French fries and our demise

 This past weekend,  Mary and I were at the beach, a belated getaway left over from last year.  On Saturday night we went to the Sportsman's Pub n Grub in Pacific City for dinner.  They are reputed to have the best fish and chips ever.  The fish is locally caught ling cod and is lightly battered and tasty.  But I digress.  Halfway through our meal I was staring at my platter from which I had consumed almost all the fish and began thinking about the crinkle cut french fries which underlay the cod pieces.  I was absently eating the spud sticks while I reflected on the fact that I almost never eat all my french fries.  In fact, I might eat half of what I'm served on a good night.  And that is true for almost everyone I know. I began to wonder about the scale of unconsumed french fries across the nation.  A quick gander at Google told me that Americans eat a total of 4.5 billion pounds of french fries a year (from a site called "mashed.com").  

I've got a hunch that is not correct.  Based on my scientific survey of my pub n grub plate,  I'd say it's more likely that Americans eat about 2.25 billion pounds of potatoes and an equal amount go into land fills or down garbage disposals.  Anyone who's pulled leftover french fries out of the fridge and eaten one cold knows that the shelf life of fried potato isn't long.  I know you can heat them up on a tray and eat them but it increases the unhealthy fat impact and, besides, who does that?  

When I looked at the posts about french fries online, I saw extensive discussions pro and con on the subject of whether french fries were particularly bad for us.  The weight of internet opinion leaned in the direction of scrubbing them from our diet.  Additional commentary added the clarification that we should not tar potatoes themselves with the same brush.  Potatoes were given a qualified thumbs up; they are after all vegetables.   I was not very interested in the health discussion.   I was more interested in the lack of comments about the quandary of castoff fries. 

If the side of fries on a restaurant entree plate were twenty percent smaller than it is today,  I think it would be possible to drop a dollar or two of the price of entrees and launch a campaign at  the same time to ask patrons to put the price difference in a pot which would go to help fund food programs.  The impact would be unlikely to adversely affect potato farmers who probably get the thinnest share of markup on potatoes going to corporate fry producers.  The impact  might well reduce urban landfill costs.  And at some point consumers themselves might be better off for not having to address the dilemma of too many fries.   

Always looking for a way to help a range of people through application of some intellect to one of the slippery problems looming over our society.