[HN Gopher] Berlin: Record harvest sparks mass giveaway of free ...
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Berlin: Record harvest sparks mass giveaway of free potatoes
Author : novaRom
Score : 67 points
Date : 2026-01-31 19:15 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Weird abundance problems. Should we get used to it?
| solatic wrote:
| > "There were pictures of huge mountains of 'earth apples'," she
| recalled, using the word Erdapfel, an affectionate term for the
| potato sometimes used by Berliners
|
| Fun fact: the Hebrew translation of potato, tpvkh dmh, is the
| portmanteau of "earth" (dmh) and "apple" (tpvkh).
|
| If you should ever be so fortunate as to have too many potatoes,
| see if you can shred them with a food processor and combine with
| onion, egg, salt, and pepper to make potato kugel, which freezes
| exceptionally well.
| docdeek wrote:
| The French term for potatoes is also 'earth apple': pomme de
| terre
| epolanski wrote:
| Polish is ziemniaki, where ziemia is earth.
| roysting wrote:
| So just "of the earth"?
| sleepychu wrote:
| I'm fairly sure that is the origin of Erdapfel. We certainly
| thought this was a funny name for potato when we learned
| French in Scotland :-)
|
| When I learned German the word for potato was Kartoffel.
| majoe wrote:
| Kartoffel is the standard German word.
|
| Erdapfel is used in many dialects and has plenty of
| variants.
|
| Actually the various different words for potatoe and their
| distribution across Germany, Swiss and Austria is
| linguistically quite interesting (see this map [1]).
|
| The legend is in German and roughly translates to (from top
| to bottom):
|
| - Potatoes
|
| - Ground pears
|
| - Earth apples
|
| - Earth pears
|
| - Hearth apples
|
| [1]: http://stepbysteplingue.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/02/karto...
| HPsquared wrote:
| I suppose this "earth apple" formulation coming up in several
| languages is partly because potatoes are from the New World,
| and Old World languages won't have a "traditional" word for
| them. Whereas in English it's basically a loanword.
| technothrasher wrote:
| It also makes more sense when you realize that 1) pomme in
| older French meant fruit generally, not apples
| specifically, and 2) sweet potatoes were introduced to
| Europe well before white potatoes were. So "earth fruit"
| seems fitting.
| wiether wrote:
| Do you have more detail about your second point?
|
| Since they both come from America, sources I can find
| place them in Europe during the XVIth century.
| roysting wrote:
| Technically apple is also just the general term for fruit
| from its root in Proto-Indo European, ab(e)l.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Potatoes originated from the Americas, so I suppose that word
| was created in the past 500 years. But even for modern computer
| names, I would thing old languages would just use amalgamations
| like that.
| seydor wrote:
| the same in many languages, french pomme de terre, greek
| geomilo,
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| Dutch is aardappel. Fun fact: there's a programming language
| called Aardappel: https://strlen.com/aardappel-language/
| pixl97 wrote:
| >make potato kugel,
|
| This seems very similar to a hash brown breakfast casserole in
| the US.
| yorwba wrote:
| Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618544
| Flavius wrote:
| This is a massive missed opportunity for financialization. We
| need a 3x Leveraged Bull Potato ETF immediately. Tokenize the
| crop, lock it in a vault and trade futures against the harvest.
| Why feed people for free when we could create artificial scarcity
| and pump the price 10x by next week?
|
| McDonald's fries pricing suggests the market has already priced
| in a massive supply squeeze. They are generating better margins
| on a sliced potato than the Central Banks get when they print
| fiat.
| assaddayinh wrote:
| Leave it to [capitalism|socialism] to organize artificial
| scarcity..
|
| why does endstage one starts to feel like the other..
| ahartmetz wrote:
| The scarcity in socialism is all real! Organic, if you wish.
| seydor wrote:
| Duh. Just set up a viral potato coin and then short it to death
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| but... will this solution be Cloud Native?
|
| :-D
| yongjik wrote:
| I know it's fashionable to blame capitalism on everything, but
| dealing with excess produce is legitimately a hard problem
| because they have a shelf life and someone has to harvest them
| and move them to where consumers are.
| puzzlingcaptcha wrote:
| Crop futures are already a thing. Potatoes are traded on EEX
| for example:
| https://www.eex.com/en/markets/agriculturals/potatoes
| scirob wrote:
| It's good they didn't flood the market and tank the price.
|
| It's real btw. I got a whole wagens worth and distributed amongst
| my neighbors
| Flavius wrote:
| > It's good they didn't flood the market and tank the price.
|
| God forbid the price of food ever goes down. That would kill
| millions.
| nosianu wrote:
| > God forbid the price of food ever goes down.
|
| They _did_ give it away for free...?
|
| And not letting farms go bust is not the worst idea. Crops
| are not like industrial products, how much gets produced has
| a significant random component. Relying on market forces
| alone does not appear to be the best solution in this field,
| no?
|
| That's independent of how much big agro-businesses
| benefitting from policies they asked politicians to create
| for them is a problem too.
