In France, there is a popular children’s song whose lyrics go ‘Lundi, des patates / Mardi, des patates / Mercredi, des patates / Jeudi, des patates / Vendredi, des patates / Samedi, des patates aussi’. The plodding rhythm and limited melodic compass perfectly compliment this litany of days of the week, each one borne down by the same drab meal: potatoes, potatoes, potatoes. We could be in the world of Bela Tarr’s (2011) film The Turin Horse, in which a herdsman and his daughter inhabit a greyscale vista at the end of the world; every day subsisting on the same unadorned spud. It was while watching another film that I first heard this song. In Agnés Varda’s The Gleaners and I, it provides the soundtrack to a scene of people scavenging through fields for potatoes missed by the harvest in an image that recalls Jean-François Millet’s painting Les glaneuses.
Only with difficulty can we separate the potato from association with the soil. What other supermarket item sits on the shelf still muddied, like an unwiped bum? To think of the potato is to conjure toiling peasants like Millet’s. When a restaurant serves up fries that resemble even slightly the vegetable they were cut from, they call them ‘rustic’, or ‘country style’ as if each chip were transported by time machine from some pre-industrial golden age.
All of which would have caused some dismay to Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the potato’s great promoter in directoire France, for whom the humble tater was a ‘revolutionary food’ – the very essence of modernity.
Read more on Potatoes as Revolutionary Food and Tuber Sacer in my Object Lesson for The Atlantic.