Berlin: Record harvest sparks mass giveaway of free potatoes
theguardian.com133 points by novaRom 3 days ago
133 points by novaRom 3 days ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618544
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
4k tons of potatoes to be given away for free in Berlin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618544 - Jan 2026 (141 comments)
Wow. Not only is this not tech, but it’s a dupe from two weeks ago, yet no one has flagged it?
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.
Crop futures are already a thing. Potatoes are traded on EEX for example: https://www.eex.com/en/markets/agriculturals/potatoes
I'm glad someone pointed that out. They even have call and put options, and thousands of FPGAs in Chicago trying to arbitrage deviations from put-call parity from market open to market close.
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.
With advanced preservation techniques, we can extend the shelf life of food almost indefinitely. This flexibility extends to the farm level as well: farmers have the agility to pivot production annually, switching from low-demand crops like potatoes to more profitable alternatives as the market dictates.
Not to mention it's factored into future prices. Futures for the same commodity, but for delivery on different dates can vary wildly in price. The most notable examples are oil and electricity prices going negative occasionally.
Leave it to [capitalism|socialism] to organize artificial scarcity..
why does endstage one starts to feel like the other..
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)
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
They’ve been driving people to use their app for years now. The menu prices isn’t what one pays if they use the app, since it has a constant stream of coupons and discounts that bring the list price down.
Pretty much a standard 20% off, sometimes 25% as a deal depending on amount spent. BOGO value menu McDouble / McChickens. Points that add up to actually free food. Items not on the menu in store. It's robbery if you don't use their app now.
I’m not convinced it’s that good because of how the deals are structured. For example, top deal where I am at the moment is 9 chicken nuggets plus two medium drinks plus two sauces for 1990 HUF. That’s a two person deal (you don’t need two drinks if you’re on your own), but there are no chips, add a large chips to share at 1270 HUF and your meal costs 3260 HUF. Two four nugget McMoment deals comes to 3060 HUF (small fries, small drink). Are an extra 80ml of coke and half a nugget each worth 200 HUF? Maybe? But it’s definitely not the huge savings it purports to be.
This walkthrough is just an example, open the app yourself and have a look, most of the deals are just an item or two away from being a thing people would actually order.
I agree and don't use those deals. The items or sizes are wrong. I'm always offered "20% off purchases of $10 or more", "$2 any size fries", "$0.29 any size soft drink / tea with minimum spend of $3" which I think are pretty decent and always a savings.
If I do eat McDonalds its usually just a burger + fry + drink usually around ~$6ish unless I'm ordering for others.
I’d rather pay full price than sell McDonalds my data, I’ll never notice paying 25% more given how little I eat there.
If everyone else refused to sell their data, we wouldn’t be in this position.
In the US, a rule of thumb for restaurant economics is that only about 25-35% of an item's price is the cost of ingredients, when you average over all menu items (of course some items better margins than others). The rest goes into labor, fixed costs, etc. It varies a bit by region and by market segment (e.g. fast food vs fast casual vs fine dining), but not by too much.
For McDonald's fries it's certainly much less than 25%. These are a high margin item, I wouldn't be surprised if ingredients costs is only 5% of that €2.99
Of course! That is why I qualified it as "averaged over all menu items". The expectation is that higher-margin items are purchased in a volume that balances out lower-margin items.
Also sodas/fountain drinks are famously high-margin. Depending on the size, as much as a third of the COGS comes from the disposable cup.
Japan: McFry S Size ¥ 200~ (1.09 EUR) M Size ¥ 330~ (1.80 EUR) L Size ¥ 380~ (2.07 EUR) * Prices may differ at selected restaurants and for delivery.
Most of it is probably labor, marketing & franchise fees, rent, utilities, and equipment depreciation. Raw ingredients are likely 5-10%.
> “There were pictures of huge mountains of ‘earth apples’,” she recalled, using the word Erdäpfel, an affectionate term for the potato sometimes used by Berliners
Fun fact: the Hebrew translation of potato, תפוח אדמה, is the portmanteau of "earth" (אדמה) and "apple" (תפוח).
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.
The French term for potatoes is also ‘earth apple’: pomme de terre
I'm fairly sure that is the origin of Erdäpfel. 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.
Kartoffel is the standard German word.
Erdäpfel 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...
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.
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.
Technically apple is also just the general term for fruit from its root in Proto-Indo European, ab(e)l.
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.
Diverging but funny: "pommes de route" is a french-canadian colloquialism for horse droppings (on the street - "road apples")
In Chinese one word for potato is "earth bean" 土豆 (the other word is "horse bell tuber" 马铃薯)
french fries are pommes frites. the french term is also used in germany (though sometimes shortened to pommes or fritten).
"Pommes frites" is German, not French. (It might have been French in the past, but nobody says that in French anymore.)
a term falling out if use does not make it foreign. even if no longer common pommes frites is still a french term. the french wikipedia page also does not give any indication that the term is no longer used.