|
| Anyway -
|
| my recommendation for potatoes is "Kartoffelpuffer"! Can be
| combined with a large number of things, applesauce is the
| most simple and laziest choice.
|
| https://youtu.be/obs5MhNA4Rs (German Potato Pancakes |
| Kartoffelpuffer | Reibekuchen Homemade)
|
| This is very easy to make, the only problem is that you may
| end up with a lot of oil splashes around your pan. I cover
| everything around the pan with kitchen paper towels,
| carefully leaving a few millimeters of space around the
| heating circle, so that afterwards all I have to do is
| collect them at the end, no other cleanup necessary.
|
| They need to be as brown as shown at the beginning of the
| above video for best taste, and not too thick.
|
| They do it all manually in the video, but I just use a mixer,
| which is much faster and the resulting texture is more to my
| liking anyway compared to having solid stripes of potato in
| there. It is also the more common method. Do it like in the
| video if you prefer them made out of small solid stripes.
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| Your sarcasm is valid, up until you dig past first order
| effects.
| seydor wrote:
| Indeed it would. Below a price level, cultivation would
| become unprofitable. Hence why subsidies exist
| nkmnz wrote:
| Finally a match for "der dummste Bauer hat die dicksten
| Kartoffeln". Giving stuff away for free is literally "flooding
| the market".
| Animats wrote:
| The US has a soy glut and a corn glut, and Germany has a potato
| glut. What to do with all those carbs? Feed cattle?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Cattle, ethanol, vodka. Not sure what else with these numbers.
| novaRom wrote:
| Fun facts from Germany:
|
| - Fresh Aldi potatoes are like 0.5 Euro per 1 Kilogram -
| basically the same price as 25 years ago when Euro currency was
| introduced
|
| - Our national TV channel now shows a great collection of "potato
| recipes" videos on demand on its main page
|
| - Price of McDonalds/BurgerKing fries is around 4 Euro, and 5-6
| Euro as a street food
|
| - Crisps like Pringles are like 15 Euro per 1 Kilogram (a typical
| 2.50 Euro for 175gm pack)
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| Small fries at McD had been lately around 2,99 EUR, that was
| very expensive given that the "small fries" are actually really
| small :-D
| novaRom wrote:
| Most of it is probably labor, marketing & franchise fees,
| rent, utilities, and equipment depreciation. Raw ingredients
| are likely 5-10%.
| seb1204 wrote:
| I heard the potato harvest was generally good in Germany. This
| particular company is rumored to transition to organic farming in
| the next season.
|
| I think it is great to ensure the product gets used but I also
| heard that it puts many other potato farmers under price pressure
| in the area.
| novaRom wrote:
| Interestingly, some other products are also cheaper today than
| few months ago:
|
| Basmati rice: -25% (2.5 Euro/Kg)
|
| Pork: -25% (7-8 Euro/Kg)
|
| Butter: -33% (4 Euro/Kg)
|
| Coffee beans: -25% (10-12 Euro/Kg)
|
| Chocolate: -15% (20-30 Euro/Kg)
| BadBadJellyBean wrote:
| And then I went to the supermarket today and they wanted like
| EUR1.50 for a cucumber. A cucumber! That is essentially
| crispy water.
| dauertewigkeit wrote:
| All I want to know is if they are the floury kind or the waxy
| kind, or some in between hybrid. Floury potatoes are so hard to
| find these days. Almost everyone is growing these "allrounder"
| hybrids that cannot really be fried or roasted. I imagine these
| are also some kind of in between hybrid.
| trebligdivad wrote:
| 'Maris piper' are very common in the UK that I'd say are
| floury.
| BadBadJellyBean wrote:
| In my super market we usually have three kinds of potatos:
| festkochend (probably what you mean with waxy), vorwiegend
| festkochend (somewhere in between), weichkochend (maybe what
| you mean with floury, they fall appart easily)
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Crops are a commodity where you can't instantly ramp up or down
| the supply to meet demand. Most require the better part of a year
| from seed to harvest. If it grows on trees, it can take years
| before they produce.
|
| Forecasting crop output can also be tricky. Weather conditions,
| pests, or other things can lead to failed crops or bumper crops.
|
| The life of a farmer can literally and figuratively be 'feast or
| famine'.
| pixl97 wrote:
| This is why nations tend to have things like large stores of
| long lasting foods, and do things like crop insurance, so that
| they actually have farmers after a bad year to feed their
| people.
|
| It is a very risky profession and unless you want to depend on
| other nations for your continued survival is absolutely needed.
| novaRom wrote:
| But how do they store and preserve that surplus for a longer
| time cheaply? Probably dehydration helps, but it adds some
| energy and storing costs.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618544
|
| And also:
|
| https://www.4000-tonnen.de/
| labrador wrote:
| Gemini 3.0 informs me that the surplus is so large it has
| overwhelmed the German biofuel industry capacity.
| novaRom wrote:
| I heard crops now cost more to transport than they are worth.
| Also, it drives most other prices down e.g. pork is getting
| cheaper.
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(page generated 2026-01-31 23:00 UTC)