American: "Have french people never eaten a good apple?"
Frenchman: "Have Americans never enjoyed a tasty potato?"
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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Potatoes are indeed tasty. Some varieties are even sweet-ish. I can't say I've had potatoes that were as sweet as apples, without the addition of a lot of sugar.
Why is this weird? "Apple" used to be the generic word for fruit in many different languages, it wasn't until recently that it took on the meaning of a specific type of fruit. I don't think calling potatoes "fruit of the earth" is at all strange. The English equivalent to this is the word "pineapple" -- a fruit that kind of looks like a pine cone.
italian tomatoes have entered the chat and agree with their golden apples.
I grew up on a farm along a small river called the Pomme De Terre and we didn't grow potatoes. But we did have a potato lifter to harvest the 1/2 acre or so we would grow for our own consumption.
There was also a small county picnic area in the middle of nowhere by the same name. And no one knew why it was there.
So you had a potato lifter that just sat there, still and silent, in case you ever decided to grow 1/2 acre of potatoes?
Yeah, pretty much. It was a converted horse drawn implement so it was quite old and pretty worn. It did work, but us kids still had to walk behind it to pickup the potatoes it missed.
And when you could muster a small army of 10 kids from 3 families, well you maybe didn't need a potato lifter so much.
oh, I see you meant you didn’t grow potatoes for the market
Ah my bad. Back in those days, having a small one row potato lifter was not unusual for a farm where I grew up. Potatoes were a staple food because they could be stored easily until the next harvest. You would grow a half acre, sometimes more just for your own needs. Along with a lot of other vegetables to be home canned or stored.
Self sufficiency is important when you were poor.
Grosse Pomme is New York
Hans Grosse
if you think ground apples isn't an apt description, you've never eaten potatoes raw.
Here's something else to gnaw at your brain: "corn" used to be a generic term for any cereal grain, and now only refers to the one group of crops. Also we now (mostly) only use "cereal" to describe the stuff you have for breakfast with milk. Which used to be just shitty puffed grains but now also includes all kinds of flakes and processed nonsense.
In a lot of languages the word for apple used to refer to all kinds of fruits, particularly new ones from more or less exotic lands. Pineapples also don't look much like apples, do they?
I pronounce is Pin-eap-ples, just to avoid this very thing.
But, at least they're fruit.
Pomme de terre (IIRC) is a sad version of a underground apple.
Pineapples look like a pinecone but with a sweet fruit inside. Makes sense to me.
Then again horse apples, i.e., horse shit doesn't taste great at all. Then again, again: horse apples, the Osage Orange fruit, are inedible. Osage Orange is neither an apple or orange tree.
English 'tis a silly language.
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