Dutch is aardappel. Fun fact: there's a programming language called Aardappel: https://strlen.com/aardappel-language/
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.
Checks
Wiktionary says it was in Old High German a thousand years ago, but defines that word as "pumpkin, squash, melon", which is strange since pumpkins are New World too.
Squashes are New World, but gourds and melons were grown in the Old World (Wikipedia says brought to Europe during the Roman era).
>make potato kugel,
This seems very similar to a hash brown breakfast casserole in the US.
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'.
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.
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.
It's not always stored, sometimes it is spoiled.
https://www.thecooldown.com/outdoors/mississippi-delta-farme...
At one point more was sent to developing countries as aid but that practice was curbed as it was undercutting local farmers.
I think most national reserves are cereals (wheat, rice) which are naturally long lasting.
There's some storage of special products (dairy, pork, famously maple syrup) but those have ad-hoc storage.
My grandfather was a farmer in the 70s-80s, and he used futures on about 50% of his crop every year. Just enough to make sure a bad year can't wipe out the farm.
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.
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)
Weichkochend, really? I've only ever seen mehligkochend (floury), but yeah those are widely available in supermarkets.
So this is a legit version of the Polish farmer who was robbed of 150 tons of potatoes after a fake social media post saying they were free?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/viral-free-potatoes-post-cos...
Good to see that not everything is awful all of the time.
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
Finally a match for "der dümmste Bauer hat die dicksten Kartoffeln". Giving stuff away for free is literally "flooding the market".
I am not sure if flooding the market is something really doable. At least in short timeframe. Demand is mostly inelastic. And buyers have their own predictions. They won't buy more than they can pass on how matter cheap it is. So price will likely drop, but demand will not go up much.
Giving them away for free also affects the market. Suddenly there are 100,000 fewer Berliners who go buy potatoes in a shop; that alters demand.
> 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.
> 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.
Indeed it would. Below a price level, cultivation would become unprofitable. Hence why subsidies exist
Food abundance is crazy to have. Preservation techniques are incredible right now as well. They're no match for a fresh fruit, but if I can get thawed grapes through the year without seasons having significance I'll take them. I am constantly impressed by these seemingly mundane improvements to our lives over the years that have advanced science and development behind them.
I watched a documentary a while ago on YT, I can't remember the name now, but it was talking about the negative affects of this.
It was discussing how crops are bred specifically for life span and storefront appeal, at the expense of other attributes like taste and nutrition. It focussed on tomatoes, but I'd assume it is true for all crops.
Also fun fact: a kg of tomato seeds can be worth more than a kg of gold.
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.
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)
And then I went to the supermarket today and they wanted like €1.50 for a cucumber. A cucumber! That is essentially crispy water.
To be fair it is January, so your crispy water has to be grown in a heated greenhouse.
Smack in the middle of the coldest winter in years. It's not the tomato or cucumber season, obviously.
Chop into fries, wash, quick boil 3 minutes, rinse with cold water, dry ( salad spinner works well). Fry in beef tallow and never use veg oil. Remove when crispy and place in drip basket. Season
Surprisingly (for people who never lived in USSR/Russia :) Belarus and Russia have very tight supply of potatoes (after outright shortages in 2025) with Russia importing Chinese potatoes.
In 2023 there was record harvest of potatoes in Russia. Prices dropped, so farmers stopped planting potatoes in 2024 and 2025. Wouldn't be surprised if they plant more this year due to high price.
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?
Cattle, ethanol, vodka. Not sure what else with these numbers.
The US corn industry is lobbying for more ethanol in gasoline. Nobody else can absorb all those carbs near term.
5% of all land in America is used to grow corn because taxpayer money in the form of government subsidies makes it a cash crop. Socialism wealth transfer just for farming.
Meanwhile, Russia is importing potatoes because of record low harvests.
Weird abundance problems. Should we get used to it?
The fail-safe answer is: absolutely not. Climate change is already leading to mass migrations and decreasing food security due to greater variance in floods and droughts, and heat waves and cold snaps. We should be doing all we can to holistically improve food security by:
- expand fresh water reservoir, flood control, reclamation, and RO water generation capacity
- increase diversity of crop cultivars because monoculture is a liability, e.g., Gros Michel banana
- increase geographic distribution of farming
- improve long-term food preservation technology
- increase strategic food storage capacity rather than relying entirely upon for-profit, just-in-time-delivery and inventory minimization cost-optimization
- cut net GHG emissions and gradually return to pre-industrial levels
Berlin: Take My Spuds Away
I foresee a busy year for potato flour and MRE processing plants.
... And those little boxes of instant au gratin.
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Gemini 3.0 informs me that the surplus is so large it has overwhelmed the German biofuel industry capacity.
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.
This kind of stunt is never received well in a working market economy.
Best case it will bankrupt well-meaning potato farmers.
Worst case, someone does it with malicious intent to grow a monopoly.
