Comment by morsch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by morsch | Hacker News Reader

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I tried to find some data, and I have to say I'm surprised how low potato consumption is in Germany[1]: 59 kg per capita per year. Metaphorically unfocusing my eyes while looking at the linked map, that seems like it's about average for Europe.

Another, more recent, statistic[2] bears this out, 54 kg, and also has surprising (to me) details. Of those 54 kg, fully two-thirds -- 38 kg -- are processed potatoes (the article names potato chips/crisps, ready-to-eat potato salad and, of course, fries) and just 16 kg are "real" fresh potatoes.

Finally, things used to be different[3]: in 1950, the per-capita consumption was 186 kg!

[1] https://landgeist.com/2021/12/21/potato-consumption-in-europ... attributed to FAO

[2] https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung/versorgungsbilanzen... German dept. of agriculture

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/539799/per-capita-consum... it doesn't say, but I doubt people were eating a lot of potato chips in 1950 Germany

The fact that per-capita potato consumption was so much higher in 1950 tracks with what I've observed from german-american areas in the US. I lived in wisconsin for a bit and grew up as/around a lot of German-Americans, and we consumed way more potatoes than seems typical compared to eg San Franciscans. Potato salad, potato pancakes, potato soup, potato dumplings, german fried potatoes, baked potatoes, mashed potatoes (the latter two not being exclusively german but much more consumed), potatoes au gratin/scalloped potatoes +/- ham (I guess has some French origin as well).

Also notable is that a lot of dishes that seem popular in Germany when I went aren't very common in the US in german-american areas as far as I can tell. Spaetzle is basically just a novelty, and I never see schnitzel per-se, but we do have equivalents like chicken-fried steak. We also basically never use the German name for anything except sauerkraut, bratwurst, and strudels, which to my understanding is because the US heavily de-germanized in WW1.

A contributing factor in that is that Germans eat less and less traditionally German food. I'm wondering if fries are counted among the processed potatoes (I suspect so), as those are seemingly – like in many places – the most commonly observed form of potatoes.

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