Okay. I'm gonna tell you all the truth about potatoes.

Because what I'm going to relate is hard for some people to grasp, let me preface these remarks by saying that ever since I came to Idaho and the Snake River Plain I've been awed by the numbers of spuds produced here. Last fall I was stopped at a crossing by a train of 127 hopper cars, each of which was filled with taters. Potatoes are such big business here that the motto of Idaho is "Famous Potatoes" and is found on license plates.

Idaho is proud of this vegetable, which is eaten by folks around the world.

And it's a lie.

After considerable research, digging down deeply to get to the truth, I've discovered that the potato is actually a parasite.

Yes, a parasite. What you see above the ground is actually bait. The potato, which is actually a blind, subterranean creature similar to a mole (without the fur -- sort of like a chihuahua dog), moves below the surface eathing rhizomes, slow earthworms, mycelium, nematodes, and similar things. But the American Indian discovered centuries ago that these dim-witted critters can simply love the roots of Solanum tuberosum, a plant of otherwise no significance at all.

The potato senses the presence of S. tuberosum by microscopic receptors in its skin and will travel amazing distances to reach it. Once it finds the roots, the potato (or "potatoe" is it is sometimes spelled by Dan Quayle) attachs itself to a convenient root and sucks the sap of the plant.

Idaho and Maine, to use but two examples of potato country, used to be as flat as central Illinois. Beneath their soil potatoes moved, going about their potato business of buying and selling, reproducing, pawning their watches, mortgaging their homes, driving too fast for conditions, and searching for roots to suck. Especially the last.

When the Indians, and later the White Man, found our about the little suckers' sucking habits they would deliberately cultivate S. tuberosum, creating huge fields of "bait." When the time was ripe the tops of the plants would be cut off and a few days later the suckling potatoes, their skins now hard, would be dug up and ignominously tossed into a basker or other container to be stored for winter food.

So well has this been done for so long that both Idaho and Maine have had huge swathes of land subside because of the harvest of that subsurface parasite, the potato. In Idaho, for example, the subsidence in the Mount Borah area alone has been over 12,000 feet (more than 3,657,600 millimeters). I will leave it to you to figure out how many potatoes have been harvested in this one area alone! Mt. Katadin, up in Maine, is yet another example.

So there you have it: potatoes are really soft, pasty, creatures that humans have addicted to an equivalent of a crack cocaine and methamphetamine cocktail. Humans then rip these inoffensive beings from their dark, warm home beneath the soil after subjecting them to the potato equivalent of "cold turkey" drug withdrawal, throw them into bins, store them in darkness without food, and eventually cook and eat their dead flesh with butter and sour cream.

And it's been going on for ten thousand years.