papa’s Thomas Guide that he used for his job as an LAX cab driver. In those days, we didn’t have cellphones or printers or any way to know where we were going aside from the directions Natalya carefully wrote down with a green gel pen on a piece of college-ruled paper. We walked what felt like miles down mid-city LA streets lined with duplexes and weeping willows and stubby palm trees and cars so hot you could cook breakfast on them. When we finally got to the restaurant—to me, this was a restaurant—I had no idea what to order, let alone how. I had never asked someone outside of my family to make food for me in exchange for money. Instead of trying the traditional beige fried chicken, I pointed to a glossy ad on the wall: sticky teriyaki wings sprinkled with scallions and sesame seeds. Drool. The cashier stood behind some plexiglass and took our bunched-up dollars and coins Natalya had earned from helping her papa with his weekly taxi paperwork. There wasn’t really any place to sit, so we ate standing up.

I distinctly remember that first bite. The chicken was wet on the outside and dry on the inside and sweet and tangy and semi-crispy and warm, like nothing I had ever tasted. But the scallions were familiar. Scallions were distinctly Belarusian, often added as a garnish to my babushka’s traditional summer salad made up of sour cream, cucumbers, radishes, and dill—those scallions a reminder that maybe the place I was from wasn’t all that beige after all.

I felt the embossed brown sauce stick to my baby teeth and stay. I must’ve looked like one of those spooky muddy kids from Children of the Corn. I had stepped through the KFC glass door etched with Superman Cool Ss and gang tags into a future of culinary exploration, and that day I think I began, for the first time, to think for myself.

That day was the beginning of my untethering. My “Americanization.” That day may have been the beginning of my hatred of potatoes.

This is good, I told Natalya, licking my sticky little fingers.

The years passed, and as they did, I began to think that maybe I had never actually hated the humble, unassuming potato.

I think maybe it was only its association with peasantry that riled me because I grew up as a working-class immigrant Jew surrounded by wealthy people—Jews and non-Jews—in West Los Angeles. That fact plopped me right back into the feeling of living inside the feudal caste system that my parents had managed to escape in the Soviet Union and that earlier family members had experienced in Tsarist Russia. I began to think: How could a fit of immigrant child rebellion have so easily thrown me off the spud wagon?

It’s a simple equation: potatoes equal poverty.

Now I know that as much as I was both right and wrong, my financial insecurities weren’t the potato’s fault. In fact, the affordable potato allowed my family to survive, to save money, to prosper.

The potato is surely a metaphor. An immigrant itself. A symbol of perseverance. Potatoes have eyes. When the eyes sprout but the potato stays firm, all you have to do is cut off the sprouts and the potato remains edible. When stored properly, in a cool, dark pantry, potatoes can last for several months.

When I was in my late 20s, I visited Peru with some friends, and at the Cusco Farmer’s Market, I nearly fell to my knees onto the rocky ground when I saw the potato variety—rows and rows—I kid you not—of every type of potato. Papa Blanca. Papa Amarilla. Papa Perricholi. Papa Peruanita. Papa Purpura. Papa Nativa. Papa Negra. Peru has over 5000 varieties of potatoes.

I came back home—to the US—with a new appreciation, and now, the older I get, the more I crave potatoes.

I’m in my mid-30s now, and as I approach middle age, I’m slowly growing into one of those brawny Eastern European women from whom I descend.

Sometimes I worry about turning into a potato, a round, shapeless, invisible thing.

But then, I remember the Bulba’s tenacity. Its insistence on survival. And its ability to reinvent itself, over and over again, and my potato hate dissolves, my self-hate dissolves, I’m left with a deeper love for the humble root vegetable, for roots themselves. Maybe we’re all just tubers, sprouting wherever we land.