Oh, Sweet Potato, what have they done to you...
...or the evolution of the spud! One of my favourite vegetables, of a non human variety, is the Potato. The Potato, often forgotten, was once seen as a most radical discovery by the British explorer, Sir Walter Raleigh (who previously had discovered the pedal bicycle), and bought triumphant from the new world, along with a long forgotten leaf, called, Tobacco. How the mighty potato rose to become such a noble food, named after Kings no less. Formed to be perfect, the potato has been a design classic, so much so that some people's faces have actually evolved to resemble the mighty potato, my son for example.
However, the glory of the potato, long glistening is now being tarnished; Here below is the pure form of Potato; The classic form; In this format the potato just, is.
The Jacket potato. Simple, elegant, unable to be improved on....
...EXCEPT IF YOU ARE MAN!...
...In the deepest, most evil parts of man's mind, nothing can remain the same. There must always be tinkering. We cannot help ourselves. Over the past few years we have sought to evolve the potato, too mutant perfection into some unrecognisable, mis-shapen abomination.
IT STARTED WITH OVEN CHIPS, PEOPLE!
...And did we protest? No, like sheep, we devoured the abomination, like those who worshiped false idols, we knelt below the 'Alter of Chip'. Our love of the potato in pure form, perverted.
Yet, this abomination is already enough to have us, collectively punished by the potato God's. When their potato thunderbolts rain upon our heads, we can only seek forgiveness!
But no, we compound the deviation by doing this....
Essentially, people, what we have done here is, bury a potato alive in it's own coffin. That's a potato in a box! Would you cage a perfect song bird? No, nor should a potato, used to the cold, damp earth of this once great nations fertile soil, or Lincolnshire as it's locally known, be torn from this Eden and sealed away to be irradiated by micro waves, until it becomes a fluffy snack food. Where is the Love? where is the patience to put a potato in a low heated oven, and then leave it to gently warm, as you go off and do other things in homage to the Potatoes fiery self sacrifice? Like, grow a beard, watch you kids grow up. Then and only then returning to discover it still is not quite crispy enough.
And lo, surely this is as far as man's mand can stretch. Yet, no, the mind of man has no depths it cannot sink too. No perversion it cannot think of that would shame and destroy that long earned potato dignity. And we have sunk, sunk so low to this...
And we shall now thy name. And you name will be, 'shame'. Thousands of years of evolution and we have reached the nadir, of our history. We have taken the once noble, potato, king of vegetables and reduced the great Lord into a liquified mess, vacuum packed into a carton, to satisfy our most debased morals. We can no longer bothered to cut up a soft, yielding, velvety, enticing, moist and soft potato (that sentence, taken from the forthcoming boook, '50 shades of Potato'; A sordid tale of one mans obsession with feeling the very clothes off a naive and unknowing, virgin potato, to get it naked).
We are no so inhuman as to have evolved the potato to a form when we can now drink it, mixed up with cheese and beans...is this a day to be glad? is this a day to shout about the innovation of man? or is it the day when, we must look back and see how, Sir Walter Raleigh would have shuddered...he gave us the king of vegetables and we have given back...nothing but shame.
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